Anthropology

82. Heredity

The first of the several factors through which it is logically possible to explain the life and conduct and customs of any people is race or heredity: in other words, the inborn tendencies, bodily and mental, of the people that carry these customs. At first sight it may seem that this element of race might be quite influential. Since peoples differ in inherited characteristics of body—complexion, features, hair, eye color, head form, and the like—these bodily inherited peculiarities ought to be accompanied by mentally inherited traits, such as greater or less inclination to courage, energy, power of abstract thought, mechanical ingenuity, musical or æsthetic proclivities, swift reactions, ability to concentrate, gift of expression. Such racial mental traits, again, might conceivably be expressed in the conduct and culture of each people. Races born to a greater activity of the mechanical faculties would achieve more or higher inventions, those innately gifted in the direction of music would develop more subtly melodious songs, and so on.

Yet in every particular case it is difficult or impossible to establish by incontrovertible evidence that heredity is the specific cause of this accomplishment, of this point of view, or of this mode of life; that it is the determining factor to such and such degree of such and such customs. This is not a denial of the probability that inborn racial differences exist. It is an affirmation of the difficulty, discussed in Chapters I, IV, and V, of knowing what is inborn; and more specifically, of the difficulty of tracing particular customary activities back to particular racial qualities. The problem of connecting specific race traits with specific phenomena of culture or group conduct, such as settled life, architecture in stone, religious symbolism, and the like,—of determining how much of this type of architecture or symbolism is instinctive in the race and how much of it is the result of traditional or social influences,—remains unsolved.

For example, should one try to apply to the explanation of the mode of life or culture of the Indians of the Southwestern United States biological facts, such as their head form, one would be confronted by the difficulty that long heads are characteristic of some of the town-building tribes, or Pueblos, and also of some of the tribes living in brush huts. Broad heads are also found among both the settled and nomadic tribes. The Pueblo Taos and non-Pueblo Pima are narrow-headed, the Pueblo Zuñi and non-Pueblo Apache broad-headed. So with the pulse rate, which has been already mentioned (§ 70) as unusually slow among the Southwestern Indians. It is the same for the nomadic Apache who lived by fighting, and for the Hopi and Zuñi who are famous for their timidity and gentleness. Similar cases might be cited almost endlessly. It is evident that they are of a kind with the lack of correspondence between race and speech, or race and nationality, among the European peoples.

83. Geographical Environment

When it comes to the second factor by which culture might theoretically be explained—physical environment or geography—similar difficulties are encountered.

It is of course plain that a primitive tribe under the equator would never invent the ice box, and that the Eskimo will not keep their food and water in buckets of bamboo, although it is possible that if the Eskimo had had bamboo carried to them by ocean currents, they would have been both glad and able to use it. The materials and opportunities provided by nature may be made use of by each people, while other materials not being provided, other arts or customs can therefore not be developed. But evidently this correspondence is mainly negative. Not performing an act because one lacks the opportunity by no means proves that the opportunity will necessarily lead to the performance. Two nations will live where there is ice to store and one will invent and the other fail to invent the ice chest. Whole series of peoples possess bamboo and clay, and yet some of them draw water in bamboo joints and others in pots. Obviously, natural environment does impose certain limiting conditions on human life; but equally obviously, it does not cause inventions or institutions.

The native Australians have wood and cord and flint but do not make bows and arrows. Their civilization had not advanced to the point where they were able to devise an efficient bow, and the requisite idea failed to be carried to them from elsewhere as it was to other peoples who also did not invent the weapon. The Polynesians, on the other hand, seem once to have had the weapon, as evidenced by their retaining it as a toy, but to have disused it, perhaps because they specialized on fighting with spears and clubs. Modern civilized people fight at long range, but have let bows go out of use, except for sport, because their knowledge of metallurgy and chemistry centuries ago progressed to the point where they could produce firearms. Development or lack of development or specialization of other cultural activities—social causes—thus determine more directly than other factors whether or not a people employ the bow and arrow. Of those mentioned, the Australians are the only ones with whom a factor of natural environment might be alleged to enter: namely, their isolation, which cut them off from communications and the opportunity to learn from other races. Yet such isolation is as much a matter of inability to traverse space as it is a matter of physical distance. A developed art of navigation would have abolished the Australian isolation. Thus, this seemingly environmental cause of a cultural fact depends for its effectiveness on a co-existing cultural cause. It is the latter which is the most immediate or specific cause.

