111. Parallels and Psychology
Such associations as these are common enough in the history of civilization. A number are touched upon elsewhere in this volume under the name of culture trait associations or complexes (§ [97], [149]). But usually such a complex or nexus consists of culture elements that have no necessary connection: Christianity and trousers, for instance. It is accident that first throws them together; association ties them one to the other; once the cluster is established by usage, its coherence tends to persist. But there is something arbitrary about this cohesion, generally. There is no inherent reason why a hundred American tribes that grow maize should also grow beans and squashes and nothing else; but they do limit themselves to the three. The distinctive feature of the sib-complex is that it has an almost reasonable quality. Its elements, however separate or even opposite logically, do have a certain psychological affinity to one another. Also, the arbitrary maize-beans-squash complex and other complexes are generally not duplicated. But the intricate and psychologically founded totemism-exogamy-descent complex looks as if it might have been triplicated or quadruplicated. This parallelism, if the facts prove to substantiate it, is parallelism raised to a higher power than any yet considered. Heretofore the discussion has been of the parallelism of single culture traits. Here it is a case of parallelism of a complex of culture traits. Such complex convergence might suggest something peculiar to or inherent in the human mind, leading it, once it is stimulated to commence the development of one of the factors of the complex, to follow with the production of the other factors.[20]
Similar instances would be the tendency of agriculture to be followed by town life, if it could be demonstrated, though this seems doubtful; of settled living to be accompanied by migration legends; of religions with personal founders to become propagandizing and international but in time to die out among the nations in which they were originated.
In regard to all such cases it may be said first of all that an exhaustive analysis is necessary to ascertain whether the seeming association or correlation is borne out by the facts. Second, the possibility of diffusion must be eliminated. If Melanesian and African totem-exogamy are both products of one culture growth, they cannot be counted as two examples of the same association. If they should ultimately both prove to be linked with the American system by a wave of migration or culture contact, as has, indeed been maintained in two separate hypotheses recently advanced, parallelism is of course disproved altogether. But such views are as yet undemonstrated and seem extreme; and if, after continued search of the evidence, two or more such associations or complex parallels as the exogamic-totemic scheme of society stand as independent growths, it is evident that they will be something in the nature of cultural manifestations of psychological forces. In short, we should then be beginning to grasp specific psychological determinants for the phenomena or events of civilization. But as yet such a causal explanation of the data of anthropology by the mechanism of psychology has not been achieved.