Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

Proper behaviour with regard to names is one of the most important points of savage decorum. The confusion, amounting almost to identification, between a person and his name is one of the most signal proofs of the power of language over thought. As Catlin’s or Kane’s Indian pictures were thought to detract from the originals something of their existence, giving the painter such power over them that whilst living their bodies would sympathise with every injury done to their pictures, and when dead would not rest in their graves, so the feeling among savages is strong that the knowledge of a person’s name gives to another a fatal control over his destiny. An Indian once asked Kane ‘whether his wish to know his name proceeded from a desire to steal it;’[164] whilst with the Abipones it was positively sinful for anyone to pronounce his own name. Kane could only discover Indians’ names through third parties; and it is curious that the natives of one of the Fiji Islands will never tell their names to an inquirer, if there should be anyone else to answer the question.[165] Hence it is that the highest compliment a savage can pay a person is to exchange names with him, a custom which Cook found prevalent at Tahiti and in the Society Islands, and which was also common in North America.[166] Warriors sometimes take the name of a slain enemy, from the same motive apparently which, in some instances, is an inducement to eat their flesh, namely, to appropriate their courage. The Lapps change a child’s baptismal name, if it falls ill, rebaptizing it at every illness, as if they thought to deceive the spirit that vexed it by the simple stratagem of an alias;[167] and the Californian Shoshones, in changing their names after such feats as scalping an enemy, stealing his horses, or killing a grizzly bear, had, perhaps, some similar idea of avoiding retaliation. Among the Chinook Indians near relations often changed their names, lest the spirits of the dead should be drawn back to earth by often hearing familiar names used.

With these ideas about names it is easy to understand how especial reverence would become attached to the names of kings or dead persons whose power to punish a light use of their appellations might well be deemed exceptional. On accessions to royalty in the Society Islands all words resembling the king’s name were changed, and any person bold enough to continue the use of the superseded terms was put to death, with all his relations.[168] From a similar state of thought the Abipones invented new words for all things whose previous names recalled a dead person’s memory, whilst to mention his name was ‘a nefarious proceeding.’[169] In Dahome the king’s name must be pronounced with bated breath, and it is death to utter it in his presence.[170] The degrees of guilt, attached to the mention of a dead person, arising from a belief in the power of spoken names to call back their owners, vary in sinfulness from its being a positive crime, punishable by fine, to a mere rudeness, to be checked in the young. Among the Northern Californians it was one of the most strenuous laws that whoever mentioned a dead person’s name should be liable to a heavy fine, payable to the relatives.[171] The tribe of Ainos held it a great rudeness to speak of the dead by their names; whilst young Ahts are instantly checked, if they make an unthinking use of the name of a chief that has been relinquished in memory of some event of importance.[172]

Several causes may have led to animal worship. The tendency to call men by qualities or peculiarities in them fancifully recalling those of some animal, and the tendency to apotheosize distinguished ancestors, thus named after the tiger or the bear, may have led to a confusion of thought between the animal and the man, till the divine attributes, once attached to the individual, became transferred to the species of animal that survived him in constant existence. Or the same fancy, which sees inspiration in an idiot from his very lack of common reason, may have attributed peculiar wisdom and looked with peculiar awe on the animal world, by very reason of its speechlessness. Then, again, the idea that the bodies of animals may be the depositories of departed human souls may have led to the worship of certain animals: some Californians for this reason refraining from the flesh of large game, because it is animated by the souls of past generations, so that the term ‘eater of venison’ is one of reproach among them. Or the prohibitions of shamans may have produced the result in some cases: the Thlinkeet Indians being found, for this reason, abstinent from whale’s flesh or blubber, whilst both are commonly eaten by surrounding tribes. But, whatever the original causes may have been, tribes are found all over the world beset with a feeling of sinfulness with regard to the injuring, eating, or in any way offending different species of animals; of which, as no extreme instance, may be mentioned the Fijian custom of presenting a string of new nuts, gathered expressly, to a land crab, ‘to prevent the deity leaving with an impression that he was neglected, and visiting his remiss worshippers with drought, dearth, or death.’

Beyond, however, customs or ideas in prevention of acts prejudicial to their real or supposed welfare, savage communities appear to have little idea of any quality in actions rendering them good or bad independently of consequences. Their prayers, their beliefs, and their mythology, alike go to prove this. That they will pray for such temporal blessings as health, food, rain, or victory, but not for such moral gains as the conquest of passion or a truthful disposition, to some extent justifies the inference that moral advancement forms no part of their code of things desirable. Their good and evil spirit or spirits are simply distinguished, where they are distinguished at all, as the causes respectively of things agreeable or disagreeable, as taking sides for or against struggling humanity, so that tribes which pay and sacrifice to the source of evil, to the neglect of that of good, cannot be said not to conform to reason. Their mythology, again, owes its very monotony mainly to the lack of moral interest to relieve and sustain it. As Mr. Grote, arguing from the mythology to the moral feeling of legendary Greece, observes, that such a sentiment as a feeling of moral obligation between man and man was ‘neither operative in the real world nor present to the imaginations of the poets,’ so it may be said not less emphatically of extant savage mythology. The Polynesian idea of a god, it has been well said, is mere power without any reference to goodness. The divine denizens of Avaiki (the Hades of the Hervey Islands), as they marry, quarrel, build, and live just like mortals, so they murder, drink, thieve, and lie quite in accordance with terrestrial precedents.[173] The unethical nature, however, of savage prayer or mythology is obviously not incompatible with the practical recognition of certain moral distinctions; in the same Hervey Islands, for instance, the greatest possible sin was to kill a fellow-countryman by stealth, instead of in battle.[174]

