86. Cultural Factors
Such cultural causes constitute the third set or kind of factors by which civilization is explainable. If the example just discussed is representative, it is clear that cultural factors ordinarily interpret more phenomena of civilization, and interpret them more fully, than factors either of racial heredity or physical environment.
It is different in zoölogy and botany. The forms and behavior of animals and plants are explainable in terms of heredity and environment because animals and plants have no culture. It is true that the forms and behavior are determined also by other animals and plants, their characteristics, habits, and abundance, but these factors are in a larger sense part of the environment. They are at any rate sub-cultural. But since anthropology deals with beings whose distinctive trait in social relations is the possession of the thing that we call culture, the factors which biology employs are insufficient. It is not that heredity and natural environment fail to apply to man, but that they apply only indirectly and remotely to his civilization. This fundamental fact has often been overlooked, especially in modern times, because the biological sciences having achieved successful increases of knowledge and understanding, the temptation was great to borrow their method outright and apply it without serious modification to the human material of anthropology. This procedure simplified the situation, but yielded inadequate and illusory results. For a very long time the idea that man possessed and animals lacked a soul influenced people’s thought to such a degree that they scarcely thought of human beings in terms of biological causality, of heredity and environment. Then when a reaction began to set in, less than two centuries ago, and it became more generally recognized that man was an animal, the pendulum swung to the other extreme and the tendency grew of seeing in him only the animal, the cultureless being, and of either ignoring his culture or thinking that it could be explained away by resolving it into the factors familiar from biology. The just and wise course lies between. The biological aspects of man must be interpreted in terms of biological causation, his cultural aspects in terms first of all of cultural causation. After they have been thus resolved, the cultural causes may reduce to ultimate factors of heredity and natural environment.
87. Cultural Distribution
The Southwest also provides an example of how cultural phenomena can be seen to be arranged geographically so as to yield a meaning or to outline their history, without reference to climate or natural influences. Near the center of the area, in northern New Mexico and Arizona, live four groups of Pueblo or town building Indians—the Hopi, Zuñi, Keres, and Tewa or Tano—who represent a sort of élite of the native culture. They farm, make pottery, accumulate wealth in turquoise, are governed by priests, worship under a remarkably complex set of rituals, which involve altars, masks, symbols of all sorts, and a rude sort of philosophy.
As one goes from the Pueblo center to the less settled tribes, one encounters first the Navaho, who are earth hut builders and farm but little, yet share much of the Pueblo elaborateness of ritual, including altars, masks, and symbols. A little farther out, among the Apache and Pima, the cults have perceptibly diminished in intricacy and symbolic value: altars and masks are lacking.
The simplification increases among the more remote Mohave, whose cults are based on dreams instead of priestly tradition. Still farther, on the shores of the Pacific among the Luiseño and Gabrielino, some Pueblo traits can still be found; cult altars and pottery, for instance. But agriculture, homes of stone, turquoise, priests, and the majority of Pueblo institutions are unknown. Finally, still farther away in central California, the Yokuts now and then show a culture trait reminiscent of the Pueblos: grooved arrow straighteners, perhaps, or occasional rudely made pottery vessels. These are suggestive bits; fragments that have been whittled away or toned down. Pueblo culture as a whole has vanished at this distance. In its place the Yokuts possess quite different arts and institutions and beliefs.
What is the significance of this gradual fading away of one type of civilization and its replacement by others? Evidently that certain influences have radiated out from the higher Pueblo center, and that the effect of these has diminished in proportion to the number of tribes they have passed through. The Pueblos have succeeded in handing over the largest share of their civilization to the adjacent Navaho—and no doubt also received most from them. The Apache being more remote, were less affected; and so on to the farthest limits of the influences.
It is also clear that a time element is involved. A people receiving an art from another obviously acquires this later than the inventors. Most traits which the central Pueblos share with peripheral tribes may be assumed to have existed longer among the Pueblos, simply because they possess more traits in their culture and the flow has prevailingly been out from them. Thus they make uncolored, two-colored, and three-colored pottery; the tribes on the margin of the Southwest, uncolored pottery only; those beyond the range of immediate Southwestern influence, no pottery at all. Unless therefore there should be special reasons suggestive of a degenerative loss of the art among the marginal tribes—and no such reasons are known—the conclusion is forced that Southwestern pottery was first made by the ancestors of the Pueblos or their predecessors in the central part of the area, presumably as plain ware, and that thence knowledge of the art was gradually carried outward. However while simple pottery making was thus being taken up by the tribes nearest to the Pueblo district, the Pueblos were going ahead and learning to ornament vessels with painted designs. In time this added art also spread to the neighbors, but meanwhile these had passed knowledge of the first stage on to the tribes still farther out than themselves; and meanwhile also the Pueblos had perhaps gone on to a third stage, that of combining colors in their decoration.