Ethnologist

“ It is consoling in a difficulty of this kind to recall the case of an eminent ethnologist, who was exceedingly industrious and prolific and was very great a short generation ago, about which time his learned contemporaries, vexed at his facile method of overcoming all difficulties, rose up against and overthrew him, smashing and pulverising his beautiful theories. ”

“ The ethnologist is free to investigate the characteristics of the different races and families of men, but not free to deny the unity of the human race itself, or the descent of all men from one and the same primitive pair, who must have been immediately created and instructed by God himself. ”

“ The kitchen-clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnaean classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe. ”

“ It is the ethnologist's business merely to record impartially what racial, tribal, social, and religious differences still survive, and, if he can, to show how far they have been, and are being, obliterated by the spread of education, and by growing self-confidence and ambition among educated Indians. ”

“ The one contention, that "passeth all understanding" and which defies the skill of the ethnologist, the psychologist, and all who deal with the ancestral or philosophical aspects of mankind, is the "race-problem." ”

“ At the present day the progress of research has in practice, however, restricted the “ethnologist” as a rule to the study of one or more branches only of so wide a subject, and the word “ethnology” is used with a somewhat vague meaning for any ethnological study; each country or nation has thus its own separate ethnology. It becomes more convenient, therefore, to deal with the ethnology as a special subject in each case. “Ethnography,” in so far as it has a distinctive province, is then conveniently restricted to the scientific mapping out of different racial regions, nations and tribes ”

“ Such is the position of ethnology, such are the objects of the ethnologist. The paths or methods, by following which he may hope to reach his goal, are diverse. He may work at man from the point of view of the pure zoologist, and investigate the anatomical and physiological peculiarities of Negroes, Australians, or Mongolians, just as he would inquire into those of pointers, terriers, and turnspits,—"persistent modifications" of man's almost universal companion. Or he may seek aid from researches into the most human manifestation of humanity—language ”

“ Hence some of the most advanced ethnologists are ready to give up the ethnos itself as a subject of study. Those terms so popular a few years ago, Völkerpsychologie, Völkergedanken, racial psychology, ethnic sentiments, and the like, are looked upon with distrust. The external proofs of the psychical unity of the whole species have multiplied so abundantly that some maintain strenuously that it is not ethnic or racial peculiarities, but solely external conditions on the one hand and individual faculties on the other, which are the factors of culture evolution. ”

“ But in attempting to divide mankind into such groups, an ethnologist is met by a serious and apparently insurmountable difficulty. The gradation of color is so imperceptible from the clearest white to the jettest black; and even anatomical peculiarities, normal in one branch, are found to exist, albeit in exceptional cases, in many others; so that the ethnographers scarce know where to stop in their classification, and while some recognize but three grand varieties, others contend for five, for eleven, or even for a much greater number. ”

“ Ethnologists and anthropologists confine themselves now to systematizing the results obtained in all and each of these sciences; the latter striving to establish the relation existing between the various types of man for a classification of the human species into races; the former trying to analyze the natural and artificial forms of man in his social relations, in order to detect the forces which cause divergences and analogies among them, and to build thereon a classification of the human race into tribes and nations.—The ancient writers contributed very little to ethnology. ”

“ For purely practical reasons, connected with the minute division of labor that has become imperative with modern specialization, ethnology has in practice concerned itself with the cruder cultures of peoples without a knowledge of writing. But this division is an illogical and artificial one. As the biologist can study life as manifested in the human organism as well as in the amoeba, so the ethnologist might examine and describe the usages of modern America as well as those of the Hopi Indians. ”

“ Recent discoveries have revolutionized our conception of primeval man, while still providing abundant material for controversy, and the rapidly increasing pile of ethnographical matter, although a vast amount of spade work remains to be done, is but one sign of the remarkable interest in ethnology which is so conspicuous a feature of the present decade. Even to keep abreast of the periodical literature devoted to his subject provides ample occupation for the ethnologist and few are those who can now lay claim to such an omniscient title. ”

“ In the simpler mental operations, comparative psychological studies indicate a specific unity of mankind. Differences in culture are certainly not proportionate to mental differences, i.e., relatively slight differences in native ability may well have produced tremendous cultural effects. Since, finally, cultural differences of enormous range occur within the same race, and even within very much smaller subdivisions, the ethnologist cannot solve his cultural problems by means of the race factor. ”

“ Of course a careful and complete study of the whole work of an author enables one to judge much better how far his profession or personality may have affected his statements. And this is also the reason why an ethnologist confining himself to a small ethnic area is in a better position than the general one. ”

“ When the ethnologist has acquired a competent knowledge of his facts, and deduced from them a clear conception of the mental states of the peoples he is studying, he has not finished his labors. Institutions and arts in some degree reflect the mental conditions of a people, in some degree bring them about ”

“ Even in the cases, however, where the inference is most doubtful, we have no right dogmatically to deny the origin of the terminology of relationship in social conditions, but should keep each example before an open mind, to guide and stimulate inquiry in a region where ethnologists have till now only scratched the surface covering a rich mine of knowledge. ”

“ Writers on history would not find themselves flatly contradicting ethnologists on the strength of their own gratuitous assumptions, when ethnologists say that the modern English race is largely composed of descendants of the primitive inhabitants. ”

