84. Diet
The greater part of the Southwest is arid. Fish are scarce. The result is that most of the tribes get little opportunity to fish. Most of these Southwestern Indians will not eat fish; in fact, think them poisonous. This circumstance might lead to the following inference: nature does not furnish fish in abundance; therefore the Indians got out of the habit of eating them, and finally came to believe them poisonous. At first blush this may seem a sufficient explanation. But it is well to note that the explanation has two parts and that only one of them has to do with nature: the habit of not eating fish because they are too scarce to make it worth while. As soon as one proceeds to the second step, that the disuse led to aversion and then to a false belief of poisonousness, one has gone on to a different matter. Disuse, aversion, and belief lie wholly within the field of human conduct. To derive a psychological phenomenon, such as a belief, from another psychological phenomenon such as a particular disuse, because this disuse is founded on a geographical factor, would of course be a logical fallacy. It can also be shown not to hold, since we prize caviar and oysters and venison in proportion to their rarity. Scarcity in this case thus leads to the contrary psychological attitude, and either fails to establish beliefs or establishes favorable ones.
Again, either through a change in climate or through the improvement of trade, a food that was scarce may become plentiful. Or a people may remove to a new habitat, different from that in which their customs of eating were formed. If environment alone were the dominating cause of their customs, these customs should then immediately alter. As a fact, a group sometimes adheres to its old customs. The immediate cause of such conservatism is habit or inertia or inclination toward superstition or fear of taboo, all of which are mental reactions expressed in folkways or social customs. Thus environment remains at most a partial and indirectly operating cause.
A case in point is that of the Jews. It is often said that the Jew’s prohibition against eating pork and oysters and lobsters originated in hygienic considerations; that these were climatically unsafe foods for him in Palestine. This explanation is more simple than true. Ancient Palestine was an arid country in which hogs could not be raised with economic profit, and so they were not raised; and the Philistine and Phœnician kept the Jew from the coast along which he might have obtained shellfish. Eating neither food, he happened to acquire a distrust of them; having the distrust, he rationalized it by saying that it was foreign and wicked and irreligious to act counter to his habits—just like the Pueblo Indian; and in the end had the Lord issue the prohibition for him. Yet this outcome is a long way from the starting point of natural environment. The environment may indeed be said to have furnished the first occasion, but the determining causes of the taboos in the Mosaic law are of an entirely different kind—distrust, custom, rationalization, psychological or cultural factors. If doubt remains, it is dispelled by the orthodox Jew of to-day, whose environment thrusts some of his forbidden foods at him as economically and hygienically satisfactory, whereas he still shudders at the thought of tasting them.
If this sort of cultural crystallizing of custom and subsequent rationalizing or ritual sanctioning takes place among civilized and intelligent people, the like must occur among uncivilized tribes.