269. The Bushmen
Two local culture-areas, as they would be called on American soil, emerge with fair distinctness: The Bushman and the West African.
The Bushmen of the far south about the Kalahari desert are distinctive in both race (§ 26) and speech. Culturally they also stand apart as an exceptionally primitive people, lacking the agriculture, cattle and fowls, and iron working of the Negroes. They are expert hunters, stalking or wearing down game until it is within range of their poisoned bone or stone pointed arrows, while the women pry up roots with stone weighted digging sticks. They live under rock shelters or on the leeward side of rude windbreaks. Subterranean water is sucked up through reeds and kept in ostrich egg shells. All this suggests an early Neolithic or even largely Palæolithic culture type, which accords well with the remote and environmentally unfavorable habitat. It is as if the peripherally situated Bushmen had retained up to the present, and with few additions, the culture that prevailed in Europe ten thousand years ago. It is certainly striking that they carve and paint animal figures on rock faces and in caves with a fidelity and unconstrained naturalism that remind of Magdalenian art.
The Hottentots, who are neighbors of the Bushmen and approach them in physical type, appearing to be a mixture of Bushman and other blood, are culturally less retarded, having cattle and iron. In central Africa another dwarf black race, the Pygmies or Negrillos, probably represent a people of once primitive status. But their actual cultural condition is parasitic rather than natively primitive, thus resembling that of their relatives the East Indian Negritos. They live among Negro tribes, acknowledge their kings, trade forest and hunting products for the agricultural yield and manufactures of the Negroes, and speak dialects of the latter’s languages. They thus constitute a racially accentuated caste or economic class within Bantu culture; and although shy and backward, cannot be said to preserve a relatively pure early culture as do the Bushmen.
270. The West African Culture-area and Its Meaning
Over the larger northern portion of the Congo drainage and along the Guinea coast from the Niger mouth to the Senegal, there prevails a well defined West African culture. This is marked by a number of traits which within Africa are approximately confined to it. These traits include the cultivation of the banana but general absence of millet and cattle; gabled houses of thatch, other Africans building domed or conical structures or mud dwellings; clothing of palm fiber or bark; straight self-bows with pointed ends and encircling ridges for the attachment of the looped cord of rattan; shields of wood or cane, in place of which other Africans employ leather bucklers, shields of hide, or parrying sticks; face masks for religious purposes; carvings of the human form; slit wooden drums; xylophones; and a number of other traits.
Two interpretations can be suggested for this consistent and geographically limited association of traits. One makes use of the recurrence of many of the elements in the Indo-Oceanic and especially the Melanesian area. As the latter is also Negroid territory, an ancient connection is conceivable. This would obviously have to be old enough to precede the Egyptian, west Asiatic, and Indian-East African culture developments. These later growths would be interpreted as having spread less far, although obliterating the antecedent Negroid culture so far as they did diffuse. This explanation fits well with the principle that, other things equal, superposed culture strata appear centrally, underlying ones survive marginally. Proof, however, must depend on whether the parallel traits are really specifically similar, whether they constitute a reasonably large proportion of the culture of the two areas, and whether they are lacking in the intervening region. This evidence is naturally difficult to assemble.
The other interpretation is less incisive. It looks upon the resemblances as at least partly conditioned by environment; and would tend to explain the remainder as due to a diffusion, early indeed, but gradual and applying to single elements or small clusters of traits rather than to an association of traits large enough to form a culture and moving as a single block. In this connection it is significant that the Oceanic area is one of tropical forest, and the West African area the only large forested tract in its continent. Hence the absence of cattle and open-country grains, the use made of the banana. Hence too the possibility of bark cloth; and the extremely serviceable rattan cord, which in turn may have demanded a certain type of bow; whereas other types, like the sinew-backed bow, would be unsatisfactory in the humid climate. And the carving of wood, while not due to the forest, was at least made possible by it. In short, diffusion may have been the motive power involved, but like environmental conditions in the two areas caught and helped to preserve such elements as were diffused—stabilized the culture once it was adapted to the soil and rendered it more resistive to importations of traits worked out in different climates. This interpretation at any rate makes smaller assumptions than its competitor, and serves as an illustration of the need of environmental conditions being kept in mind in the explanation of culture, even though the essential explanation be in social or cultural terms.