Ideas, again, relating to a future state and the dependence of future welfare on the mode of life spent on earth, though they would seem to afford some insight into the moral sentiments of those holding them, in default of definition of the good or bad conduct so rewarded or punished, do not really prove much. In the following instances, which offer several shades of variety, there is scarcely any attempt at moral definition, and the native belief has, perhaps, been adulterated by Christian influence. The Good Spirit of the Mandans dwelt in a purgatory of cold and frost, where he punished those who had offended him, before he would admit them to that warmer and happier place, where the Bad Spirit dwelt and sought to seduce the happy occupants.[175] For the Charocs of California were two roads, one strewn with flowers, and leading the good to the bright Western land, the other bristling with thorns and briers, and leading the wicked to a place full of serpents. The souls of Chippewyans drifted in a stone canoe to an enchanted island in a large lake; if the good actions of their life predominated they were wafted safely ashore; but if the bad, the canoe sank beneath their weight, leaving the wretches to float for ever, in sight of their lost and nearly won felicity. Wicked Okanagans, again, a Columbian tribe (and by the wicked are here specified murderers and thieves), went to a place where an evil spirit, in human form, with equine ears and tail, belaboured them with a stick.[176] The Fijian belief appears truer to savage thought; for whilst such of their dead as succeeded in reaching Mbula were happy or not, according as they had lived so as to please the gods, mortals subjected to special punishment were persons who had not their ears bored, women who were not tattooed, and men who had not slain an enemy.[177]

Taking, however, these instances at their best, there is nothing to show that the good or bad, rewarded or punished as above described, were really anything more than those who on earth had fought and hunted with courage or cowardice. Writers citing such beliefs do not always make allowance for the difference between the savage and the civilised moral standard. The code to be observed, says Schoolcraft, in order for the soul to pass safely the stream which leads to the land of bliss, ‘appears to be, as drawn from their funeral addresses, fidelity and success as a hunter in providing for his family, and bravery as a warrior in defending the rights and honour of his tribe. There is no moral code regulating the duties and reciprocal intercourse between man and man.’[178] And if the good American Indians above mentioned were distinguished by any higher moral attributes than those of mere bravery and activity, it is difficult to account for the fact that, while Mexican civilisation consigned all who died natural deaths, good and bad alike, to the dull repose of Mictlan, reserving for the higher pleasures of futurity those who met their deaths in war or water, or from lightning, disease, or childbirth, tribes whose culture stood to that of Mexico as far removed as that of Polynesia from that of Europe, should have attained to the moral belief of the influence of earthly conduct reaching beyond the grave.[179]

The foregoing brief review of some of the real evidence on the subject would seem to indicate the conclusion that, in matters of morals, savages are neither so low as they have been painted by most writers nor so blameless as they have been portrayed by some. Their faults, such as their vindictiveness, their ingratitude, or their mendacity, might be predicated as easily of communities the most advanced in the world; nor, in the face of the great neglect of precision of language in all narratives of travel, can any evidence of the utter ignorance of right and wrong among any tribe lay claim to the smallest scientific value. Of the African Yorubas, whilst one writer asserts that they are not only covetous and cruel, but ‘wholly deficient in what the civilised man calls conscience,’ of the same people another says that they have several words in their language to express honour, and ‘more proverbs against ingratitude than perhaps any other people.’[180]

Perhaps no description of savage character is fairer than Mariner’s of the Tongan Islanders. ‘Their notions,’ he says, ‘in respect to honour and justice are tolerably well-defined, steady, and universal; but in point of practice both the chiefs and the people, taking them generally, are irregular and fickle, being in some respects extremely honourable and just, and in others the contrary, as a variety of causes may operate.’[181] But the justice of such remarks is lost in their vagueness, and their impartial generality would render them of world-wide rather than of merely local or insular application.

If, therefore, in consideration of the unsatisfactory nature of the direct evidence, we resort to the indirect for the materials of our judgment, we shall perhaps not err widely from the truth if we say that average savage morality coincides very much with that of any contemporary remote village of the civilised world, where the fear of retaliation and disgrace is the chief preventive of great wickedness, and the natural play of the social affections the main safeguard of good order. The statement calls for but few limitations, that wherever travellers have explored, or missionaries taught, they have been able to detect customary laws regulating the relations of civil life, the orderly transference of property by exchange or inheritance, no less than the fixed succession to titles and dignities. They have found not only punishments for the prevention, but judicial ordeals for the detection, of crimes; nor is it possible to believe that such penal laws can exist without ideas of wrongness attaching to the deeds they prohibit. But, besides the secular absolution involved in legal penalties, they have found not unfrequently a kind of spiritual purification by means of confession, penances, and fasting; the practice of such confession alone proving that feelings of remorse are not foreign to savage races, difficult as it must always be to discriminate between actual remorse for wickedness and the mere dread of contingent punishment. The greater social crimes, murder, theft, and adultery, though not recognized as morally worse than many acts of purely fanciful badness, are sufficiently prevented by the fear of revenge or of tribal punishment; and statements concerning indifference to the immorality of such actions either do not rest on good evidence or apply to extra-tribal, that is, to hostile relations. It seems, therefore, that fundamentally the two extremities of civilisation are ethically united; each having for its standard of morality the idea of its own welfare, and deriving a sense of moral obligation from a more or less vague dread of consequences. The fundamental identity of human emotions, of the operations of the feelings of love, fear, hope, and shame, appear to have produced, in different stages of culture, very similar moral feelings; nor is it conceivable that such feelings, howsoever much weaker, were ever radically different in the most remote antiquity.