Nascent Industrial Development
Industries form the chief bond between man and his environment. The esthetic activities arise in the individual and extend to his fellows; the institutional activities express the relations among individual men and groups; the linguistic activities serve to extend social relations in space and time, and the sophic activities to integrate and perpetuate all relations; but it is through the industrial activities that human intelligence interacts with physical nature and makes conquest of the material world. Accordingly, industries act as a steady and never-ceasing stimulus to intelligence; accordingly, too, the industrial activities afford the simplest and surest measure of intellectual advancement.
Under this view of the place of industrial activities in human phylogeny, certain phases of Seri technology acquire importance and especial significance.
1. One of the most conspicuous features of Seri craft is its local character. The foodstuffs, the materials for appareling and habitations, and the substances utilized in the several lines of simple handicraft are essentially local; moreover, the characteristic methods and devices evidently reflect local environmental conditions. There are, indeed, a few phenomena suggesting, and a still less number demonstrating, extraneous origin; the balsa and the kilt are sufficiently similar to devices of other districts to suggest, though not to prove, genetic identity (indeed, the sum of indications of local origin is much weightier than the several suggestions of extraneous derivation); the iron harpoon-points and arrow-tips are mainly of local flotsam, and are essentially provincial in modes of employment; the chipped stone arrow-tips, though local in material, are foreign in motive; but on summarizing the industrial phenomena, it would appear that by far the greater share are essentially local, while the few of exceptional (and extraneous) character can be pretty definitely traced to importation through the social interactions of recent centuries.
2. An equally conspicuous feature of the industrial craft of the Seri is the dominance of chance in both processes and devices. The traditional “fisherman’s luck” is made exceptionally uncertain by the sudden gales and shifting currents of Seriland shores, while the absolute necessaries of life on land are still more capricious than those alongshore; this uncertainty of resources has profoundly affected the somatic features of the tribesman, as indicated elsewhere (ante, p. 159); and that the mental attributes of the folk are even more profoundly affected is attested by the role played by chance in the selection and shapement of the prevailing tools of stone and shell. The large role of chance in Seri life is also revealed, though less directly, in the overweening mysticism of zootheistic faith, with its material reflection in zoomimic craft.
3. When the local and fortuitous features of the Seri industries are juxtaposed they are found to express a notably inchoate or primitive stage of industrial development. In both the local and the fortuitous or accidental aspects, the activities are so closely adjusted to the immediate environment as to approach the instinctive agencies and movements of bestial life, and correspondingly to diverge from the composite and cosmopolite characters of higher humanity; the dearth of extraneous devices denotes absence or intolerance of that accultural interchange accompanying and marking the progress of peoples; and the dearth of inventions denotes feebleness of creative faculty and absence of that self-confidence which accompanies and measures progress in nature-conquest.
4. When the local and fortuitous features of the Seri craft are viewed in their serial or sequential relations, they are found to reflect and attest autochthonal development. Excepting the few accultural processes and devices whose acquisition may confidently be traced to certain social interactions of the historic period, the Seri technic is too closely tied to local environment to warrant any supposition of importation from other districts. The question of the birthplace of the people may be left open in this case as in every other; but the birthplace of practically all those activities and activital products which define the folk as human was manifestly Seriland itself—so that the tribe, considered as a human folk rather than as a zoic variety, must be classed as autochthonous.
Summarily, then, the Seri industries are significant as (1) local, (2) fortuitous, (3) primitive, and (4) autochthonous; and these features combine to illumine a noteworthy stage in primitive thought.
