In all this story, what has become of natural environment and heredity? They have dropped from sight. We have been able to build up a reasonable and probably reliable reconstruction of the course of development of civilization in an area without reference to these two sets of factors. The reconstruction is in terms of culture. Evidently environment and heredity are in the main superfluous. They need not be brought in; are likely to be confusing, to diminish the internal consistency of the findings attained, if they are brought in. This is true in general, not only of the instance chosen. By using environment or heredity, one can often seem to explain certain selected features of a culture, but the appearance is illusory, because one need only be impartial to realize that one can never explain in this way the whole of any culture. When, however, the explanation can be made in terms of culture—always of course on the basis of a sufficient knowledge and digestion of facts—it applies increasingly to the whole of a civilization, and each portion explained helps to explain better all other portions. The cultural interpretation of culture is therefore progressive, and ever more productive, whereas the environmental and the biological-hereditary interpretation fail in proportion as they are pushed farther; in fact can be kept going only by ignoring larger and larger masses of fact to which they do not apply.
Historians, who may be described as anthropologists whose work is made easy for them by the possession of written and dated records, have tacitly recognized this situation. They may now and then attribute some event or condition of civilization to an inherent quality of a race, or to an influence of climate or soil or sea. But this is mostly in their introductory chapters. When they really get to grips with their subject, they explain in terms of human thought and action, in other words, of culture. It is true that they dwell more on personalities than anthropologists do. But that is because the materials left them by former historians are full of personalities and anecdotes. And on the other hand, anthropological data are usually unduly deficient in the personal element; they consist of descriptions of customs, tools used by long forgotten individuals, and the like. If anthropologists were able to recover knowledge of the particular Pueblo woman who first painted a third color or a glaze on a bowl, or of the priest who first instituted a masked dance in order to make rain, we may be confident that they would discuss these individuals. And such knowledge would throw more light on the history of Southwestern pottery and religion and culture generally than any amount of emphasis on the number of inches of rainfall per year, or the pulse rate or similar hypothetical and remote causes.
CHAPTER VIII
DIFFUSION
[89.] The couvade.—[90.] Proverbs.—[91.] Geographic distribution.—[92.] The magic flight.—[93.] Flood legends.—[94.] The double-headed eagle.—[95.] The Zodiac.—[96.] Measures.—[97.] Divination.—[98.] Tobacco.—[99.] Migrations.
89. The Couvade
The couvade is a custom to which the peasants of the Pyrenees adhered until a century or two ago. When a couple had a child, the wife got up and went about her daily work as well as she might, while the husband went to bed to lie-in in state and receive the visits of the neighbors. This was thought to be for the good of the baby.
The same custom is found among the Indians of Brazil. They believe that a violation of the custom would bring sickness or ill luck upon the child. They look upon the child as something new and delicate, a being requiring not only physical nurture but the superadded protection of this religious or magical practice.
The Basques of the Pyrenees and the Indians of Brazil are of different race, separate origins, and without any known historical contacts. The substantial identity of the custom among them therefore long ago led to its being explained as the result of the cropping out of an instinctive impulse of the human mind. Tylor, for instance, held that whenever a branch of humanity reached a certain hypothetical stage of development, namely, that phase in which the reckoning of descent from the mother began to transform into reckoning of descent from the father, the couvade tended to appear spontaneously as a natural accompaniment. The Basque peasants, of course, are a more advanced people than the cannibalistic Brazilian natives. But they are an old and a conservative people who have long lived in comparative isolation in their mountainous district; and thus, it might be argued, they retained the custom of the couvade as a survival from the earlier transitional condition.
According to this method of explanation, the occurrence of almost any custom, art, or belief among widely separated and unrelated peoples is likely to be the result of the similar working of the human mind under similar conditions. The cause of cultural identities and resemblances, especially among primitive or “nature” peoples, is not to be sought primarily in historical factors, such as common origin, migrations, the propaganda of religion, or the gradual diffusion of an idea, but is to be looked for in something inherent in humanity itself, in inborn psychological tendencies. This explanation is that of “Independent Evolution.” It is also known as the doctrine of “Elementary Ideas.”