Adat

“ If the division between the noble and the common of the human race, as established by birth, by hereditary rank, by unalterable caste, were stronger and deeper and less eradicable than at this day, the real division, as visible in his nature, between man and man, of the noble and the common, the difference in his tastes, his enjoyments, his pleasures, his capacity no less than his power of enjoying, was a mere nothing then, to what it is to-day. ”

“ EVOLUTION OF THE MORES
All modern social institutions arise from the evolution of the primitive customs of your savage ancestors; the conventions of today are the modified and expanded customs of yesterday. What habit is to the individual, custom is to the group; and group customs develop into folkways or tribal traditions—mass conventions. From these early beginnings all of the institutions of present-day human society take their humble origin. ”

“ It is that which is handed on by tradition and forms the mould into which each new mind is cast as it grows up. Thus, while for society it is custom, for the individual it has something of the force of habit and more than habit." [2] I seek to show that in this small area, where with all its diversity of custom there is substantial homogeneity of culture, the end which these rites serve is often consciously realised as a social end, beneficial to them as organised communities. ”

“ These questions, it will be seen, indicate a proposition which I feel sure this Society will think necessary to put forward, namely, that investigators into savage custom and belief, when they are discussing origins and development, should take into consideration the problems suggested by the science of folk-lore.
Another fruitful source of error in those anthropologists who do not take count of the detailed methods and ascertained results of folk-lore is the idea that the hunting and pastoral stage of life is necessarily earlier in development than and generally precedes the agricultural. ”

“ The process includes the comparison of an isolated custom or belief belonging, perhaps secretly, to a particular place, a particular class of persons, or perhaps a particular family or person, with a custom or belief which is part of a whole system belonging to a savage race or tribe; of a custom or belief whose only sanction is tradition, the conservative instinct to do what has been done by one's ancestors, with a custom or belief whose sanction is the professed and established polity or religion of a people ”

“ These concretions of relation and act in war, labor, religion, amusement, family life, and civil institutions are attended by faiths, doctrines of philosophy (myths, folklore) , and by precepts of right conduct and duty (taboos) . The making of folkways is not trivial, although the acts are minute. Every act of each man fixes an atom in a structure, both fulfilling a duty derived from what preceded and conditioning what is to come afterwards by the authority of traditional custom. ”

“ The change being so great,—the phenomenon of savage survivals in culture established, the position of the history and development of culture as an integral part of anthropology vindicated, and the claims of anthropology as a subject of study recognized by the Universities,—the question has naturally been more than once asked,—Is there any further need for the Folk-Lore Society? ”

“ The Manners and Customs of the Middle Ages:--this subject is of the greatest interest, not only to the man of science, but to the man of the world also. In it, too, "we retrace not only one single period, but two periods quite distinct one from the other." In the first, the public and private customs offer a curious mixture of barbarism and civilisation. We find barbarian, Roman, and Christian customs and character in presence of each other, mixed up in the same society, and very often in the same individuals. Everywhere the most adverse and opposite tendencies display themselves. ”

“ Again, there is the question whether the folk-lore of any given nation—composite as modern nations mostly are—represents the lore of the governing race, the lore of the bulk of the population, or the lore of some inferior or enslaved race; whether, in fact, a nation can adopt a new folk-lore as it can a new language, and how far, therefore, its folk-lore can be taken as evidence of the stock from which it has sprung. ”

“ Furthermore, as a part of this common life, there grows up a body of custom, convention, tradition, ceremonial, language, social ritual, public opinion, in short all that Sumner includes under the term "mores" and all that ethnologists include under the term "culture." ”

“ The fact that the custom was at once adopted by all the races of men, whatever their geographical position and degree of civilization, proves that there must be a reason for it in the physical constitution of man. ”

“ It is true that one class was then more distinctly separated from another, by costume and some external habits of life; the knight and the franklin, the monk and the priest, the trader and the peasant, always carried the badges of their position upon them; and we, with our modern notions, are apt to think that the man who was marked out by his very costume as a trader must have been “looked down upon” by what we call the higher classes of society. ”

“ In law also, progressive practitioners and students have pointed out the well-known fact of the immense and beclogging ritual which has come to surround legal procedure. It is the contention of critics of one or another of our contemporary social habits and institutions that traditionalism, the persistence of custom simply because it is custom, is responsible for many of the anachronisms in our social, political, and industrial life. ”

“ Amongst the customs which contributed most to the softening and elegance of the feudal class, we must cite that of sending into the service of the sovereign for some years all the youths of both sexes, under the names of varlets, pages, squires, and maids of honour. ”

“ In the classes shut out from all communication with the exterior there is, by their very constitution, a multitude of the elements of folk-lore, that is, of rituals and ceremonies, which, though they have lost the raison d'etre of their existence, and the cause which gave them life, are yet true relics of degrees of culture, superior perchance to the popular culture of their own time, but inferior to the popular culture of the present time. ”

“ No systematic effort has been made to treat the traditional story or the traditional custom and belief as part of the tribal history of our race, and yet in the few cases where it has been so treated the results are obviously satisfactory. ”

“ They are becoming a more enlightened race than their fathers, and from their habitations have issued some of our most distinguished merchants, statesmen and divines. Their sons have been distinguished in our seminaries of science, for the zeal with which they have pursued knowledge, and the indefatigable application with which they have supplied the defects of early culture. ”

