Towards a comparative study of the structure of sentiment among the Austronesians

Abstract

Towards a comparative study of the structure of sentiment among the Austronesians 1 James J. Fox 1 Rodney Needham, my D.Phil. supervisor at Oxford, came to prominence with the publication of his book Structure and Sentiment (1962). Years later, after the publication of his book Belief, Language and Experience (1972), he set to work on a book he said would be entitled The Structure of Sentiment. His intent was, I believe, to examine the structural patterning of categories of thought and the emotions, but he never completed this book and never revealed its contents. Without any certain idea of the substance of this work, I have chosen to insinuate his title into this introduction as a personal link to the comparative effort I imagine he had hoped to provoke.