Culture & Ethnology

CULTURE & ETHNOLOGY
BY Robert H. Lowie, Ph.D. Associate Curator, Anthropology American Museum of Natural History NEW YORK DOUGLAS C. McMURTRIE 1917



This booklet is an attempt at popularization. The first four chapters are practically identical with as many lectures, delivered in 1917 as the January course offered by the Department of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History. The purpose of the January series, which was instituted in 1914 by Dr. P. E. Goddard and the writer, is to acquaint an audience of intelligent laymen with some of the results of modern ethnological work, the emphasis being on principles and problems, rather than on purely descriptive detail. The course, in short, occupies an intermediate position between technical discourses addressed to scientists and the more popular lectures which are designed to furnish mainly entertainment. Each year different topics have been chosen and several members of the staff have cooperated. Owing to the dearth of recent ethnological literature reflecting the position of American field-workers, and at the same time accessible to the interested outsider, I was easily persuaded to issue the 1917 lectures in the present form.
The last chapter may not seem to fit within the scope of this publication. It is obviously more technical than the rest in treatment and may appear to deal with too special a topic. My object, however, was to conclude with a concrete illustration of ethnological method, and I naturally selected a subject to which I had paid considerable attention during the last two years. It is a subject in which Morgan was able to arouse the interest of hundreds of laymen; and I can see no reason why an up-to-date exposition of the problems involved should not be able to hold their attention.
Robert H. Lowie
May, 1917

With the beginning of the European war the word ‘culture’ acquired a sense in popular English usage which had long prevailed in ethnological literature. Culture is, indeed, the sole and exclusive subject-matter of ethnology, as consciousness is the subject-matter of psychology, life of biology, electricity of a branch of physics. Culture shares with these other fundamental concepts the peculiarity that it can be properly understood only by an enlarged familiarity with the facts it summarizes. There is no royal shortcut to a comprehension of culture as a whole by definition any more than to a comprehension of consciousness; but as every analysis and explanation of particular conscious states adds to our knowledge of what consciousness is, so every explanation of particular cultural phenomena adds to our insight into the nature of culture. We must, however, start with some proximate notion of what we are to discuss, and for this purpose Tylor’s definition in the opening sentence of his Primitive Culture will do as well as any: “Culture ... is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”