Gens

“ Cultivate them, frequent them, and show a desire of becoming ‘enfant de la maison’. Get acquainted as much as you can with ‘les gens de cour’; and observe, carefully, how politely they can differ, and how civilly they can hate; how easy and idle they can seem in the multiplicity of their business ”

“ The Roman family, gens, or house and tribe, the German benefice, commendation, and guild, the Anglo-Saxon ceorl and eorl castes, with their tithings and hundreds—all these institutions, mingling in the stream of history, made each individual into a part of something other than himself. ”

“ However little we may be interested in the American Indians personally, their experience touches us more nearly, as an exemplification of the experience of our own ancestors. Our primary institutions root themselves in a prior gentile society in which the gens, phratry, and tribe were the organic series, and in which the council of chiefs was the instrument of government. The phenomena of their ancient society must have presented many points in common with that of the Iroquois and other Indian tribes. ”

“ The early stages of these processes in the evolution of man are no less part of anthropology, they are more part of folk-lore, than the study of the evolution of the folk-moot into the County Council, or of the totem-clan into the State. ”

“ What Biography is to Anthropology, History is to Sociology—History, I mean, as commonly conceived. The kind of relation which the sayings and doings, that make up the ordinary account of a man's life, bear to an account of his bodily and mental evolution, structural and functional, is like the kind of relation borne by that narrative of a nation's actions and fortunes its historian gives us, to a description of its institutions, regulative and operative, and the ways in which their structures and functions have gradually established themselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The social masses, the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. ”

“ Through such social processes as these—through unconscious suggestion, through communication and discussion that mould public opinion, through changes in environment and the influence of new leaders of thought and action—the evolution of folk life has carried whole races, sometimes to oblivion, but generally out of savagery and barbarism into a material and cultural civilization. ”

“ In England we are too apt to designate, by the general term “society,” the particular class, clan, or clique in which we ourselves may happen to move, and if that little speck be sufficiently polished, people are generally quite satisfied with what they term “the present state of society;” ”

“ Who does not feel that the high numbers of its dense and far-spread population, amounting perhaps to more than a sixth part of the human family, and the yet unpenetrated veil of mystery which hangs over the origin of the people, and over their actual condition, and even over the geography of the country ”

“ Folk-lore has, in my opinion, most certainly a sociological aspect; it falls, within certain limits, within the sphere of sociology, as will be readily understood if we consider that the term folk signifies people — the human race: that is, man in the aggregate—the collective man, but not man as an individual. ”

“ Our history has traced a steady growth of the social and political units into which men have combined. In the brief period of ten thousand years these units have grown from the small family tribe of the early neolithic culture to the vast united realms—vast yet still too small and partial—of the present time. ”

“ It is clear that here we have that comparatively unimportant element in the life of the early nomad, the medicine-man, the shrine-keeper, and the memorist, developed, with the development of the community and as a part of the development of the community from barbarism to civilized settlement, into something of very much greater importance. ”

“ 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 gentle folk weep, the simple folk are glad, and the people of every town say, 'Come, let us blot out these who have power and possessions among us.' Men resemble the mud-birds, filth is everywhere, and every one is clad in dirty garments. ”

“ Anything connected with the history and vicissitudes of the primitive races of mankind excited his enthusiasm, and he was never tired of inquiring into the languages, the manners, the customs, the dress, the ceremonies, and the movements generally of various branches of the human family, of whom the most obscure were sure to be in his eyes the most interesting. ”

“ Literature, therefore, apparently begins in some countries with the prominence of the individual. But we must remember that this early individualism is something very different from that to which our modern associations are accustomed. The chief of clan or tribe represents his group. Such personifications of the group we are liable to confuse with individual character in the modern sense. ”

“ If I attempt to sum up in one sentence what, so far as I have been able to interpret it, is the chief lesson to be drawn from the past year's work of our Society, and of folk-lore studies generally, I should unhesitatingly affirm it to be the need for formulating the principles of the science of Folk-lore, Once more there is a move forward, and our Society, in this case as in previous departures in the methods of studying folk-lore, takes the lead. ”

“ It is a remarkable fact that the Caucasic division of the human family, of which nearly all students of the subject are members, with which we are in any case, so to say, on the most intimate terms, and with the constituent elements of which we might consequently be supposed to be best acquainted, is the most debatable field in the whole range of anthropological studies. ”

“ It often happens that a folk-story which has been developed in a certain social group gets passed on to another which possesses different habits of life and thought, different social institutions, customs, beliefs, and belongs to a widely divergent level of development. ”

“ I cut it out of the paper afterwards—this is it, word for word:
"You who believe yourselves to be interested in social work, ask yourselves what it is that you are interested in really. I will tell you. Well, whether you know it or not, fundamentally what you care about is PEOPLE. Let us say it in a better way. It is FOLKS."
I never took my eyes off her face after that. For "folks" is a word I know. Better than any other word in the language, I know that word "folks." ”

