Anthropology

by Franz Boas

Researches on art have led to similar results. Investigators have endeavored to show, that, since the cave-dwellers of France drew the outlines of the reindeer and mammoth on bone and antler, man has tried to reproduce in pictographic design the animals of the region in which he lived. In the artistic productions of many people, designs have been found which are readily associated with pictographic presentations, which, however, have lost their realism of form, and have become more and more conventional; so that in many cases a purely decorative motive has been interpreted as developed from a realistic pictograph, gradually breaking up under the stress of esthetic motives. The islands of the Pacific Ocean, New Guinea, South America, Central America, prehistoric Europe, have furnished examples for this line of development, which therefore was recognized as one of the important tendencies of the evolution of human decorative art, which was described as beginning with realism, and as leading through symbolic conventionalism to purely esthetic motives.

Religion has furnished another example of typical evolution in human thought. At an early time man began to think and ponder about the phenomena of nature. Everything appeared to him in an anthropomorphic form of thought; and thus the first primitive concepts regarding the world came into being, in which the stone, the mountain, the heavenly orbs, were viewed as animate anthropomorphic beings endowed with will-power, and willing to help man or threatening to endanger him. The observation of the activities of man’s own body and of his mind led to the formulation of the idea of a soul independent from the body; and with increasing knowledge and with increasing philosophic thought, religion and science grew out of these simple beginnings.

The sameness of all these phenomena in different parts of the world has been considered as proof not only of the fundamental unity of the mind of all the races of man, but also of the truth of the theory of evolution of civilization; and thus a grand structure has been reared, in which we see our present civilization as the necessary outcome of the activities of all the races of man, that have risen in one grand procession, from the simplest beginnings of culture, through periods of barbarism, to the stage of civilization that they now occupy. The march has not been equally rapid; for some are still lagging behind, while others have forged forward, and occupy the first places in the general advance.

While this evolutionary aspect has occupied the centre of attention for a long time, another view of the field of the phenomena of ethnology was defended by Bastian,—a view which makes its influence felt ever more deeply as time goes on. The sameness of the forms of thought found in regions wide apart appeared to Bastian as a proof of the unity of the human mind, but it also suggested to him that the forms of thought follow certain definite types, no matter in what surroundings man may live, and what may be his social and historical relations. In the varieties of thought found among peoples of distant areas he saw the influence of geographical and social environment upon these fundamental forms of thought, which were called by him elementary ideas. Bastian’s theory of the permanence of forms of thought is related to Dilthey’s conception of the limitation of possible types of philosophy; and the similarity of the line of thoughts of these two men appears also clearly in Bastian’s constant references to the theories of philosophers as compared to the views held by primitive man. From Bastian’s view-point the question of a single or multiple type of evolution of civilization appeared irrelevant. The important phenomenon in his mind was the fundamental sameness of forms of human thought in all forms of culture, no matter whether they were advanced or primitive.

In the views as propounded by him, a certain kind of mysticism may be recognized, in so far as the elementary ideas are to his mind intangible entities. No further thought can possibly unravel their origin, because we ourselves are compelled to think in the forms of these elementary ideas.

In a way the evolutionists and Bastian represent thus, the former the historical point of view, the latter a psychological point of view, in the field of ethnology. More recent discussions have taken up both threads of investigation, and both views are slowly undergoing a number of radical changes.

With increasing knowledge of the data of anthropology, the forms of society, of religion, of art, and the development of invention, do not seem quite so simple as they appeared to earlier investigators. Attempts were made to fit the hypothetical typical evolution of mankind to the historical development of culture in different parts of the world, so far as it had been reconstructed. Thus an opportunity was given to examine the correctness of the accepted theory. As soon as this was done, peculiar difficulties developed, which showed that the theory was hardly ever applicable to specific cases, and that the actual development, as it was traced by historical reconstruction, differed considerably from the theory. From this investigation has developed an entirely new view regarding the relation of different races. We begin to recognize that in prehistoric times transmission of cultural elements has been almost unlimited, and that the distances over which inventions and ideas have been carried cover whole continents. As an instance of the rapidity with which cultural achievements are transmitted, may be mentioned the modern history of some cultivated plants. Tobacco was introduced into Africa after the discovery of America, and it took little time for this plant to spread over the whole continent; so that at the present time it enters so deeply into the whole culture of the Negro that nobody would suspect its foreign origin. We find in the same way that the banana has pervaded almost the whole of South America; and the history of Indian-corn is another example of the incredible rapidity with which a useful cultural acquisition may spread over the whole world. The history of the horse, of cattle, of the European grains, illustrates that similar conditions prevailed in prehistoric times. These animals and plants occur over the whole width of the Old World, from the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of the Pacific. The use of milk was probably disseminated in a similar way at an early time; so that when the people of the world enter into our historic knowledge, we find milk used all over Europe, Africa, and the western part of Asia.

Perhaps the best proof of transmission is contained in the folk-lore of the tribes of the world. Nothing seems to travel as readily as fanciful tales. We know of certain complex tales, which cannot possibly have been invented twice, that are told by the Berber in Morocco, by the Italians, the Irish, the Russians, in the jungles of India, in the highlands of Tibet, on the tundras of Siberia, and on the prairies of North America; so that perhaps the only parts of the world not reached by them are South Africa, Australia, Polynesia, and South America. The examples of such transmission are quite numerous, and we begin to see that the early inter-relation of the races of man was almost worldwide.

It follows from this observation that the culture of any given tribe, no matter how primitive it may be, can be fully explained only when we take into consideration its inner growth as well as its relation to the culture of its near and distant neighbors and the effect that they may have exerted.

The sameness of a number of fundamental ideas and inventions has suggested to some investigators the belief that there are old cultural achievements belonging to a period previous to the general dispersion of the human race,—a theory that has some points in its favor, though its correctness cannot be proved.