Here a few words may be said of magic, which, though so utterly futile in practice, is a sort of early and unsuccessful attempt at science. It is easy, on looking into the proceedings of the magician, to see that many of them are merely attempts to work by false analogy or deceptive association of ideas. The attempt to hurt or kill a person by cutting or piercing a rude picture or image representing him, which is met with in all the four quarters of the globe, is a perfect example of the way in which sorcerers mistake mere association of ideas for real cause and effect. Examined from this point of view, it will be found that a large proportion of the magic rites of the world will explain their own meaning. It is true that this is not the only principle at work in the magician’s mind; for instance, he seems to reason in a loose way that any extraordinary thing will produce any extraordinary effect, so that the peculiar stones and bits of wood which we should call curiosities become to the African sorcerer powerful fetishes. It will often be noticed that arts belonging to the systematic magic of the civilised world, which has its source in Babylon and Egypt, have found their way into distant lands more readily indeed than useful knowledge, so that they may even be met with among barbaric tribes. Thus it has lately been pointed out that the system of lucky and unlucky days, which led the natives in Madagascar to kill many infants as of inauspicious birth, is adopted from Arabic magic, and it is to be expected that many other magical arts, if their formulas are accurately described, may in like manner be traced to their origin.
Society.—One of the most interesting features of savage and barbaric life is the existence of an unwritten code of moral conduct, by which families and tribes are practically held together. There may be no laws to punish crime, and the local religion may no more concern itself directly with men’s behaviour to one another than it did in the South Sea Islands. But among the roughest people there is family affection, and some degree of mutual help and trust, without which, indeed, it is obvious that society would break up, perhaps in general slaughter. Considering the importance of this primitive morality in the history of mankind, it is unfortunate that the attention of travellers has been so little drawn to it, that our information is most meagre as to how far family affection among rude tribes may be taken to be instinctive, like that of the lower animals, or how far morality is produced by public opinion favouring such conduct as is for the public good, but blaming acts which do harm to the tribe. It is desirable to inquire what conduct is sanctioned by custom among any people, whether, for instance, infanticide is thought right or wrong, what freedom of behaviour is approved in youths and girls, and so on. For though breaches of custom may not be actually punishable, experience will soon convince any explorer among any rude tribe that custom acts in regulating their life even more strictly than among ourselves. The notion of even savages leading a free and unrestrained life is contradicted by those who know them best; in fact, they are bound in every act by ancestral custom. While each tribe thus has its moral standard of right and wrong, this differs much in different tribes, and one must become intimately acquainted with any people to ascertain what are really their ruling principles of life. Accounts have been often given of the natural virtue and happiness of rude tribes, as in the forests of Guiana or the hills of Bengal, where the simple native life is marked by truthfulness, honesty, cheerfulness, and kindness, which contrast in a striking way with the habits of low-class Europeans. There are few phenomena in the world more instructive than morality thus existing in practical independence either of law or religion. It may still be possible to observe it for a few years before it is altered by contact with civilisation, which, whether it raises or lowers on the whole the native level, must supersede in great measure this simple family morality.
The unit of social life is the family, and the family is based on a marriage-law. Travellers who have not looked carefully into the social rules of tribes they were describing, or whose experience has been of tribes in a state of decay, have sometimes reported that marriage hardly existed. But this state of things is not confirmed as descriptive of any healthy human society, however rude; in fact, the absence of definite marriage appears incompatible with the continued existence of a tribe. Therefore statements of this kind made by former visitors should be carefully sifted, and marriage-laws in general deserve careful study. The explorer will hardly meet with marriage at so low a stage that the union can be described as little beyond annual pairing; but where divorce is almost unrestricted, as in some African tribes, there is more or less approach to this condition, which is possible, though unusual, under such laws as that of Islam. Polygamy, which exists over a large part of the globe, is a well-understood system, but information is less complete as to