271. Civilization, Race, and the Future
Culture may be independent of race; possibly is wholly so. But culture must be carried by races of some sort; and it may be of interest to consider whether the sweep of culture history reveals certain races as the most favorable carriers or as inherently constituted to be producers and dispensers of civilization (§ 44-46).
On the whole, the greatest share of culture production has fallen to Caucasians. The art of Upper Palæolithic Europe, the laying of the foundations of modern civilization along the Nile and Euphrates six or seven thousand years ago, the more special ancient efflorescences like that of Crete, not to mention most of the advances of the last twenty-five hundred years, all fall to the account of the white race.
The part of the Mongoloids must not be underestimated. Even if the foundation of Chinese civilization prove to be largely western, its main structure is native, and the alien elements that flowed in during the last three thousand years have been thoroughly adapted to this structure. The fact that derivative civilizations like the Japanese have succeeded in reaching a high degree of organization and refinement argues still further for the vigor of Chinese culture. Then, the East Indians, another Mongoloid branch, have shown a fair power of assimilation. In the past two thousand years they may be said to have accepted and digested at least as much of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization as the North Europeans took over from Mediterranean sources between 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D. Finally, the achievements of the American Mongoloids in Mexico and Peru must be given heavy weight because they appear to have been made in utter isolation, without the stimulus of contact or import, and on the basis of nothing more than a late Palæolithic or earliest Neolithic culture.
The share of the Negroids in the higher advances has been small. Africa, to be sure, lies off to one side from the great Eur-Asian axis, and like southern India and Arabia has suffered from constituting almost a blind alley. Yet central Africa is no farther from the Mediterranean than is northern Europe. East Africa lies open to Egypt which six and five and four thousand years ago represented the apex of civilization. Yet Negro Africa to-day possesses scarcely more culture elements of Egypto-Babylonian origin than remote Scandinavia had absorbed by 500 B.C., and far fewer than Scandinavia had in 1000 A.D. It is hard to believe that this difference is due wholly to desert and jungle and tropical heat.
There is a parallel in the Oceanic Negroes. The Australians may be disregarded in this connection, both on account of the isolation of their continent and the doubt whether they are to be reckoned as a branch of the Negroid stem. But the Papuans and Melanesians are undisputedly Negroid and far less touched by influences of higher culture than the adjacent East Indians. It may be only geographic accident that writing and iron and kingship and Hindu and Arab religion traversed the Oceanian islands as far as the brown Mongoloids inhabited them, but stopped dead at the threshold of the blacks. Even the brown Polynesians, much more remote in the central Pacific than the Melanesians, possess more elements that are presumably traceable to Asia—such as their cosmogony, genealogies, kingship.
It is of course not fair to argue from cultural accomplishment to racial faculty unless all times and parts of the world are considered equally, and not safe to interpret the evidence too rigorously then. But the consistent failure of the Negro race to accept the whole or even the main substance of the fairly near-by Mediterranean civilization, or to work out any notable sub-centers of cultural productivity, would appear to be one of the strongest of the arguments that can be advanced for an inferiority of cultural potentiality on their part.
Yet the weakness of correlation of race faculty and civilization, except in the most general way, can be driven home to North Europeans and North Americans as soon as the relative parts played in culture history by the several Caucasian divisions are examined. On the ground of long continued lead in productivity, of having reared the largest portion of the structure of existing civilization, the Mediterranean branch of the Caucasian race would have to be awarded the palm over all others. To it belonged the Egyptians; the Cretans and other Ægeans; the Semitic strain in the Babylonians; the Phœnicians and Hebrews; and a large element in the populations of classic Greece and Italy, as well as the originators of Mohammedanism. With the Hindus added as probably nearly related, the dark whites have a clear lead.
The next largest share civilization would owe to the Alpine-Armenoid broad-headed Caucasian branch. This may have included the Sumerians, if they were not Mediterranean; comprised the Hittites; and contributed important strains to the other peoples of Western Asia and Greece and Italy.
By comparison, the Nordic branch looms insignificant. Up to a thousand years ago the Nordic peoples had indeed contributed ferment and unsettling, but scarcely a single new culture element, certainly not a new element of importance and permanence. For centuries after that, the center of European civilization remained in Mediterranean Italy or Alpine France. It is only after 1500 A.D. that any claim for a shift of this center to the Nordic populations could be alleged. In fact, most of the national and cultural supremacy of the Nordic peoples, so far as it is real, falls within the last two hundred years. Against this, the Mediterraneans and Alpines have a record of leading in civilizational creativeness for at least six thousand years.
