Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

171. Cultural Ranking

Consideration must also be allowed, within certain limits, to cultural superiority and inferiority. This is a criterion that has been abused in the earlier anthropology, but it is usable with caution, especially where a measure of experience confirms the grading that seems rational. A machine process would normally be later than a manual one: cloth, for instance, subsequent to basketry. The antiquity of both these products happens to be so great that little or no direct historical evidence exists, and their perishability precludes much help from archæology. Yet there is this indirect evidence: there are peoples that make baskets only, others that make baskets and cloth, none that make cloth only. Cloth thus is something superadded, which, not coming into competition of utility with basketry, coexists with it.

Where two devices serve the same end and come into full contact, the issue is even simpler, because the better crowds out the worse. There is no record of any people, once able to produce metal axes or knives, reverting to or inventing stone ones. An adequate system of recording events has always maintained itself. Literacy may have become less frequent, now and then, under economic or military stress, and literature poorer, but no recording culture has ever gone back wholly to oral tradition. Specific systems of records have indeed died out—witness Egyptian and Cuneiform: but only because they were rendered useless by more efficient systems of pure phonetic writing. These, on the other hand, have never been known to yield to non-phonetic systems.

It is very different with culture phenomena whose ranking is based solely on the operation of our imaginations. In such cases judgment should if possible be wholly suspended until evidence is available. For fifty or sixty years it has seemed eminently plausible and natural, even inevitable to most people, that matrilinear institutions preceded patrilinear ones, because a man must know his mother, but in a condition of promiscuity would not know his father. Yet incontrovertible historical evidence of a change is conspicuously deficient, so that the belief in the antecedence of the matrilineate has remained founded solely in hypothesis. As has been indicated above (§ [110]) and will be shown more in detail below (§ [185]), the indirect evidence of distribution indicates rather that definitely matrilinear and patrilinear institutions have tended to be closely associated, and that among exogamous and totemic peoples the matrilineate has usually been the later phase.

In fact, one important stimulus to belief in matrilineal priority has been the awareness that the most advanced cultures of the recent period have inclined to count descent from the father. But it is obviously unfounded to deduce from this that ancient and primitive nations favored mother-reckoning. It would be equally logical—or illogical—to infer that what is had always been since institutions arose, as to argue that because a thing is now it must formerly not have been.

This points to a further limiting consideration: that it is dangerous to argue from a fraction of culture history to the whole. Particularly dangerous is it to infer from the last four centuries to all that went before. In the present era distant communications have become infinitely more numerous and rapid. Space has in one sense been almost abolished. Diffusions that now encircle the planet in a hundred years would in previous ages often have required a thousand to cross a continent by halting steps from people to people.

Similarly, the results of the diffusion principle may be vitiated by an arbitrary bounding of the spatial field of investigation. A review of African distributions by themselves, for instance, would lead to many misleading conclusions, because it is obvious that African culture has evolved not integrally but as a part of the larger complex Europe-Asia-Africa. What from the angle of Africa thus appears central, like iron, may really be peripheral; what appears marginal, like Islam, is often actually central. By comparison America is so discrete from the Old World, both geographically and historically, that an analogous attempt is far more justifiable. Yet even here, as will appear, some influences from the Old World have operated, whose a priori elimination would lead to false conclusions.

As regards what is high and low, whole cultures as well as culture elements must be considered. Between two civilizations, it is fair to assume that the more advanced will normally radiate, the retarded one absorb. It is known that the drift of diffusion was from western Asia to Greece in 800 B.C., from Greece to western Asia in 300 B.C. In the case of a still unexplained trait common to the two areas and limited to them, the presumption of origin would thus lie in one or the other tract according to whether its appearance fell in the period of Asiatic or Greek culture domination. So in America, loom weaving is shared by Mexicans and Pueblos. If nothing else were known of them except that the former but not the latter had passed from oral tradition to visible records, there would be justification for belief in the probability of importation of the loom from Mexico into the adjacent Southwest. Since this one item of Mexican superiority is reinforced by the facts that the Mexicans cultivated a dozen plants to the Pueblos’ three; that they were expert in several metallurgical processes and the Pueblos at best, and rarely, hammered native copper; that the Mexicans alone carried on elaborate astronomical observations, computed with large figures, and had established an intercommunal dominion, the probability of their priority in loom weaving becomes so strong as to serve as a fairly reliable working basis. Still, it is important to remember that in the absence of the direct testimony of history or archæology such a probability does not become a certainty. The Greeks were without writing, metal working, successful astronomy, or empire while these already flourished in Egypt and Asia and were later carried to Greece. Yet in this general period the Greeks developed metrical poetry and vowel signs for the alphabet.

Another limitation to the regularity of the diffusion process is to be found in the inability or unreadiness of undeveloped culture to accept specialized products of more advanced civilizations; and of any culture to accept traits incompatible with its existing customs, except on severe or long continued pressure. A backward tribe might adopt a simple iron-working technique quite avidly, yet find the manufacture of sewing machines beyond its endeavors and wants. Among a people owning little property and no money and therefore not in the habit of counting, and indifferent to their ages or the lapse of time as expressed in numbers of years and days, a calendar system like that of the Babylonians or Mayas would certainly not become established merely because of contact. They might adopt and make use of the knowledge that there are some twelve moons in the round of the seasons, and that the solstices furnish convenient starting points for the count within each year. But generations and centuries of gradual preparation through acceptance of such elementary fragments of the elaborate calendrical scheme would ordinarily precede their ability to take the latter over in completeness. So with a religion like Christianity or Buddhism carried by a lone missionary, or shipwrecked sailors, to a people as simple in their life as the Indians of California. The religion would be too abstract, too remote, too dependent on unintelligible preconceptions, to be embraced. A particular Christian or Buddhist trait, say a symbol like the swastika or cross, might conceivably be taken over and perpetuated as a decorative motive or as a magical charm. True, if the missionary came in the company of troops and settlers, and introduced cattle, regular meals, comfortable clothing, intertribal peace, new occupations and diversions, the old simple culture would often crumble rapidly, and the higher religion be adopted as part of the larger change, as indeed happened in California when the Franciscans entered it. But one would not argue from the convertibility of the Indians under such circumstances to their equal readiness to accept Buddhism from sporadic East Asiatic castaways.