Notes on the Poro in Liberia

George W. Harley's Notes on the Poro in Liberia, published in the Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in 1941, is an early and detailed ethnographic study of the Poro men's initiatory society among Liberian peoples, written by a missionary doctor with extended direct fieldwork experience among the communities he describes. Its authority rests on that direct, sustained fieldwork access and its publication through a major academic museum's own scholarly series. Its limit is the position of its author, a Western missionary describing a closed initiatory tradition from outside it, and its age, so later Africanist ethnography and the tradition's own account, where accessible, are worth reading alongside it rather than treating this as the last word on a still living and partly closed practice.