the reasons which have here and there led to its opposite polyandry, as among the Toda hill-tribes and the Nairs in South India. Among customs deserving inquiry are match-making festivals at spring-tide or harvest, when a great part of the year’s marriages are arranged. This is not only often done among the lower races, but traces of it remain in Greece, where the dances at Megara on Easter Tuesday are renowned for wife-choosing, and till lately in Brittany, where on Michaelmas Day the girls sate in a row decked in all their finery on the bridge of Penzé, near Morlaix. The custom of bride-capture, where the bridegroom and his friends make show of carrying off the bride by violence, is known in Europe as a relic of antiquity, as in ancient Rome, Wales within the last century or two, or Tyrol at the present day; but in more barbaric regions, as on the Malay peninsula or among the Kalmuks of North Asia, it may be often met with, practised as a ceremony, or even done in earnest. On the other hand, restrictions on marriage between kinsfolk or clansfolk are more prominent among the lower races than in the civilised world, but their motive is even now imperfectly understood. Partly these restrictions take the form we are accustomed to of prohibiting marriage between relatives more or less near in our sense, but among nations at a lower level they are apt to involve also what is called exogamy or “marrying-out.” A tribe or people—for instance, the Kamilaroi of Australia, or the Iroquois of North America—is divided into hereditary clans, members of which may not marry in their own clan. In various parts of the world these clans are named from some animal, plant, or other object, and anthropologists often call such names “totems,” this word being taken from the native name among Algonquin tribes of North America. For an instance of the working of this custom among the Iroquois tribes a Wolf was considered brother to a Wolf of any other tribe, and might not marry a Wolf girl, who was considered as his sister, but he might marry a Deer or a Heron. In contrast with such rules is the practice of endogamy, or “marrying-in,” as among some Arab tribes, who habitually marry cousins. But it will be found that the two rules often go together, as where a Hindu must practically marry within his own caste, but at the same time is prohibited from marrying in his own gotra or clan. Researches into totem-laws are apt to bring the traveller into contact with other relics of the ancient social institutions in which these laws are rooted, especially the practice of reckoning descent not on the father’s side, as with us, but on the mother’s side, after the manner of the Lycians, whose custom seemed extraordinary to the Greeks in the time of Herodotus, but may be still seen in existence among native tribes of America or in the Malay islands. Even the system of relationship familiar to Europeans is far different from those of regions where forms of the “classificatory system” prevail, in which father’s brothers and mother’s sisters are called fathers and mothers. In inquiring into native laws of marriage and descent, precautions must be taken to ensure accuracy, and especially such ambiguous English words as “uncle” or “cousin” should be kept clear of.
Another point on which travellers have great opportunity of seeing with their own eyes the working of primitive society is the holding and inheritance of property, especially land. Notions derived from our modern law of landlord and tenant give place in the traveller’s mind to older conceptions, among which individual property in land is hardly found. In rude society it is very generally the tribe which owns a district as common land, where all may hunt and pasture and cut fire-wood; while, when a family have built a hut, and tilled a patch of land round it, this is held in common by the family while they live there, but falls back into tribe-land if they cease to occupy it. This is further organised in what are now often called “village communities,” which may be seen in operation in Russia and India, where the village fields are portioned out among the villagers. Those who have seen them can understand the many traces in England of the former prevalence of this system in “common fields,” etc. There is the more practical interest in studying the working of this old-world system from the light it throws on projects of communistic division of land, which in such villages may be studied, and its merits and defects balanced. On the one hand it assures a maintenance for all, while on the other it limits the population of a district, the more so from the obstinate resistance which the counsel of “old men” who manage a village always oppose to any improved method of tillage. Not less perfectly do the tenures existing in many countries show the various stages of landholding which arise out of military conquest. The absolute ownership of all the land by a barbaric chief or king, which may be seen in such a country as Dahome, whose subjects hold their lands on royal sufferance, is an extreme case. In the East, feudal tenures of land granted for military service still have much the same results as in mediæval Europe.