“ Among the races held in bondage by custom there were, of course, rare souls born before their time in whom the eternal "Thou shalt not" of the law of custom provoked the question "Why?" But they met the fate ordained for men born before their time; in civilized states the hemlock, the cross and the stake; in uncivilized, the club or the spear. ”

“ The result is the creation of an almost inconceivably vast body of traditional custom, law and knowledge into which every human being is born, less in the more isolated and barbarous communities, but large everywhere. ”

“ In many of our ceremonial institutions, our fashions, habits, dress, ornamentation, opinions, notions of marriage, property, and law we are but the slaves of the customs and traditions of the past. It may be of interest to look at some of these habits and customs of savage life. We might ask the question, "How is the course of civilization traced?" One means is through the aid of survivals. And what do we mean by "survivals?" "Those opinions, customs, and peculiar notions of ours which require an explanation for their presence and which represent an older period of culture." ”

“ Their traditions are handed down from generation to generation by men who make it their business to learn, even to the most minute detail, all the folk lore, history, superstitions, and customs of their nation. ”

“ Pleasing pictures of a happy state of society are presented in many passages which we meet with in the literature of the period: "May the Brahmans in our kingdom," says the priest at a horse-sacrifice, "live in piety; may our warriors be skilled in arms and mighty; may our cows yield us profuse milk, our bullocks carry their weights, and our horses be swift; may our women defend their homes, and our warriors be victorious; may our youths be refined in their manners. ”

“ If we use the word ‘tradition’ in the widest possible sense to denote all the intellectual and moral gains of past generations, in so far as they are not innate but are handed on from one generation to another by the personal intercourse of the younger with the older generation, and if we allow the notion of tradition to include all the institutions and customs that are passed on from generation to generation, then we may class all the changes of a people that constitute the evolution of a national character under the two heads: evolution of innate qualities and evolution of traditions. ”

“ It would be difficult to find a more perfect instance of the spontaneous, evolutional character of tradition contended for by what, in default of a better name, must be called the anthropological school of folk-lorists. ”

“ The arts, inventions and institutions named represent nearly the sum of the acquisitions of mankind in savagery, with the exception of the marvelous progress in language. In the aggregate it seems small, but it was immense potentially; because it embraced the rudiments of language, of government, of the family, of religion, of house architecture and of property, together with the principal germs of the arts of life. All these their descendants wrought out more fully in the period of barbarism, and their civilized descendants are still perfecting. ”

“ That the culture of nomad peoples is lower than that [8] of pastoral tribes; that pastoral tribes advance in culture when they become agricultural; that agriculture, implying settled habits and fixed homes, leads to the foundation of cities and the formation of civic life; that the city-states of the ancient world give way to the nation-states of modern times: are all accepted facts, bridging the apparent chasm between civilisation and savagery, and demonstrating the action of the law of continuity in the evolution of society. ”

“ The old songs of the peasantry, the grandam’s fairy tales, the children’s rhymes, the auguries and omens of the ignorant and least educated portion of the community might seem at first sight to be unworthy of the serious attention of the antiquary. But experience has shown that these humble materials afford really important data for the student of mythology and anthropology. Customs, which once formed part of the ceremonial of creeds outworn, survive amongst European nations, as an evidence of their pre-Christian belief. ”

“ A new stage in comparative folklore must now be entered upon. It must be understood what the effective comparison of a [Pg 178] traditional peasant custom or belief with a savage custom or belief really amounts to. ”

“ Society was hierarchical: from the serf up through the peasant, the guildsman, the burgher, the knighthood, the nobles, to the King, and so to the Emperor, there was a regular succession of graduations, but the lines of demarcation were fluid and easily passed, and as through the Church, the schools and the cloister there was an open road for the son of a peasant to achieve the Papacy, so through the guilds, chivalry, war and the court, the layman, if he possessed ability, might from an humble beginning travel far. ”

“ Barely is there a discussion which provokes traditional lore or traditional sentiment which does not bring to light some such thought or experience, re-appearing, like the lines in family feature, after the lapse of several generations. ”

“ That the rigid and definite dividing line between patrician and plebeian, which still exists so much more markedly upon the Continent, can only be traced most sketchily in this country is due to two causes— (1) the fact that in early days, when Society was slowly evolving itself, many younger sons of gentle families embarked upon commercial careers, natural family affection, because of such action, preventing a rigid exclusion from the ranks of Society of every one tainted by commerce ”

“ At first the preservation of the gens, the tribe, the protection and service of the village community, the handing on of tradition and folk-lore, until, with conquest and extension and consolidation into a nation, settled industries, and religious faith and ritual, the desire arises to clothe the mythical and spiritual 353 ideas of a people in permanent monumental form and colour. ”

“ The nobles of those times dwelt in their villages, dealing “basse et moyenne justice,” punishing petty offences, redressing minor wrongs, settling the quarrels of neighbours, sending a good soup to the sick, relieving the necessitous, cultivating their own lands, not themselves too far removed from the humble interests of the soil, and yet, none the less, examples of a broader life, an ampler culture to the poor at their gates. ”

“ The other social and economic groups into [Pg 57] which mankind divided itself tended to perpetuate themselves as simulated sub-species by the transmission of special knowledge along strict hereditary lines. Crafts of every sort—whether metal-working or magic, architecture or agriculture, seafaring or sheep-breeding, even poetry and prostitution—came more and more to be inherited, until among some of the great ancient peoples the caste system became the foundation of society. ”