A. L. Kroeber

“ The most marked special characteristic of the Northwestern mythology, other than its practical use of myths for religious purposes in the shape of formulas, is its strong and definite, though inconsistently carried out, idea of the previous race which is parallel to but distinct from mankind, and which is the originator, not by any act of creation but by merely living its life, of everything human except mankind itself, the origin of which is never accounted for. ”

“ It is true [115] that no one, not even the most learned and prolific writer, uses all the words of the English language as they are found in an unabridged dictionary. All of us understand many words which we habitually encounter in reading and may even hear frequently spoken, but of which our utterance faculties for some reason have not made us master. In short, a language, being the property and product of a community, possesses more words than can ever be used by a single individual, the sum total of whose ideas is necessarily less than that of his group. ”

“ Grains, cattle, horses, chariots and wagons, the plow, wool and weaving, gold, patriarchal chieftains and a tribal society, a nature mythology, non-communal rituals with constant but prevailingly bloodless sacrifices, are the characteristics of this culture. It smacks more of the Europe of its time than of the contemporary Orient. It is unbound, ready to pack up and move without being essentially nomadic; half peasant-like and half aristocratic; an uncitified semi-civilization, pioneer rather than backwoods. ”

“ Least of all would it be sound to infer that essential superiority rested with the one that was in advance at the moment of observation, without knowledge of their starting points, the difficulty of their routes, the motive or goal of their courses. It is only as the number of circumstances grows, from which observations are available, that judgment begins to have any weight. The runner who has led for a long time and is increasing his lead, or who has repeatedly passed others, or who carries a load and yet gains ground, may lay some claim to superiority. ”

“ Borrowing can sometimes be shown as very likely even where direct evidence is lacking. If two peoples that possess an institution in common are known off-shoots one from the other, or if they have had numerous trade relations, it is hardly necessary to demonstrate the specific time and manner of transmission between them. Supposing that a religion, an alphabet, and perhaps a number of arts have passed from one nation to another, one would normally ask for little further evidence that a custom, such as the couvade, which they shared, had also been originated by one and borrowed by the other. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The thirteenth century brought the Greeks, then a rude, hardy, and at first non-maritime people, fighting their way south and wrecking or sapping the Ægean civilization. Culture lost its bloom, life became hard, the outlook contracted. Art shriveled into crude geometric ornamentation, the forms became childishly inept, intercourse with the Orient sank to a minimum, and when trade and foreign stimulation revived they were at first in Phœnician hands. ”

“ The most advanced of the Old Stone Age men perhaps knew and could do about one thing for every hundred that we know and can do. A whole array of fundamental inventions—the bow and arrow, pottery, domestication of animals and plants—had not yet been attempted, and they do not appear on the scene until the Neolithic. But in spite of the enormous gaps remaining to be filled in the Neolithic and in the historic period, it does seem fair to say that many of the outlines of what civilization was ultimately to be had been substantially blocked out during the Upper Palæolithic. ”

“ In the field of speech, it is easy to recognize that it is not grammarians that make languages, but languages that make grammarians. The analogous process evidently holds for culture. Lawgivers, statesmen, religious leaders, discoverers, inventors, therefore only seem to shape civilization. The deep-seated, blind, and intricate forces that shape culture, also mold the so-called creative leaders of society as essentially as they mold the mass of humanity. Progress, so far as it can objectively be considered to be such, is something that makes itself. ”

“ If the Etruscans devised the true arch and liver divination independently of the Babylonians, there are two sets of phenomena awaiting interpretation instead of one. To say that they are both “natural” events is equivalent to calling them accidental, that is, unexplainable. To fall back on instinctive impulses of the human mind will not do, else all or most nations should have made these inventions.
Of course it is important to remember that no sane interpretation of culture explains everything. ”

“ The failure of the Greeks to pass beyond column and lintel architecture may seem strange for a people that showed so unusual an artistic faculty and so bold and enterprising a spirit as they manifested in most departments of civilization. The cause appears to lie not in any internal arrest of their artistic evolution, but in the conditions that prevailed in another field of their culture: their political particularity. The Greek state remained a city. All attempts to establish larger political aggregates, whether on the basis of confederation or conquest, failed miserably and speedily. ”

“ At the same time it would be an error to believe that the life of these men of long ago was filled with the making and using of stone tools to the exclusion of everything else. Gradually during the last fifty years, through unremittingly patient explorations and the piecing of one small discovery to another, there has accumulated a fair body of knowledge of other sides of the life of Palæolithic men. There is every reason to believe that as time goes on we shall learn more and more about them, and thus be able to reconstruct a reasonably complete and vivid picture of their behavior. ”

“ Unity lay not so much in an effective organization as in an idea, the feeling of a common race and especially of a common civilization. This idea has persisted to the present. It is adhesion to the culture of China, to its deep roots, its permanence, its humanities, that has always made Chinamen feel themselves Chinamen; has in fact sooner or later turned into Chinamen all alien elements, whether they were intrusive conquerors or primitive folk, that came to be included within the limits of the realm. ”

“ Obviously it would be easiest to arrive at a clear-cut classification by grouping all the peoples of the earth according to a single trait, such as the shape of the nose, or color. But any such classification must be artificial and largely unsound, just because it disregards the majority of traits. The only classification that can claim to rest upon a true or natural basis is one which takes into consideration as many traits as possible, and weights the important more heavily than the unimportant features. ”