It is clear therefore that any fears of the arrest and decay of human progress if a particular race should lose in fertility or become absorbed in others, are unfounded. Such alarms may be attributed to egocentric imagination. They resemble the regrets of an individual at the loss which the world will suffer when he dies; what he really fears is his own death. When we loosen the hold of such narrow and essentially personal emotions, and allow our minds to range over the whole of the labors and gradual achievements of humanity, irrespective of millenium or continent, the result is an imperturbed equanimity as to the slight and temporary predominance of this or that racial strain and as to the stability or future of culture. To contribute to this larger tolerance and balance of mind is one of the functions of anthropology.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Ethnography is sometimes separated, as more descriptive, from Ethnology as more theoretically inclined.
[2] The place or “station” Grimaldi must not be confused with the Grimaldi race mentioned below. The grottos at Grimaldi contained two skeletons of Grimaldi racial type and a larger number of Cro-Magnon type. The Grimaldi race is therefore really not the most representative one of the locality Grimaldi; but as it has not yet been discovered elsewhere, there seems no choice but to call it by that name.
[3] It has been maintained that individuals of Cro-Magnon type can still be found in southern France and reckoned as a distinct element in the population of certain districts; but the Cro-Magnon race as such has disappeared.
[4] The usual nomenclature for cephalic index is on the basis of round numbers: broad or round headed or brachycephalic above 80; medium headed or mesocephalic between 75 and 80; narrow or long headed or dolichocephalic below 75. Yet, as the average for mankind is in the neighborhood of 79, this terminology makes far more brachycephalic than dolichocephalic peoples. Groups frequently spoken of as long headed are often really mesocephalic by the accepted definition: a large proportion of Europeans, for instance. It would result in both more accuracy and a better balancing of the limits if the three types of head form were set, as has been suggested, at 81 and 77 in place of 80 and 75.—The index of the skull (strictly, the cranial index) is two units less than that taken on the living head.
[5] On the living, platyrhine noses have an index of breadth compared with length above 85, mesorhine between 70 and 85, leptorhine below 70; skeletally, the same three terms denote proportions above 53, between 48 and 53, and below 48.
[6] The distribution of the races is described as it existed before the era of exploration and colonization that began toward the end of the fifteenth century. Although for practical purposes they have been submerged by Caucasians in the greater part of the Americas, Australia, and South Africa, it is the native races whose distribution is referred to.
[7] Noun incorporation is really an etymological process rather than a grammatical one. In most cases it is the result of a language permitting compounds of nouns with verbs, or verbs with verbs, to form verbs: “to rabbit-kill,” “to run-kill,” and so on. This construction, which is perfectly natural and logical, happens to be so alien to the genius of the Indo-European languages that it has been singled out as far more notable and significant than it deserves. Pronominal incorporation is discussed below (§ 60).
[8] Recently, certain “rostro-carinate” pre-Palæolithic implements have been much discussed by British archæologists, and in the past year or two there have been some adherents of other nationalities. The implements are referred in part to the Pliocene, that is, late Tertiary, and are said to be accompanied by hearths. The evidence to be adjudicated is technical, and some years will probably elapse before expert opinion settles into tolerable agreement on the authenticity of the objects as artifacts and their age.
[10] It will be noted that the second of these tables is an amplification of the upper part of the first.
[11] A Pre-Chellean period, without large picks, and associated with the Second Interglacial fauna (§ 69, 214), is recognized by some specialists.
[12] A period known as the Azilian, dated about 10,000-8,000 B.C., usually included in the Palæolithic, is discussed in chapter XIV in connection with a review of the Palæolithic outside Europe and of the relations between the Palæolithic and Neolithic.
[13] Of course this does not mean that the tribes beyond the edge are without culture. They would normally be under influences from other centers. And in a certain degree every people possesses initiative and is constantly tending to invent or produce culture, though perhaps only of a simple order. It is only from the point of view of the Southwest and its Pueblo focus that the extra-marginal tribes possess a zero culture.—For examples of other cultural step pyramids, see § 164, 175, Fig. 35.