In general, then, it may be concluded that the directly determining factors of cultural phenomena are not nature which gives or withholds materials, but the general state of knowledge and technology and advancement of the group; in short, historical or cultural influences.

84. Diet

The greater part of the Southwest is arid. Fish are scarce. The result is that most of the tribes get little opportunity to fish. Most of these Southwestern Indians will not eat fish; in fact, think them poisonous. This circumstance might lead to the following inference: nature does not furnish fish in abundance; therefore the Indians got out of the habit of eating them, and finally came to believe them poisonous. At first blush this may seem a sufficient explanation. But it is well to note that the explanation has two parts and that only one of them has to do with nature: the habit of not eating fish because they are too scarce to make it worth while. As soon as one proceeds to the second step, that the disuse led to aversion and then to a false belief of poisonousness, one has gone on to a different matter. Disuse, aversion, and belief lie wholly within the field of human conduct. To derive a psychological phenomenon, such as a belief, from another psychological phenomenon such as a particular disuse, because this disuse is founded on a geographical factor, would of course be a logical fallacy. It can also be shown not to hold, since we prize caviar and oysters and venison in proportion to their rarity. Scarcity in this case thus leads to the contrary psychological attitude, and either fails to establish beliefs or establishes favorable ones.

Again, either through a change in climate or through the improvement of trade, a food that was scarce may become plentiful. Or a people may remove to a new habitat, different from that in which their customs of eating were formed. If environment alone were the dominating cause of their customs, these customs should then immediately alter. As a fact, a group sometimes adheres to its old customs. The immediate cause of such conservatism is habit or inertia or inclination toward superstition or fear of taboo, all of which are mental reactions expressed in folkways or social customs. Thus environment remains at most a partial and indirectly operating cause.

A case in point is that of the Jews. It is often said that the Jew’s prohibition against eating pork and oysters and lobsters originated in hygienic considerations; that these were climatically unsafe foods for him in Palestine. This explanation is more simple than true. Ancient Palestine was an arid country in which hogs could not be raised with economic profit, and so they were not raised; and the Philistine and Phœnician kept the Jew from the coast along which he might have obtained shellfish. Eating neither food, he happened to acquire a distrust of them; having the distrust, he rationalized it by saying that it was foreign and wicked and irreligious to act counter to his habits—just like the Pueblo Indian; and in the end had the Lord issue the prohibition for him. Yet this outcome is a long way from the starting point of natural environment. The environment may indeed be said to have furnished the first occasion, but the determining causes of the taboos in the Mosaic law are of an entirely different kind—distrust, custom, rationalization, psychological or cultural factors. If doubt remains, it is dispelled by the orthodox Jew of to-day, whose environment thrusts some of his forbidden foods at him as economically and hygienically satisfactory, whereas he still shudders at the thought of tasting them.

If this sort of cultural crystallizing of custom and subsequent rationalizing or ritual sanctioning takes place among civilized and intelligent people, the like must occur among uncivilized tribes.

85. Agriculture

Attempts have been made to derive the invention of agriculture from climatic factors. The first theory was that farming took its rise in the tropics, where agriculture came naturally, almost without effort, under a bounteous sky. Only after people had acquired the habit of farming and had moved into other less favorably endowed countries, did they take their agriculture seriously in order to survive. But a second, equally plausible, and quite contradictory theory has been advanced, which looks toward the duress rather than the easy favors of nature. On the basis of conditions among the modern Papago Indians and the ancient inhabitants of the Southwest, it has been argued that it must have been the peoples of arid countries who invented agriculture, necessity driving them to it through shortage of wild supplies.