“ It is not because migrations of large bodies of men are rare or wholly negligible in their influence on civilization that they have been touched so lightly here, but because we all tend, through the romantic and sensationalistic streak in us, to think more largely in terms of them than the sober truth warrants. It is in culture-history as in geology: the occasional eruptions, quakings, and other cataclysms stir the mind, but the work of change is mainly accomplished by quieter processes, going on unceasingly, and often almost imperceptible until their results accumulate. ”

“ Beyond the beginning of the Chou dynasty, about 1100 B.C., or more exactly, beyond a point when this dynasty was about three centuries old, in 827 B.C., the Chinese possess only legendary history, in which slight strands of fact are interwoven with fabricated or fabulous constituents. Then, too, the Chinese have long been genuinely more advanced than their neighbors, than all of their world, in fact; with the result that they could hardly escape the conviction of their own superiority and self-sufficiency, and the belief that they had devised almost everything in their own culture. ”

“ Consequently picture-writing is not the spontaneous product which we, who as children are reared in an environment of pictures, might imagine it to be. If pictography were due to a primary parallelism, to a spontaneous outflow of the human mind, its absences would be in need of explanation. If, on the other hand, it is the result of a single diffusing development, this must have an antiquity of more than fifteen thousand years, as attested by the Old Stone Age paintings, and the failure of certain peoples to be affected is also in need of explanation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They barely dented the civilization of the West as they barely dented that of India and China. If Russia is backward as compared with western Europe, it is not from having been Tatar-ruled a few centuries, but because Russia has long been peripheral to the Mediterranean focus of civilization and therefore chronically belated. It was the very thinness of her culture that made mediæval Russia succumb to the Mongol wave which pounded vainly against the more consolidated civilization of central Europe and quickly drew off. ”

“ Is, then, human language as old as culture? It is difficult to be positive, because words perish like beliefs and institutions, whereas stone tools endure as direct evidence. On the whole, however, it would appear that the first rudiments of what deserves to be called language are about as ancient as the first culture manifestations, not only because of the theoretically close association of the two phases, but in the light of circumstantial testimony, namely the skull interiors of fossil men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But vocabulary is largely a cultural matter. A people that uses more materials, manufactures more objects, possesses knowledge of a larger array of facts, and makes finer discriminations in thought, must inevitably have more words. Yet even notable increases in size of speech content appear not to be accompanied by appreciable changes in form. A larger vocabulary does not mean a different type of structure. Grammar seems to be little influenced by culture status. No clear correspondence has yet been traceable between type or degree of civilization and type of language. ”

“ Of course, most individual men and women are neither idiotic nor insane. The only conclusion is that as soon and as long as people live in relations and act in groups, something wholly irrational is imposed on them, something that is inherent in the very nature of society and civilization. There appears to be little or nothing that the individual can do in regard to this force except to refrain from adding to its irrationality the delusion that it is rational. ”

“ If a people in Asia and one in America each knew a story of a person who to impede a pursuer spilt water on the ground which magically grew into a vast lake, it would be dogmatic to insist on this as proof of a historical connection between the two far separated stories. Belief in the virtue of magic is world-wide, and it is entirely conceivable that from this common soil of magical beliefs the same episode might repeatedly have sprouted quite independently. The same reasoning would apply to the incident of the transformation of the stone and of the comb, as long as they occurred separately. ”

“ Thus it appears that it is not always easy to settle the origin and history of the phenomena of culture. Evidently, many facts must be taken into consideration: above all, geographic distribution. Because a habit is so well ingrained in our life as to seem absolutely natural and almost congenital, it does not follow that it really is so. The vast majority of culture elements have been learned by each nation from other peoples, past and present. At the same time there are unexpected limits to the principle of borrowing. ”

“ That heavy bodies tend to fall to the earth and that fire burns fingers are truths verifiable and verified every day, but we do not hold them with impassioned certitude, and we do not resent or resist inquiry into their basis; whereas in such a question as that of the survival of death by human personality we hold the favorable or the adverse view with a quality of feeling entirely different, and of such a kind that inquiry into the matter is looked upon as disreputable by orthodox science and as wicked by orthodox religion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nations are instinctively imbued with a feeling of superiority. They look down upon the foreigner. Even where they admit his skill in this matter or that, they envy rather than admire him. Thus, there is historic record of Oriental and European vessels being wrecked on the Pacific coast of North America, during the last century and a half, among tribes that were still almost wholly aboriginal. In no case did the natives make any attempt to absorb the higher culture of the strangers. ”

“ But arts that in the Orient had appeared almost simultaneously with bronze—writing, masonry, wheel turning of pottery—did not reach Scandinavia until after bronze had been superseded by iron there. The consequence was that the Northern culture remained on the whole thoroughly barbarous. And yet, perhaps on account of this very backwardness, an aloofness resulted which drove the Scandinavian bronze-workers to follow their own tastes and develop their own forms and styles, often with taste as exquisite as simple. ”

“ There is no question but that some populations are nothing but the product of such race crossing. Thus there is a belt extending across the entire breadth of Africa of which it is difficult to say whether the inhabitants belong to the Negro or to the Caucasian type. If we construct a racial map and represent the demarcation between Negro and Caucasian by a line, we are really misrepresenting the situation. The truth could be expressed only by inserting a transition zone of mixed color. Yet as soon as we allow such transitions, the definiteness of our classification begins to crumble. ”

“ In keenness of hearing, on the contrary, one should expect the civilized white to come out ahead, as in fact he does; not because he is Caucasian but because he is civilized and because the instruments of experimentation, be they tuning forks or ticking [75] watches or balls dropped on metal plates, are implements of civilization. Make the test the howl of a distant wolf, or the snapping of a twig as the boughs bend in the wind, and the college student’s hearing might prove duller than that of the Indian or Ainu. ”