ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our original field work among the Rungus in 1959-60 and 1961-63
was conducted under the auspices of the Department of Anthropology
and Sociology, Research School of Pacific Studies, the Australian
National University. I would like to express my thanks to the Australian
National University for support of this research and the preliminary
analysis of my data. I owe a very special debt of gratitude to my
supervisor and friend, Professor Derek Freeman, who guided my field
research. It is difficult to fully express my appreciation to my
wife, Laura W. R. Appell, who has always participated fully in my
research and the analysis and writing up of our data. Religion among
the Rungus, with the exception of certain agricultural ceremonies,
lies in the hands of Rungus females. Without Laura's help it would
have been impossible to gather data in this realm, for which she
was primarily responsible. Nor would it have been possible without
her help to collect data on the female view towards sex and marriage,
as these subjects are not accessible to a male researcher. I also
want to express my thanks to the National Science Foundation and
the ACLS-SSRC, which have supported portions of the analysis and
the writing up of my field data and further research; and in particular
the Halcyon Fund which has been very generous in its support of
my research over the years. I would like to express my gratitude
to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for their grant in 1989 to support
our recent collection of the oral literature, its translation, and
the revision of our Rungus dictionary.
I want to thank Cornelia Ann Kammerer and Clifford Sather for very
helpful criticisms of the original version of this manuscript. I
particularly want to express my appreciation to Benson Saler for
his very fruitful and insightful comments on previous versions of
this paper, which have been extraordinarily useful. And to Vinson
H. Sutlive, Jr., I owe a deep debt of gratitude for his encouragement
and support for the writing of this article.
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