Between such flat opposites, the choice is merely one of unscientific guessing. In this particular case of the Southwest it is certain that both guesses are wrong. Agriculture did not come to the natives of this area because nature was favorable or because it was unfavorable. It came because through increase of knowledge and change of attitude, some people in the region of Southern Mexico or Guatemala or beyond first turned agriculturists, and from them the art was gradually carried, through nation after nation, to the Southwestern tribes, and finally even to the Indians of the North Atlantic coast.

The reasons for acceptance of this explanation are several. First is the distribution of native agriculture, whose practice was about equally spread in the two American continents with its middle in or near Central America. If a geographical diffusion of the art from a center took place, its radiation or extension would probably be about equal to the north and south. Then, the middle portions of the new world held the greatest concentration of native population, such as would have tended to produce a pressure in the direction of the establishment of agriculture and would also normally be a consequence of the continued custom of farming, as opposed to unsettled life. Again, the Southwestern tribes planted only maize, beans, and squashes; the Mexicans grew in addition tomatoes, chili peppers, cacao, and sweet potatoes. It looks as if they had carried their agriculture farther through having been at it longer. Then, pottery has evidently spread out from the same center, and the two arts seem to go hand in hand. Other evidence might be adduced, such as archæological excavations and the botanical fact that the home of the nearest wild relatives of the plants cultivated in the Southwest is the central or middle American area (§ 183).

In short, the Southwestern Indians did not farm because nature induced them to make the invention. They did not make the invention at all. A far away people made it, and from them it was transmitted to the Southwest through a series of successive tribal contacts. These contacts, which then are the specific cause of Southwestern agriculture, constitute a human social factor; a cultural or civilizational factor. Climatic or physical environment did not enter into the matter at all, except to render agriculture somewhat difficult in the arid Southwest, though not difficult enough to prevent it. Had the Southwest been thoroughly desert, agriculture could not have got a foot-hold there. But this would be only a limiting condition; the active or positive causes that brought about the Southwestern agriculture are its invention farther South, the spread of the invention to the North, and its acceptance there.

Of course this conclusion sheds no light on the causes of the first invention in the middle American region. The ultimate origin of the phenomenon has not been penetrated. But the prevalence of agriculture in the aboriginal Southwest for several thousand years past has been pretty certainly accounted for, and by an explanation in terms of culture or civilization, or the activity of societies of human beings.

86. Cultural Factors

Such cultural causes constitute the third set or kind of factors by which civilization is explainable. If the example just discussed is representative, it is clear that cultural factors ordinarily interpret more phenomena of civilization, and interpret them more fully, than factors either of racial heredity or physical environment.

It is different in zoölogy and botany. The forms and behavior of animals and plants are explainable in terms of heredity and environment because animals and plants have no culture. It is true that the forms and behavior are determined also by other animals and plants, their characteristics, habits, and abundance, but these factors are in a larger sense part of the environment. They are at any rate sub-cultural. But since anthropology deals with beings whose distinctive trait in social relations is the possession of the thing that we call culture, the factors which biology employs are insufficient. It is not that heredity and natural environment fail to apply to man, but that they apply only indirectly and remotely to his civilization. This fundamental fact has often been overlooked, especially in modern times, because the biological sciences having achieved successful increases of knowledge and understanding, the temptation was great to borrow their method outright and apply it without serious modification to the human material of anthropology. This procedure simplified the situation, but yielded inadequate and illusory results. For a very long time the idea that man possessed and animals lacked a soul influenced people’s thought to such a degree that they scarcely thought of human beings in terms of biological causality, of heredity and environment. Then when a reaction began to set in, less than two centuries ago, and it became more generally recognized that man was an animal, the pendulum swung to the other extreme and the tendency grew of seeing in him only the animal, the cultureless being, and of either ignoring his culture or thinking that it could be explained away by resolving it into the factors familiar from biology. The just and wise course lies between. The biological aspects of man must be interpreted in terms of biological causation, his cultural aspects in terms first of all of cultural causation. After they have been thus resolved, the cultural causes may reduce to ultimate factors of heredity and natural environment.

