AtD: Chums of Chance and the Prime Directive

[Daniel Wolf]

One small thing jumped out for me in the first pages of AtD:  The 
Charter of the Chums of Chance directs the members "never to interfere 
with legal customs of any locality at which we may have happened to 
touch." This is, of course, familiar to us as basic ethical guidelines 
for post-Colonial ethnography, or, perhaps more to the point, as the 
Prime Directive in a famous television series.  I wonder, however, if 
there is an earlier source. In imperialist times, as in AtD, this was 
scarcely the prevailing attitude. 

Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt