150. Regional Variation of Culture
As one first becomes acquainted with a totally strange people spread over a large area, such as the Indians of North America, they are likely to seem rather uniform. The distinctions between individual and individual, and even the greater distinctions between one group and another, become buried under the overwhelming mass-effect of their difference from ourselves. Growing familiarity, however, renders individual, local, and tribal peculiarities plainer. The specialist, finally, comes to concern himself with particular traits until the peculiarities occupy more of his attention than the uniformities. His danger always is to let himself get into the habit of taking sweeping similarities so much for granted that he ends by underemphasizing or forgetting them. At the same time his business is to add something new to human understanding—facts at any rate, interpretation if possible. Generalities are likely to be pretty widely known, and progress, new formulations, therefore depend ultimately on mastery of detail. This means that if a scientist is to contribute anything to the world’s comprehension, is to add a new mental tool to its chest, he must devote himself to specific traits, to discriminations of fine detail. It is only by finding new trees that he helps to make the woods larger.
If then we approach a race like the American Indians with the scientist’s or student’s purpose of discovering something more than we already know, we quickly find that institutions, customs, and utensils, in other words the cultures, vary from tribe to tribe. When one compares tribes living so far apart as to be no longer united in intercourse, nor even by communication with common intermediaries, there is scarcely a trait in which their cultures are wholly identical. Within a limited district a fair degree of uniformity is found to prevail. Yet when the boundaries of such an area are crossed, a new type of culture begins to be encountered, which again holds with local variations until a third district is entered.