5. On juxtaposing these significant features of Seri technic, they are found to reflect the tribal mind with noteworthy fidelity, and hence to indicate the sources of Seri mentations, and of the local culture in which these mentations are integrated. The local foodstuffs—especially that vital standard of values in arid regions, water—are periodic sources of the strongest aspirations and inspirations of industrial life, and the methods and devices for food-getting are but the legitimate offspring of the inevitable relation between effort and environment; the conspicuous role of chance is but the composite of the hard and capricious environment on the one hand, and of the lowly thought reflecting that environment on the other hand; the zoic faith into which the magma of recurrent chance has semicrystallized finds carnate symbols either in local beasts or in fantastic monsters suggested by those beasts; even the mating instinct, second only to thirst among the impelling action-factors of the folk, is so profoundly and bitterly provincial as to exclude foreign ideals to a degree unparalleled among known peoples. The industrial materials are local—but not more local than the thoughts in which they are reflected; the technical methods are unmistakably the offspring of the environment—but they are equally the offspring of minds reflecting that environment and no other; the few and simple devices stand for integrations of experiences, instinctive rather than ratiocinative, the germ of invention rather than even its opening bud—but the experiences bear the marks of that environment and no other. Accordingly, the mental side of Seri industry, and, indeed, of all Seri life, appears to be the counterpart of the physical side. The Seri mind is (1) local, (2) chance-dominated, (3) exceeding lowly, and especially (4) autochthonal in its content and workings.
There is an aspect of the inference as to the local and autochthonal character of the Seri mind which is of wide-reaching application. As indicated by many tribes, though most clearly by the Seri, there is a definite relation between the somatic characteristics of primitive folk and their environment; the indications are that the relation is inversely proportionate to development, the lowliest tribes reflecting environment most closely, and the higher peoples responding less delicately to the environmental pressure in the ratio of their increased power of nature-conquest; and the relation is essentially phylogenetic, in that it sums and integrates the innumerable interactions between organic kind and environment during generations or ages. It is to be realized that the relation is not simple and direct or physiologic merely (e. g., like that between climate and the pelage of an animal), but that it is linked through the human activities; for, as is conspicuously the case in Seriland, the environment prompts exercises of particular kinds, and it is these exercises that shape the somatic features, such as strength of lung, length of limb, and the soundness of constitution displayed in physical endurance; yet the relation is none the less real, in that it operates through the activities rather than directly. The relation may be characterized with respect to mechanism as bodily responsion, or with respect to capacity as responsivity of body. Now, as is well illustrated by the provincial ideation of the Seri, the relation between environment and physique is accompanied by a corresponding relation between environment and thought. This relation, too, varies inversely with development, the connection being closest among the most primitive tribes, and growing less and less close with maturing mentality and proportionately increasing power of nature-contest; and the relation is still less direct (or physiologic merely) than that between the human body and its environment, in that not only the bodily activities but the instinctive and nascently ratiocinative processes are interposed. This relation between mind and environment may be characterized as mental responsion in its mechanical aspect, or as responsivity of mind when regarded as a psychic property.[312] Accordingly, the relation between the tribal mind and its environment, as illumined by the peculiarly delicate interactions observed among the Seri, seem to indicate the genesis and earlier developmental stages of mentality in its multifarious aspects.
The specially significant feature of the relation between environment on the one hand and body + mind on the other is its diminishing value with general intellectual advancement. Viewed serially, the relation may be considered to begin in the animal realm with organisms adapted to environment through physiologic processes, and to end in that realm of enlightened humanity in which mind molds environment through complete nature-conquest. In the serial scale so defined the various primitive tribes and more advanced peoples may be arranged in the order of mental power or culture-status; when the same arrangement will express in inverse order the relative closeness with which the several tribal minds reflect their environments. It follows that the lowly minds and craft of the Seri reflect their distinctive environment with exceeding, perhaps unparalleled, closeness, because of their very lowliness; it follows, too, that any other equally lowly folk imported into the region and perfectly wonted to it by generations of experience would equally reflect the physical features of the region in their craft and in their thinking; it follows, also, that if the Seri were transported into any other district of equally distinctive physical features, they would gradually adapt themselves to the new environment—though with some added intelligence, and hence with diminished closeness, as is the way of demotic development—in such manner that their craft and thinking would reflect its features. In a more general way it follows that those similarities in culture, or activital coincidences, which have impressed the ethnologic students of the world (notably Powell and Brinton), are normal and inevitable in primitive culture and of diminishing prominence with cultural advancement.