“ Social habits they may be called, or folk-ways, as some prefer to name them. These habits are quickly learned by the members of the group, and are passed on from generation to generation by imitation or the teaching of tradition. ”

“ Now-a-days we seek to know more of the domestic habits and conditions of the mass of the population, and the degree and kind of intellectual and moral culture which obtained amongst a people at any given period of their history. ”

“ And finally, recognising this initiative among the Folk, and breaking down the distinction between the Folk of the past and of the present, we shall be able to study the lore of the present with happy results, I am sure, for our study of the lore of the past. Survivals are folk-lore, but folk-lore need not be all survivals. We ought to learn valuable hints as to the spread of folk-lore by studying the Folk of to-day. ”

“ If so, I hope they will pass it over without reading. Each individual life is molded by one's ancestry, by the incidents of his childhood, the training he receives in the family and the school and the conditions and surroundings of his early days. ”

“ There are all descriptions and classes in society, all casts and sects, all tribes and associations, all colours, complexions and appearances, not only of human and inhuman beings, but also all shades, features, and conformations of vice. ”

“ As a natural consequence a class was found, apart from household slaves, who took advantage of these defects, and, bringing culture to fascinate unprincipled men, established those relations which brought estragements, if not ruin, into the home life of the day. ”

“ All the marked events of our day, all the cities, all the colonizations, may be traced back to their origin in a private brain. All the feats which make our civility were the thoughts of a few good heads. ”

“ Thus the existing races of mankind may be taken to represent the budding twigs and foliage, each in accordance with the relative superiority of its civilization, appertaining to branches higher and higher placed, upon the great stem of life. ”

“ But here we have it all again, not in parts, but as a comprehensive whole, in a novel which asks us to consider every class in the social ladder in modern England, which questions the whole organisation of our society, which raises central questions about birth, marriage, religion, death, and survival, and presents the whole as a personal and human affair. ”

“ The scope and method of the mores. In the present work the proposition to be maintained is that the folkways are the widest, most fundamental, and most important operation by which the interests of men in groups are served, and that the process by which folkways are made is the chief one to which elementary societal or group phenomena are due. The life of society consists in making folkways and applying them. The science of society might be construed as the study of them. ”

“ Voluntary agents, visible and invisible, impel and govern everything. Moreover this point of view is universal throughout the community,—adopted with equal fervor, and carried out with equal consistency, by the loftiest minds and by the lowest. ”

“ This organization which the pastoral group gets by being at once family and society, and which is gradually perfected by conflict and survival of the fittest, it carries into settled life. But settled life entails multiplication into numerous such groups adjacent to one another ”

“ To such a division of population may be attributed the two dominant characteristics of local history—the total absence of national as distinguished from civic life, and the remarkable development of art, science and literature. ”

“ The class called People (to which you and I, with no little pride, attach ourselves) has certain casual, yet profound, assumptions, which are called "commonplaces," as that children are charming, or that twilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting three is a fine sight. ”

“ Constant Factors in Social Phenomena.—Our study of social life has made it plain that it is a complex affair, but it has been possible to classify society in certain groups, to follow the gradual extension of relations from small groups to large, and to take note of the numerous activities and interests that enter into contemporary group life. ”

“ In an account of the total development of mental life, however—and this is the decisive consideration—the 'folk' is the most important collective concept and the one with which all others are associated. The 'folk' embraces families, classes, clans, and groups. These [Pg 5] various communities are not excluded from the concept 'folk,' but are included within it. The term 'folk psychology' singles out precisely the folk as the decisive factor underlying the fundamental creations of the community. ”

“ We may compare, therefore, the culture of one people with the folk-lore of another, because both are upon the same level of development; or we may pare the different elements of folk-lore or of culture together.
Thus there are two elements in the comparative study of custom and belief—namely, the comparison of like elements in two distinct areas, and the comparison of unlike elements in the same area. ”

“ That branch of anthropology which treats of the actual distribution of the human race in its different divisions, as distinguished by physical character, language, institutions, and customs, in contradistinction to ethnography, which treats historically of the origin and filiation of races and nations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But there is still wanting a full, throughough, and domestic, social account of our English ancestors, that is, a history which shall trace the progress of social life in the intercourse of man with man; the advance of arts, the various changes in the habits and occupations of individuals ”

“ Do social classes tend to assume the character of cultural groups? That is to say, do the classes tend to acquire the exclusiveness and independence of a caste or nationality; or is each class always dependent upon the existence of a corresponding class? ”

“ In this way the individuality and peculiar type of social and literary life of each of the ancient nations of the world were developed simultaneously with, and even as the results of, the individuality and nationality of the other peoples. ”