Yet since they are distinct, it is remarkable that in probably seven or eight tenths of all cases they coincide, and that in each of the continents or areas containing them they are found associated. If exogamy and totemism had grown out of separate roots, one could expect at least one considerable area somewhere in which one of them appeared without the other. But there is no such area. Wherever social exogamy appears among a larger group of nations, social totemism also crops out; and vice versa.
It must then be concluded that exogamy and totemism, matrilineate and patrilineate, multiple and dual sibs, all show a strong tendency toward association with one another. In other words, their correlation is positive and strong. Even where they seem mutually exclusive in their very nature, like matrilinear and patrilinear reckoning, ways have been found by unconscious human ingenuity to make them coexist among one people, as when one reckoning is attached to the exogamy, the other to the totemism; and still more often they occur among adjacent tribes.
111. Parallels and Psychology
Such associations as these are common enough in the history of civilization. A number are touched upon elsewhere in this volume under the name of culture trait associations or complexes (§ [97], [149]). But usually such a complex or nexus consists of culture elements that have no necessary connection: Christianity and trousers, for instance. It is accident that first throws them together; association ties them one to the other; once the cluster is established by usage, its coherence tends to persist. But there is something arbitrary about this cohesion, generally. There is no inherent reason why a hundred American tribes that grow maize should also grow beans and squashes and nothing else; but they do limit themselves to the three. The distinctive feature of the sib-complex is that it has an almost reasonable quality. Its elements, however separate or even opposite logically, do have a certain psychological affinity to one another. Also, the arbitrary maize-beans-squash complex and other complexes are generally not duplicated. But the intricate and psychologically founded totemism-exogamy-descent complex looks as if it might have been triplicated or quadruplicated. This parallelism, if the facts prove to substantiate it, is parallelism raised to a higher power than any yet considered. Heretofore the discussion has been of the parallelism of single culture traits. Here it is a case of parallelism of a complex of culture traits. Such complex convergence might suggest something peculiar to or inherent in the human mind, leading it, once it is stimulated to commence the development of one of the factors of the complex, to follow with the production of the other factors.[20]
Similar instances would be the tendency of agriculture to be followed by town life, if it could be demonstrated, though this seems doubtful; of settled living to be accompanied by migration legends; of religions with personal founders to become propagandizing and international but in time to die out among the nations in which they were originated.
In regard to all such cases it may be said first of all that an exhaustive analysis is necessary to ascertain whether the seeming association or correlation is borne out by the facts. Second, the possibility of diffusion must be eliminated. If Melanesian and African totem-exogamy are both products of one culture growth, they cannot be counted as two examples of the same association. If they should ultimately both prove to be linked with the American system by a wave of migration or culture contact, as has, indeed been maintained in two separate hypotheses recently advanced, parallelism is of course disproved altogether. But such views are as yet undemonstrated and seem extreme; and if, after continued search of the evidence, two or more such associations or complex parallels as the exogamic-totemic scheme of society stand as independent growths, it is evident that they will be something in the nature of cultural manifestations of psychological forces. In short, we should then be beginning to grasp specific psychological determinants for the phenomena or events of civilization. But as yet such a causal explanation of the data of anthropology by the mechanism of psychology has not been achieved.
112. Limitations on the Principle
From the evidences reviewed in this and the last chapter, the conclusion is confirmed which social philosophers had long since reached, that imitation is the normal process by which men live, and that invention is rare, a thing which societies and individuals oppose with more resistance than they are ever aware of, and which probably occurs only as the result of the pressure of special circumstances, although these are as yet little understood. Not only are a hundred instances of diffusion historically traceable for every one of parallelism, but the latter is regularly limited in scope. Something tends to make us see phenomena more parallel than they actually are. They merely spring from the same impulse, they inhere in the properties of objects or nature, they bear resemblance at one point only—and differ at all other points. Yet they tend to impress us, in some mysterious way, as almost identical. The history of civilization has no more produced two like cultures, or two separately developed identical culture traits, than has the evolution of organic life ever duplicated a species by convergently modifying two distinct forms. A whale may look fishlike, he is a mammal. The Hindu and the Maya zero are logically the same; actually they have in common nothing but their abstract value: their shapes, their place in their systems, are different. The most frequent process of culture history therefore is one of tradition or diffusion in time and space, corresponding roughly to hereditary transmission in the field of organic life. Inventions may be thought of as similar to organic mutations, those “spontaneous” variations that from time to time arise and establish themselves. The particular causes of both inventions and mutations remain as good as unknown. Now and then a mutant or an invention heads in the same direction as another previously arisen one. But, since they spring from different antecedents, such convergences never attain identity. They remain on the level of analogous resemblance. Substantial identity, a part for part correspondence, is invariably a sign of common origin, in cultural as well as organic history.