87. Cultural Distribution

The Southwest also provides an example of how cultural phenomena can be seen to be arranged geographically so as to yield a meaning or to outline their history, without reference to climate or natural influences. Near the center of the area, in northern New Mexico and Arizona, live four groups of Pueblo or town building Indians—the Hopi, Zuñi, Keres, and Tewa or Tano—who represent a sort of élite of the native culture. They farm, make pottery, accumulate wealth in turquoise, are governed by priests, worship under a remarkably complex set of rituals, which involve altars, masks, symbols of all sorts, and a rude sort of philosophy.

As one goes from the Pueblo center to the less settled tribes, one encounters first the Navaho, who are earth hut builders and farm but little, yet share much of the Pueblo elaborateness of ritual, including altars, masks, and symbols. A little farther out, among the Apache and Pima, the cults have perceptibly diminished in intricacy and symbolic value: altars and masks are lacking.

The simplification increases among the more remote Mohave, whose cults are based on dreams instead of priestly tradition. Still farther, on the shores of the Pacific among the Luiseño and Gabrielino, some Pueblo traits can still be found; cult altars and pottery, for instance. But agriculture, homes of stone, turquoise, priests, and the majority of Pueblo institutions are unknown. Finally, still farther away in central California, the Yokuts now and then show a culture trait reminiscent of the Pueblos: grooved arrow straighteners, perhaps, or occasional rudely made pottery vessels. These are suggestive bits; fragments that have been whittled away or toned down. Pueblo culture as a whole has vanished at this distance. In its place the Yokuts possess quite different arts and institutions and beliefs.

What is the significance of this gradual fading away of one type of civilization and its replacement by others? Evidently that certain influences have radiated out from the higher Pueblo center, and that the effect of these has diminished in proportion to the number of tribes they have passed through. The Pueblos have succeeded in handing over the largest share of their civilization to the adjacent Navaho—and no doubt also received most from them. The Apache being more remote, were less affected; and so on to the farthest limits of the influences.

It is also clear that a time element is involved. A people receiving an art from another obviously acquires this later than the inventors. Most traits which the central Pueblos share with peripheral tribes may be assumed to have existed longer among the Pueblos, simply because they possess more traits in their culture and the flow has prevailingly been out from them. Thus they make uncolored, two-colored, and three-colored pottery; the tribes on the margin of the Southwest, uncolored pottery only; those beyond the range of immediate Southwestern influence, no pottery at all. Unless therefore there should be special reasons suggestive of a degenerative loss of the art among the marginal tribes—and no such reasons are known—the conclusion is forced that Southwestern pottery was first made by the ancestors of the Pueblos or their predecessors in the central part of the area, presumably as plain ware, and that thence knowledge of the art was gradually carried outward. However while simple pottery making was thus being taken up by the tribes nearest to the Pueblo district, the Pueblos were going ahead and learning to ornament vessels with painted designs. In time this added art also spread to the neighbors, but meanwhile these had passed knowledge of the first stage on to the tribes still farther out than themselves; and meanwhile also the Pueblos had perhaps gone on to a third stage, that of combining colors in their decoration.

In this way, if nothing interrupted the even regularity of the process, the focal people, with their lead in creating or inventing or improving, might pass through half a dozen successive stages of the art, or of many arts, while the outermost peoples were just beginning to receive the rudiments. The intermediate tribes would show attainment of a less or greater number of stages in proportion to their distance from the center. In this event the main facts concerning the pottery art of the Southwest could be represented by a diagram of a step pyramid, each level or step picturing a new increment to the basic art. The Pueblos would be at the peak of the pyramid, five or six steps high, the near-by tribes a step or two lower; and so on to the outermost, who remain at, or have only recently attained to, the first or lowest level; while beyond these would be the non-pottery-making tribes wholly outside the Pueblo sphere of influence.

