Preface There lives a society far away that we came to know. It imposes fewer inhibitions on its citizens than perhaps any other society. There are very few cultural constraints on the appearance and behaviour of its members. The meagre rules of conduct that do exist are implicit and well understood. These norms are almost always followed, so there are no policemen, judges or lawyers. This society is a fine example of self-regulated social conduct. As a consequence, its members have had no need to create a mask to impress the world. Their eccentricities and their idiosyncrasies have had the chance to develop in the confines of their society, and it does not occur to them that they have anything to conceal.

So they express their oddities, personalities and emotions without inhibition, and you can't but help admire their frankness and openness. We observed the members of this society over long periods of time. We came to realise that since they expressed themselves freely, there was a wide diversity of personalities. We found it difficult to use scientific methods to analyse, categorise and measure them. Indeed, it would have been a distortion of the truth to reduce our observations to data. So all the analytical tools we had been brought up with were rendered useless and, in fact, would have been misleading had we applied them. We also struggled to find another society to which we could reference them. We came to realise that just as the individuals in this society are unique personalities, the society itself is unique.

We had to have a seismic shift in our mind-sets. Thus we now think that a study of a tribe cannot be done properly. Perhaps there is no such thing as 'the tribe nature' or 'the tribe condition' or, by extension, 'human nature' and 'the human condition'. These are concepts we cling to because, perhaps, we prefer easy thinking to complex reality; we prefer reducing diversity to suit the limitations of our thinking abilities. We now believe that there are only stories of individuals, their unique struggles and triumphs and their unique interactions. Fortunately, we are photographers and have learnt to observe with a different eye. As photographers, we are not constrained by the strict requirements of modern science to study the minutiae. We can view a society as a whole.

Thus liberated, we shed our assumptions, discarded our analytical tools, opened our eyes wide and saw riches all around.