4. Cultural Anthropology
The historical or social sciences overlie the organic ones. Men’s bodies and natural equipment are back of their deeds and accomplishments as transmitted by tradition, primary to their culture or civilization. The relation of anthropology to historical science has therefore been in a sense the opposite of its relation to biological science. Instead of specializing, anthropology has been occupied with trying to generalize the findings of history. Historians cannot experiment. They deal with the concrete, with the unique; for in a degree every historical event has something unparalleled about it. They may paint with a broad sweep, but they do not lay down exact laws.
Moreover, history inevitably begins with an interest in the present and in ourselves. In proportion as it reaches back in time and to wholly foreign peoples, its interest tends to flag and its materials become scant and unreliable. It is commonly considered useful for a man to know that Napoleon was a Corsican and was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, but a rather pedantic piece of knowledge that Shi Hwang-ti was born in northwestern China and unified the rule of China in 221 B.C. From a theoretical or general point of view, however, one of these facts is presumably as important as the other, for if we wish to know the principles that go into the shaping of human social life or civilization, China counts for as much as France, and the ancient past for as much as the nearby present. In fact, the foreign and the old are likely to be inquired into with even more assiduity by the theoretically minded, since they may furnish wholly new clues to insight, whereas the subjects of conventional history have been so familiarized as to hold out less hope of novel conclusions still to be extricated from them.
Here, then, is the cause of the seeming preoccupation of social or cultural anthropology with ancient and savage and exotic and extinct peoples: the desire to understand better all civilizations, irrespective of time and place, in the abstract or in form of generalized principle if possible. It is not that cave men are more illuminating than Romans, or flint knives more interesting than fine porcelains or the art of printing, that has led anthropology to bear so heavily on the former, but the fact that it wanted to know about cave men and flint knives as well as about Romans and printing presses. It would be irrational to prefer the former to the latter, and anthropology has never accepted the adjudication sometimes tacitly rendered that its proper field is the primitive, as such. As well might zoölogy confine its interest to eggs or protozoans. It is probably true that many researches into early and savage history have sprung from an emotional predilection for the forgotten or neglected, the obscure and strange, the unwonted and mysterious. But such occasional personal æsthetic trends can not delimit the range of a science or determine its aims and methods. Innumerable historians have been inveterate gossips. One does not therefore insist that the only proper subject of history is backstairs intimacies.
This, then, is the reason for the special development of those subdivisions of anthropology known as Archæology, “the science of what is old” in the career of humanity, especially as revealed by excavations of the sites of prehistoric occupation; and Ethnology, “the science of peoples,” irrespective of their degree of advancement.[1]