168. General Serviceability of the Method
The anthropological facts which have been analyzed and then recombined in the foregoing pages are not presented with the idea that the history of the lowly and fading Californians is of particular intrinsic moment. They have been discussed chiefly as an illustration of method, as one example out of many that might have been chosen. That it was the California Indians who were selected, is partly an accident of the writer’s familiarity with them. The choice seems fair because the problem here undertaken is rather more difficult than many. The Californian cultures were simple. They decayed quickly on contact with civilization. The bulk of historical records go back barely a century and a half. Archæological exploration has been imperfect and yields comparatively meager results. Then, too, the whole Californian culture is only a fragment of American Indian culture, so that the essentially local Californian problems would have been further illuminated by being brought into relation with the facts available from North America as a whole—an aid which has been foregone in favor of compact presentation. In short, the problem was made difficult by its limitations, and yet results have been obtained. Obviously, the same method applied under more favorable circumstances to regions whose culture is richer and more diversified, where documented history projects farther back into the past, where excavation yields nobler monuments and provides them in stratigraphic arrangement, and especially when wider areas are brought into comparison, can result in determinations that are correspondingly more exact, full, and positive.
It is thus clear that cultural anthropology possesses a technique of operation which needs only vigorous, sane, and patient application to be successful. This technique is newer and as yet less refined than those of the mechanical sciences. It is also under the disadvantage of having to accept its materials as they are given in nature; it is impossible to carry cultural facts into the laboratory and conduct experiments on them. Still, it is a method; and its results differ from those of the so-called exact sciences in degree of sharpness rather than in other quality.
It will be noted that throughout this analysis there has been no mention of laws; that at most, principles of method have been recognized—such as the assumption that widely spread culture elements are normally more ancient than locally distributed ones. In this respect cultural anthropology is in a class with political and economic history, and with all the essentially historical sciences such as natural history and geology. The historian rarely enunciates laws, or if he does, he usually means only tendencies. The “laws” of historical zoölogy are essentially laws of physiology; those of geology, laws of physics and chemistry. Even the “laws” of astronomy, when they are not mere formulations of particular occurrences which our narrow outlook on time causes to seem universal, are not really astronomical laws but mechanical and mathematical ones. In other words, anthropology belongs in the group of the historical sciences: those branches of knowledge concerned with things as and how and when they happen, with events as they appear in experience; whereas the group of sciences that formulates laws devotes itself to the inherent and immutable properties of things, irrespective of their place or sequence or occurrence in nature.
Of course, there must be laws underlying culture phenomena. There is no possibility of denying them unless one is ready to remove culture out of the realm of science and set it into the domain of the supernatural. Where can one seek these laws that inhere in culture? Obviously in that which underlies culture itself, namely, the human mind. The laws of anthropological data, like those of history, are then laws of psychology. As regards ultimate explanations for the facts which it discovers, classifies, analyzes, and recombines into orderly reconstructions and significant syntheses, cultural anthropology must look to psychology. The one is concerned with “what” and “how”; the other with “why”; each depends on the other and supplements it.
CHAPTER XIII
THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN NATIVE AMERICA
[169.] Review of the method of culture examination.—[170.] Limitations on the diffusion principle.—[171.] Cultural ranking.—[172.] Cultural abnormalities.—[173.] Environmental considerations.—[174.] Culture-areas.—[175.] Diagrammatic representation of accumulation and diffusion of culture traits.—[176.] Representation showing contemporaneity and narrative representation.—[177.] Racial origin of the American Indians.—[178.] The time of the peopling of America.—[179.] Linguistic diversification.—[180.] The primitive culture of the immigrants.—[181.] The route of entry into the western hemisphere.—[182.] The spread over two continents.—[183.] Emergence of middle American culture: maize.—[184.] Tobacco.—[185.] The sequence of social institutions.—[186.] Rise of political institutions: confederacy and empire.—[187.] Developments in weaving.—[188.] Progress in spinning: cotton.—[189.] Textile clothing.—[190.] Cults: shamanism.—[191.] Crisis rites and initiations.—[192.] Secret societies and masks.—[193.] Priesthood.—[194.] Temples and sacrifice.—[195.] Architecture, sculpture, towns.—[196.] Metallurgy.—[197.] Calendars and astronomy.—[198.] Writing.—[199.] The several provincial developments: Mexico.—[200.] The Andean area.—[201.] Colombia.—[202.] The Tropical Forest.—[203.] Patagonia.—[204.] North America: the Southwest.—[205.] The Southeast.—[206.] The Northern Woodland.—[207.] Plains area.—[208.] The Northwest Coast.—[209.] Northern marginal areas.—[210.] Later Asiatic Influences.