[14] It has not been. The Maya series runs: 1 not made out, 2 rattlesnake, 3 tortoise, 4 scorpion, 5 king vulture, 6 marine monster, 7 bird, 8 frog (?), 9 deer (?), 10 and 11 not made out, 12 death, 13 peccary. Comparison with the Old World list shows 8-scorpion and 4-scorpion, and 1-ram and 9-deer (?), as the only resemblances.
[15] Grammarians generally recognize a greater number because they follow the example of ancient grammarians and are interested in the history or theory of language. But any one giving a purely empirical picture of French or English would put the situation as it is put here.
[16] 12 × 10 = 120 ÷ 2 (highest common factor of 10 and 12) = 60.
[17] Or 360 and 7,200 respectively in calendrical notations.
[18] This section will not be found confusing if it is read with the following points clearly in mind. A tribe is a political unit, a sib or clan or moiety a social unit forming one of several divisions of such a political unit. A tribe corresponds in savage or barbarous life to the state or nation among ourselves. The sib is a sort of enlarged family. The blood relationship is often mainly fictitious, but it is considered actual or treated as such, and is the basis of the prohibition of marriage within the sib. The origin of the sib seems to have been the family. The terms sib, clan, and gens are here used synonymously. Some writers restrict “clan” to sibs with descent in the female line, “gens” to sibs with male descent. Sib is perhaps the best general term, clan the one most used.
[19] Three out of four, to be exact; but two eastern areas, which are almost in contact and perhaps rather closely connected in history, are for convenience treated here as if they were one.
[20] It is perhaps hardly necessary to remark that the association here found between the various elements of the exogamic complex would not conflict with patrilinear descent being on the whole the earlier and matrilinear the later phase to appear in each of the independent developments of the complex. Nor would it prevent each separate continental development from undergoing its own history of diffusion, as represented in § 185.
[21] It seems quite doubtful whether any American people held seven as a mystic number in pre-Columbian times. The case most frequently cited is that of the Zuñi. But these people had a Christian mission in their town for two centuries; they still employ four and six far more frequently than seven in their rituals; and their unmissionized neighbors the Hopi and Navaho esteem four or six but not seven. The other Indians stressing seven lived either on the Atlantic slope, such as the Delaware and Cherokee, and have therefore long been in contact with the colonists; or in the Plains—notably the Siouan tribes—and there came into direct and indirect relations with the French for two hundred years before ethnologists visited them. Moreover, the number which the Plains tribes most frequently used in regard to sacred matters was four. The mystic value of seven may therefore be traceable to European influence wherever it appears in America.
[22] Except perhaps for the fragments of the Baal Lebanon bowl.
[24] Mexico, Central America, and the coast and mountain parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
[25] Maize is the name of the plant in England, continental Europe, and Latin America. In the United States “corn,” short for Indian corn, is in current usage; but this word means grain or cereal in general.
[26] The contrary has been alleged. To dispose of the allegations seriatim would involve the minute examination of much evidence. Clan organization is here used in reference to arbitrary, named, intratribal exogamic groups to which the individual belongs inalienably by virtue of his birth, his descent being necessarily reckoned on one side only; and totemic phenomena being usually though not always associated with the group. A segregation of society into groups based primarily on blood kinship, co-residence, town quarters, occupation, social rank, or subordination to a chieftain is not a clan organization. Nor is the unilateral reckoning of descent a sufficient criterion. Our modern family names descend patrilineally without any historical connection between them and a clan organization. In general, statements as to the existence of clan systems in Middle America, at least among the advanced nations of Mexico and Peru, rest either on a loose use of terms; on the assumption that they must have existed at the time of discovery; or on a forward projection into the historic period of the belief that they had once existed. This belief is accepted here without such projection.
[27] Why the Southwest with its solid towns of a thousand and more inhabitants, its generally greater advancement, and proximity to Mexico, should never have progressed to larger political units, is not wholly clear. The reason may be that the Pueblo was a heavily ritualized culture, whose emphasis was on the priest, not the governor or councilor. Such government as the Pueblos had was distinctly theocratic. They were also disinclined to fight. Southeastern religion was quite simple in comparison, an important priesthood lacking, and the warlike spirit rather strong.