At low levels of civilisation the first dawning of criminal law may be seen in the rule of vengeance or retaliation. The person aggrieved, or his kinsfolk if he has been killed, are at once judges and executioners, and the vengeance they inflict stands in some reasonable relation to the offence committed. Not only is such vengeance the great means of keeping order among such rude tribes as the Australians, but even among half-civilised nations like Abyssinians and Afghans the primitive law may still be studied in force, carried out in strict legal order as a lex talionis, not degraded to mere illegal survival in outlying districts like the “vendetta” of modern Europe, carried on even now, in spite of criminal jurisprudence, which for ages has striven to transfer punishment from private hands to the State. Whether among savages, barbarians, or the lower civilised nations, the traveller will find everywhere matter of interesting observation in the law and its administration. The law may be still in the state of unwritten custom, and the senate or council of old men may be the judges, or the power at once of lawgiver and judge may have passed into the hands of the chief, who, as among the modern Kaffirs, may make a handsome revenue by the cattle given him as fees by both sides, a fact interesting as illustrating the times when an European judge took gifts as a matter of course. Among the nations at higher levels of culture in the East, for instance, most of the stages may still be seen through which the administration of law, criminal and civil, was given over to a trained legal class. One important stage in history is marked by religion taking to itself legal control over the conduct of a nation. The working of this is seen among Oriental nations, whether Mohammedan, Brahman, or Buddhist, whose codes of law are of an ecclesiastical type, and the lawyers theologians. There is much to be learnt from the manner in which such law is administered, and the devices are interesting by which codes framed under past conditions of society are practically accommodated to a new order of things, without professedly violating laws held to be sacred, and therefore unchangeable. Ordeals, which have now disappeared from legal procedure among European nations, are often to be met with elsewhere. Thus in Arabia the ordeal by touching or licking hot iron is still known (the latter is an easy and harmless trick, if the iron is quite white-hot). In Burma, under native rule, the ancient trial of witches by “swimming” went on till lately. In many countries also symbolic oaths invoking evils on the perjurer are to be met with, as when the Ostyaks in Siberia swear in court by laying their hand on a bear’s head, meaning that a bear will kill them if they lie. It shows the carelessness with which Europeans are apt to regard the customs of other nations, that in English courts a Chinese is called upon to swear by breaking a saucer, under the entirely erroneous belief that this symbolic curse is a Chinese judicial oath.
The most undeveloped forms of government are only to be met with in a few outlying regions, as among some of the lower Esquimaux or Rocky Mountain tribes, where life goes on with hardly any rule beyond such control as the strong man may have over his own household. Much oftener travellers have opportunity of studying, in a more or less crude state, the types of government which prevail in higher culture. It is of especial interest to see men of the whole tribe gathered in assembly (the primitive agora) to decide some question of war or migration. Not less instructive are the proceedings of the council of old men (the primitive senate), who, among American tribes or the hill tribes of India, transact the business of the tribe; they are represented at a later social stage by the village-elders of the Hindus or the Russians. Among the problems which present themselves among nations below the civilised level is that of the working of the patriarchal system, still prevailing among such tribes as the Bedaween, while often the balance of power is seen adjusting itself between the patriarchal heads of families and the leaders who obtain authority by success in war. The struggle between the hereditary chief or king and the military despot, who not only usurps his place but seeks to establish hereditary monarchy in his own line, is one met with from low to high levels of national life. The traveller’s attention may be called to the social forces which do their work independently of men in authority, and make society possible, even when there is little visible authority at all. The machinery of government described in books is often much less really powerful than public opinion, which controls men’s conduct in ways which are so much less conspicuous that they have hardly yet been investigated with the care they deserve.
Religion and Mythology.—While great religions, like Mohammedanism and Buddhism, have been so carefully examined that European students often know more about their sacred books than the believers themselves, yet the general investigation of the religions of the world is very imperfect, and every effort should be made to save the details from being lost as one tribe after another disappears, or passes into a new belief. Missionaries have done much in recording particulars of native religions, and some have had the skill to describe them scientifically; but the point of view of the missionary engaged in conversion to another faith is unfavourable for seeing the reasons of the beliefs and practices he is striving to upset. The object of the anthropologist is neither to attack nor defend the doctrines of the religion he is examining, but to trace their rational origin and development. It is not only among the rudest tribes that religious ideas which seem of a primitive order may be met with, but these hold their place also among the higher nations who profess a “book-religion.” Thus the English or German peasant retains many ideas belonging to the ancestral religion of Thor and Woden, and the modern Burmese, though a Buddhist, carries on much of the old worship of the spirits of the house and the forest, which belong to a far earlier religious stratum than Buddhism. It is in many districts possible for the traveller to obtain at first hand interesting information as to the philosophical ideas which underlie all religions. All over the world, people may be met with whose conception of soul or spirit is that belonging to primitive animism, namely, that the life or soul of men, beasts, or things, resides in the phantoms of them seen in dreams and visions. A traveller in British Guiana had serious trouble with one of his Arawaks, who, having dreamt that another had spoken impudently to him, on waking up went quite naturally to his master to get the offender punished. So it is reported that our officials in Burma have considered themselves disrespectfully treated when the wife or servant of the person they have come to see has refused to wake him, the Englishman not understanding that these people hold early animistic ideas, believing the soul to be away from the sleeper’s body in a dream, so that it might not find its way back if he were disturbed. As scientific ideas of the nature of life and dreams are rapidly destroying these primitive conceptions, it is desirable to collect all information about them for its important bearing on the history of philosophy and religion. The same may be said as to the ancient theory of diseases as caused by demons, and the expulsion and exorcism of them as a means of cure, which may still be studied everywhere outside the scientific nations. Information as to religious rites is of course valuable, even when the foreign observer does not understand them, but if possible their exact meaning should be made out by some one acquainted with the language, otherwise acts may be confused which have really different senses, as where a morsel of food offered as a pious offering to an ancestral ghost may be taken for a sacrifice to appease an angry wood-demon. A people’s idea as to the meaning of their own rites may often be very wrong, but it is always worth while to hear what they think of the purpose of their prayers, sacrifices, purifications, fasts, feasts, and other religious ordinances, which even among savage tribes have been long since stereotyped into traditional systems.
