Editing W. H. R. Rivers (section)

===The Todas===
Rivers had already formed a career in physiology and psychology. But now he moved more definitively into anthropology. He wanted a demographically small, fairly isolated people, comparable to the island societies of the Torres Strait, where he might be able to get genealogical data on each and every individual. The [[Toda people|Todas]] in the [[Nilgiri Mountains|Nilgiri Hills]] of Southern India, with their population then about 700 plus, suited Rivers's criteria. And they had specific features of social organization, such as [[Polyandry in India|polyandrous marriage]] and a bifurcation of their society into so-called [[Moiety (kinship)|moieties]] that had interested historical evolutionists. Whether his fieldwork was initially so single-minded is questionable, however, since at first Rivers looked at other local communities and studied their visual perception before fixing all his attention on the Todas.

Rivers worked among the Todas for less than six months during 1901–02, communicating with his Toda informants only through interpreters and lodged in an [[Ootacamund]] hotel. Yet he assembled a stunning collection of data on the ritual and social lives of the Toda people. Almost all who have subsequently studied the Todas have been amazed at the richness and the accuracy of Rivers's data. His book ''The Todas'', which came out in 1906, is still an outstanding contribution to Indian ethnography, "indispensable: still only to be supplemented rather than superseded", as [[Murray Barnson Emeneau|Murray Emeneau]] wrote in 1971. And it is little wonder that so famous a champion of anthropological fieldwork as Dr [[Bronisław Malinowski|Bronislaw Malinowski]] (1884–1942) declared Rivers to be his "patron saint of field work".

In the preface to this book Rivers wrote that his work was "not merely the record of the customs and beliefs of a people, but also the demonstration of anthropological method". That method is the collection of genealogical materials for the purpose of more fully investigating other aspects of social life, notably ritual. 
 
The first eleven chapters of ''The Todas'' represented in 1906 a novel approach to the presentation of ethnographic data, one that, under the influence of Malinowski, would later become a standard practice in British [[social anthropology]]. This is the analysis of a people's society and culture by presentation of a detailed description of a particularly significant institution. In the Toda case, it is the sacred dairy cult. But Rivers is unable to sustain this focus throughout the work, so after a brilliant opening, the book tails off somewhat. We get a good idea of the Toda dairies and the ideas of ritual purity that protect them; but then the author returns to the ready-made categories of the day: gods, magic, kinship, clanship, crime and so on, and says no more about the dairies. Moreover, he failed to discover the existence of matrilineal clans alongside the patrilineal ones. A second, and more important, limitation of his study is its failure to view Toda society as a local and specialized variant of—as [[Alfred Kroeber|A. L. Kroeber]] wrote—"higher Indian culture". Rivers's book has been largely responsible for the view (now not infrequently held by educated Todas themselves) that these are a people quite distinct from other South Indians.

When, in 1902, Rivers left the Nilgiri Hills and India too, he would never return. Moreover, after the publication of ''The Todas'' he wrote very little more about them.