[28] The kiva or estufa of the Southwest, a ceremonial chamber, is a partial exception. Yet even it differs from the living room of the same region chiefly in use. Structurally it may be somewhat larger, or circular instead of rectangular, but does not depart widely from the dwellings. Functionally it is a development of the primitive “men’s house,” not a temple.
[29] Some of the Eskimo followed a solstitial reckoning also, but probably as a result of the unusual astronomical phenomena of their high latitudes rather than as the consequence of cultural influence.
[30] The tonalamatl was not divided into 13 discrete month periods of 20 days each, but was a permutation system of 20 names with 13 numbers, yielding a recurrent cycle of 260 days each designated by its particular combination of name and number. See § 106.
[31] The years in this reckoning were somewhat short: 360 days.
[32] So primary is the distinction within the Palæolithic of its Lower and Upper halves, that some authors, for purposes of elementary presentation, have felt justified in calling these halves the Old and the Middle Stone Ages. This is unfortunate because this “Middle” Stone Age is in scientific writings always included in the Palæolithic, whereas the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age of many archæologists embraces the more or less transitional periods such as the Azilian and Maglemose (below, § 216) between the end of the Palæolithic and the definitive or Full Neolithic. Nevertheless, the unorthodox terminology has the merit of condensing detail with a broad sweep.
[33] These are the proportions of implements of flint to those of bone or horn in several stations of different age:
| Hundsteig, Austria, early Aurignacian | 20,000 | 2 |
| Sirgenstein, Würtemberg, Aurignacian | 1,000 | rare |
| Sirgenstein, Würtemberg, early Solutrean | 700 | 10 |
| Predmost, Czecho-Slovakia, Solutrean | 25,000 | many |
| Schweizersbild, Switzerland, late Magdalenian | 14,000 | 1,300 |
| Maglemose, Denmark, Azilian | 881 | 294 |
| Oban, Scotland, Azilian | 20 | 150 |
[34] The horse seems to have survived wild in parts of Europe until the Neolithic, but the first domesticated forms, in the Bronze Age, appear to have been brought in from Asia.
[35] In France, four or five periods are distinguished: 2500-1900; 1900-1600; 1600-1300; 1300-900 B.C. The first of these is a time of copper rather than bronze, with northern France still Neolithic. If five periods are admitted, an era around 1300 B.C. is recognized as a separate division.
[36] A Uralic Bronze Age culture-area is recognizable as stretching with considerable uniformity from the Dniepr in southwestern Russia to Lake Baikal in the latitude of eastern Mongolia, and centering about Minusinsk on the upper Yenisei. It possessed horse trappings, an abundance of sickles that argue a population primarily agricultural, and socketed axes related to the type that occurred in western Europe between about 1400 and 1000 B.C. This bronze culture shows definite resemblances on the one hand to that of the Danubian area—and, it may be added, of the Caucasus; on the other, to the ancient bronzes of China.
[37] In India, “Hindu” means any native who adheres to the higher cults of native origin which collectively constitute the “religion” known as Hinduism; in effect, the non-savage and non-Mohammedan inhabitants. Hindus and Mohammedans are contrasted in local usage. In this book, Hindu is synonymous with Indian, irrespective of religion.
[38] The Malays proper, whose home until the twelfth or thirteenth century lay in Sumatra, are to be distinguished as a particular people from the Malaysian or East Indian group which we name after them, in the same way that the Mongols are a nation which is but one of many that constitute the Mongolian race and Mongoloid stock.
[39] Several languages in the interior of the larger Melanesian islands have been described as non-Malayo-Polynesian. If they confirm as such, they may be regarded as survivals of a group of languages which were the original tongues of the Melanesians and are probably to be classed with the Papuan languages. The Malayo-Polynesian speech of the majority of the modern Melanesians may in that case be considered as having been taken over through contacts with brown peoples of a higher culture. A similar situation exists in Madagascar, which in race is predominantly Negroid, but whose speech is purely and whose culture largely Malaysian.
[40] The population attained only to a minority fraction of a million, perhaps not over 150,000 all told.
[41] It may be corroborative of this interpretation that totemism and exogamy are more irregularly distributed, and therefore more difficult to reconstruct as to their history, in South than in North America. The Tropical Forest area, in which these institutions occur in South America, has long been exposed to the influence of the higher civilization of the Andean region, much as Africa has been exposed to Europe and Asia.