“ They have worked out all their problems, established all their customs, arranged the world and its phenomena in a philosophy to their complete satisfaction. They have lived, ethnologists tell us, for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, just as we find them to-day. ”

“ The history of development of the mental side of anthropology has been quite different from the growth of physical anthropology. While in the latter branch of our science the differences between human types were the first to attract attention, it was the similarity in cultural types found in remote regions which first impressed itself upon ethnologists. A comparison of the descriptions of the customs of primitive peoples the world over brought out analogies in ever-increasing number. These were early correlated with general impressions regarding the degrees of civilization ”

“ Together, they make up the social unit, at first the family or clan, itself becoming part of a larger unit, a tribe, nation or people. The typical folk, or ethnos, is a social unit, the members of which are bound together by certain traits common to all or most, which impart to them a prevailing character, an organic unity, specific peculiarities and general tendencies. ”

“ Reflections such as these teach us how closely the study of ethnographic science is related to practical politics. Ethnography, indeed, is the necessary basis of correct history and sound statesmanship. It offers to history a foundation on natural law; it explains events by showing their dependence on the physical structure, the mental pecularities, and the geographic surroundings of the peoples engaged in them; it presents, in its present pictures of savage life, the condition of the highest nations in the earlier stages of their culture. ”

“ It is assumed as a working principle that each ethnic group has or tends to have an individuality of its own, and, moreover, that the members of such a group think, feel, and act primarily as the representatives, so to speak, of that ethnic individuality in which they live, move, and have their being. That is to say, a social as contrasted with an individual psychology must, it is held, pronounce both the first and last word regarding all matters of mythology, religion, and art in its numerous forms. ”

“ But who are the agents to bring about this grand change in the Negro race? Remember, just here, that all effectual revolutions in a people must be racial in their characteristics. You can't take the essential qualities of one people and transfuse them into the blood of another people, and make them indigenous to them. The primal qualities of a family, a race, a nation are heritable qualities. They abide in their constitution. They remain, notwithstanding the conditions and the changes of rudeness, slavery, civilizations, and enlightenment. ”

“ Because we let the old Indians and their long, long recollections pass into irrevocable silence, we missed the great opportunity. All, however, is not lost, as is shown by what modern ethnologists and anthropologists are finding in their magical penetration of the past. The difficulty of civilizing an Indian has had an advantage in this respect; his unwillingness to assimilate new ways has kept his spirit from being completely deprived of retrospect; it has left a concatenation with the old times that full acceptance of the white man's culture may have destroyed. ”

“ They have died out or amalgamated with others. What I have to argue for is the study of the dead languages of extinct and barbarous tribes.
You will readily see that my arguments must be drawn from other considerations than those of immediate utility. I must seek them in the broader fields of ethnology and philosophy; I must appeal to your interest in man as a race, as a member of a common species, as possessing in all his families and tribes the same mind, the same soul. ”

“ I must still deny that all races are equally endowed, or that the position with reference to civilization which the various ethnic groups hold to-day is one merely of opportunity and externalities. I must still claim that the definition of the ethnos is one of the chief aims of ethnology ”

“ In the study of ethnology we first recognized the more civilized races. The Aryan, Hamites, Shemites, and Chinese, and the rest were the weeds of humanity—the barbarian and savage, sometimes called Turanians. But, when we come carefully to study these lower people, what numbers of races are discovered! ”

“ On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes: while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future. To the investigation of these two great principles in several departments of ethnography, with especial consideration of the civilization of the lower tribes as related to the civilization of the higher nations, the present volumes are devoted. ”

“ Nevertheless, the broad scope of ethnography provides the kind of study for which the data supply a rather full picture of life on this frontier. Political, economic, and social patterns are discernible, although no day-by-day account for any extended period has been uncovered.
This ethnographic analysis demonstrates the merits of the "civilization approach" to history. Examining every aspect of a society, it provides more than a mere "battles and leaders" account. ”

“ Some years since, a question which brings out this point was put to me by a great historian—‘How can a statement as to customs, myths, beliefs, &c., of a savage tribe be treated as evidence where it depends on the testimony of some traveller or missionary, who may be a superficial observer, more or less ignorant of the native language, a careless retailer of unsifted talk, a man prejudiced or even wilfully deceitful?’ This question is, indeed, one which every ethnographer ought to keep clearly and constantly before his mind. ”

“ By definition, ethnography is "the scientific description of nations or races of men, their customs, habits, and differences." [2] Frontier ethnography is the scientific description of the full institutional pattern of a particular group of people, located specifically on a certain frontier, within a certain period of time. That institutional pattern is described from the analysis of data concerning the political and economic systems, and the social structure, including religion, the family, the value system, social classes, art, music, recreation, mythology, and folklore. ”

“ But the characteristics of race and language, which are the most important for ethnology, because they are the most ancient in their origin, are not often alluded to by them, and when the modern sciences of anthropology and ethnology had been established on solid principles many of these southern races had already disappeared or intermingled, and scientific inquiry came too late for their investigation. ”

“ At least five distinct races are, as we know, universally recognized by ethnographers, — namely, the yellow or Asiatic race, the brown or Malays, the copper-colored or American-Indian, the negro or African, and,the Caucasian or white race. ”