Mythology is intimately mixed up with religion, which not only ascribes the events of the world to the action of spirits, demons, or gods, but everywhere individualises many of these beings under personal names, and receives as sacred tradition wonder-tales about them. Thus, to understand the religion of some tribes, we have not only to consider the rude philosophy under which such objects as heaven and earth or sun and moon are regarded as personal beings, whose souls (so to speak) are the heaven-god and earth-god, the sun-god and moon-god; but we have to go on further and collect the religious myths which have grown on to these superhuman beings. The tales which such a people tell of their origin and past history may to some extent include traditions of real events, but mostly they consist of myths, which are also worth collecting, as they often on examination disclose their origin, or part of it. This is seen, for instance, in the South Sea Island tale of the god Maui, whose death, when he plunged into the body of his great ancestress the Night, is an obvious myth of the sunset. The best advice as to native mythology is to write down all promising native stories, leaving it to future examination to decide which are worth publishing. The native names of personages occurring in such stories should be inquired into, as they sometimes carry in themselves the explanation of the story itself, like the name of Great-Woman-Night in the Polynesian myth just referred to. Riddles are sometimes interesting, as being myths with an explanation attached, like the Greek riddle of the twelve black and twelve white horses that draw the chariot of the day. It is not too much to say that everything which a people thinks worth remembering as a popular tradition, and all the more if it is fixed in rhyme or verse, is worth notice, as likely to contain something of historical value. That it may not be historically true is beside the question, for the poetic fictions of a tribe often throw more light on their history than their recollections of petty chiefs who quarrelled fifty years ago. The myths may record some old custom or keep up some old word that has died out of ordinary talk, or the very fact of their containing a story known elsewhere in the world may give a clue to forgotten intercourse by which it was learnt.
Customs.—It remains to say a few words as to the multifarious customs which will come under the traveller’s observation. It does not follow that because these may be mentioned or described in books they need not be further looked into. The fact is that accurate examination in such matters is so new, that something always remains to be made out, especially as the motives of so many customs are still obscure. The practice of artificially deforming the infant’s skull into a desired shape, which is not quite forgotten even in Europe, may be noticed with respect to the question whether the form to which the child’s head is bulged or flattened is the exaggeration of the natural form of an admired caste or race. If not, what can, for instance, have induced two British Columbian tribes, one to flatten their foreheads and the other to mould them up to a peak? In tattooing, an even more widespread practice, it is well to ascertain whether the pattern on the skin seems to have been originally tribe-marks or other signs or records, or whether the purpose is ornament. In South-East Asia the two motives are present at once, when a man has ornamental designs and magical charm-figures together on his body. With regard to ornaments and costumes, the keeping-up of ancient patterns for ceremonial purposes often affords curious historical hints. Thus in the Eastern Archipelago, the old-fashioned garments of bark-cloth are used in mourning by people who have long discarded them in ordinary wear, and another case is found among some natives of South India, whose women, though they no longer put on an apron of leaves as their real ordinary garment, wear it over a cotton skirt on festival-days. Among the amusements of a people, songs are often interesting musically, and it is well to take them down, not only for the tunes, but also for the words, which sometimes throw light on old traditions and beliefs. Dancing varies from spontaneous expression of emotion to complex figures handed down by tradition and forming part of social and religious ceremony. The number of popular games in the world is smaller than would be supposed. When really attractive they may be adopted from one people to another till they make their way round the world. Any special variety, as of ball or draughts, should therefore be noticed, as it may furnish evidence of intercourse by which it may have come from some distant nation.
Though the subjects of anthropological interest are not even fully enumerated in the present chapter, some idea may have been given of the field of observation still open to travellers, not only in remote countries, but even in Europe. In taking notes, the explorer may be recommended not to be afraid of tedious minuteness, whereas the lively superficiality of popular books of travel makes them almost worthless for anthropology.[15]