Explore how mind and culture shape human traditions in a classic scholarly collection. This volume gathers William Halse Rivers’s essays on psychology and ethnology, offering deep insight into how beliefs, rituals, and social practices arise from mental processes. It blends experimental observation with cultural analysis to illuminate how we understand societies at a fundamental level. This edition presents Rivers’s investigations across topics like the psychology of primitive peoples, the social meanings of death and initiation, and the role of ritual in shaping culture. Read alongside introductions and contextual notes, it reveals a pioneering approach that links mind, society, and culture in a coherent academic narrative. Close readings of ritual practices, secret societies, and rites of passage in Melanesia and the New Hebrides Discussions of megalthic structures, sun-cult, and the diffusion of ideas across oceans Analyses of language, kinship, and social organization through a psychological lens Connections between medical and magico-religious beliefs and everyday life in traditional societies Ideal for readers of early anthropology, psychology of culture, and those interested in how mind and society shape human history.