Of course on the actual map the distribution of the various forms or stages of pottery made does not work out with the perfect regularity of our schematic diagram. Here and there a tribe has migrated from its habitat and disturbed the symmetry of arrangement; or the population of a district has been so thin that it could live on wild products without resorting to agriculture, so that it remained more or less nomadic and had no use for fragile pottery; or a third group of tribes developed basket making to a pitch which yielded excellent vessels, with the result that they were satisfied and failed to take up pottery, or took it up half-heartedly, so that the art remained stunted among them—a stage or two more backward than their position would lead one to expect. But on the whole pottery distribution in the Southwest does follow the schematic arrangement with sufficient closeness to warrant the assumption that the history of its development has been, at least in outline, as just reconstructed.

The facts conform still more closely to the step pyramid arrangement when consideration is given not to pottery alone but to the whole culture—agriculture, other arts, social forms, ritual, religious organization, and the like. In that case Pueblo culture is seen to comprise easily the greatest number of traits or component parts, and these to grow fewer and fewer towards the edges of the Southwest.[13]

88. Historical Induction

The sort of conclusion here outlined is really a historical induction drawn from the facts of culture distribution among living but historyless tribes. Where documents are available, the development, the growth of the pyramid itself, as it were, can often be seen as it happened. Thus, about the year 100 A.D., Rome, Italy, France, England, Scotland, stood on successive descending culture levels related to one another much like Pueblo, Navaho, Pima, Mohave, Gabrielino; and also in the same placement of ever more outward geographic situation.

Where written records fail, archæological remains sometimes take their place. This is true of the Southwest, whose ancient pottery, stone edifices and implements, and evidences of agriculture remain as records of the past, telling a story only a little less complete and direct than that of the Roman historians. One of the archæologists of the Southwest has drawn up a pair of diagrams to outline the culture history of the area as he has reconstructed it from comparison of the prehistoric remains (Fig. 26).

In all this story, what has become of natural environment and heredity? They have dropped from sight. We have been able to build up a reasonable and probably reliable reconstruction of the course of development of civilization in an area without reference to these two sets of factors. The reconstruction is in terms of culture. Evidently environment and heredity are in the main superfluous. They need not be brought in; are likely to be confusing, to diminish the internal consistency of the findings attained, if they are brought in. This is true in general, not only of the instance chosen. By using environment or heredity, one can often seem to explain certain selected features of a culture, but the appearance is illusory, because one need only be impartial to realize that one can never explain in this way the whole of any culture. When, however, the explanation can be made in terms of culture—always of course on the basis of a sufficient knowledge and digestion of facts—it applies increasingly to the whole of a civilization, and each portion explained helps to explain better all other portions. The cultural interpretation of culture is therefore progressive, and ever more productive, whereas the environmental and the biological-hereditary interpretation fail in proportion as they are pushed farther; in fact can be kept going only by ignoring larger and larger masses of fact to which they do not apply.

Historians, who may be described as anthropologists whose work is made easy for them by the possession of written and dated records, have tacitly recognized this situation. They may now and then attribute some event or condition of civilization to an inherent quality of a race, or to an influence of climate or soil or sea. But this is mostly in their introductory chapters. When they really get to grips with their subject, they explain in terms of human thought and action, in other words, of culture. It is true that they dwell more on personalities than anthropologists do. But that is because the materials left them by former historians are full of personalities and anecdotes. And on the other hand, anthropological data are usually unduly deficient in the personal element; they consist of descriptions of customs, tools used by long forgotten individuals, and the like. If anthropologists were able to recover knowledge of the particular Pueblo woman who first painted a third color or a glaze on a bowl, or of the priest who first instituted a masked dance in order to make rain, we may be confident that they would discuss these individuals. And such knowledge would throw more light on the history of Southwestern pottery and religion and culture generally than any amount of emphasis on the number of inches of rainfall per year, or the pulse rate or similar hypothetical and remote causes.