“I was to help carry out a major survey of Prosperity’s fifteen hundred families. …Before long, I had become good friends with Yu Xiji… Together we began the house-to-house survey in the spring of 1941.”

“Xiji joined me there (Chengdu, where her father served as the dean of Education at West China Union University) early in 1942, and together we spent several more months sifting through the materials we had gathered, focusing on extracting the quantitative information from the surveys since they needed to be returned.”

According to Firth, one could, and furthermore, he argued, anthropologists have an obligation to contribute to the societies they study. Commitment, he wrote, should be conductive to the collection of reliable data….