In the conventional seriation of social development four stages are clearly recognizable, viz.: (1) Savagery, in which the social organization is based on blood kinship reckoned in the female line; (2) barbarism, in which the basis of organization is actual or assumed consanguinity reckoned in the male line; (3) civilization, in which the laws are based on property-right, primarily territorial; and (4) enlightenment, in which the organization is constitutional and rests on the recognition of equal human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, in terms of this seriation of general culture-stages, the place of the Seri tribe is clear. Reckoning consanguinity wholly in the maternal line, as they do, they belong in the initial stage of savagery. Accordingly they pertain to the lower or more primitive of the two great stages represented by the American aborigines.
A still more refined seriation may be effected through conspection of the several lines of activital development—the esthetic and industrial, and especially the sophic or fiducial, as well as the strictly social; for these lines are most intimately intertwined. Thus, in the Old World, the transition from maternal to patriarchal organization was accompanied, and evidently superinduced, by the development of zooculture into extensive herding; in different districts of the New World, a parallel transition attended the development of agriculture to a phase involving the protection of acequias and fields by armed men; while throughout primitive life, laws are formulated and enforced chiefly through appeals to the superphysical or mythologic. Now, review of the Seri esthetic indicates that the decorative concepts and activities are in large measure inchoate and are practically confined to a single manifestation, i. e., the delineation of totemic symbols primarily denoting zoic tutelaries and incidentally connoting the blood-carriers of clans consecrated to these beast-gods; so that the esthetic motives and devices of the tribe are essentially zoosematic. In like manner a considerable part of the technic of the tribe is zoomimic, as already shown, while even the most highly developed industrial activities occupy the biotic borderland of mechanical chance rather than the characteristic demotic realm of intellectual design. So, too, the faith of the folk is exclusively and overweeningly zootheistic, to the extent that every motion, every thought, every organized action, every law, every ceremony, is shaped with reference to mystical potencies vaguely conceived as a pantheon of maleficent beast-gods; and it is this dark and hopeless faith that gives character to the tribal esthetic and technic. Concordantly the faith finds reflection in the very elements of the social organization; the matron is the blood-carrier and the lawgiver not in and for herself but as the vicarious and visible exponent of an ever-immanent beast-god—the clan tutelary; her appeals to her brothers for administrative aid are precisely parallel to her intuitive passage from zoomimicry into the field of mechanical chance defined by protolithic implements; and the appeal, like the execution of the law either by herself or by her brothers, is controlled and regulated in absolute deference to the zoic pantheon. Thus, the inchoate tribal laws, expressed in habitual lines of action and modes of thought, are by no means conscious products of human wisdom, but are confidently imputed to a superhuman wisdom on the part of myth-magnified beasts of a mystical olden time; and, similarly, the power of executing these laws is by no means cognized as conscious human faculty, but is faithfully imputed to supernal potencies of mythical monsters. Essentially, therefore, the tribal law is putatively zoocratic; and the social organization may justly be classed as a putative zoocracy.
To prevent possible confusion, it may be desirable to note specifically that the Seri government is not matriarchal in any proper sense. As pointed out elsewhere, matriarchy is not (at least among the American aborigines) an antecedent of patriarchy, but a correlative of that form of government; and it would be especially erroneous and misleading to designate as matriarchal a tribe like the Seri, whose chiefs and subchiefs (i. e., appellate clan-administratives) are invariably masculine. Neither would it be just, despite the dominance of matrons in legislative and judicative matters, to regard the tribal government as a gyneocracy, such as have been noted in various parts of North America—e. g., in Sonora, according to a current tradition as to the origin of the name of the province, and among the Pomo Indians of California, according to Cronise as interpreted by Powers;[331] for the actual control is exercised by the warrior brothers, while the ideal control is vested in that zoic pantheon of which the matrons are putative mouthpieces. Physically and practically the Seri government is an adelphiarchy, as already indicated; but in the minds of the tribesmen themselves it is an inchoate theocracy putatively headed by a pantheon of animate monsters, whose prelates are personified in the painted clanmothers.
Summarily, then, the Seri are zoosematic in esthetic, zoomimic in technic, zootheistic in faith, and putatively zoocratic in government, while even the Seri tongue is so largely mimetic or onomatopoetic in form as to accord with the industries and institutions; and in view of the intimate interrelations between the several lines of activity, it would seem preferable to determine the culture-status from the coincident testimony of all the lines, but feasible to measure it in terms of any one or more of these activital lines.
Now, on comparing the characteristics of the Seri with those of other known tribes of North America, many resemblances and a few differences are found; and practically all of the more conspicuous differences extend in the same direction—i. e., they combine to indicate an exceptionally primitive, or lowly, or zoic, plane for the simple savages of Seriland. Thus, few tribes are so poor in esthetic as the Seri, and in none other are the esthetic devices so clearly and so exclusively zoic; few if any other known tribes so clearly exemplify zoomimic culture; none other so well represents protolithic culture, and no other known tribe is so completely devoid of mechanical devices reflecting higher culture; in general socialry no other known tribe better, or indeed so well, exemplifies zoocracy, while in such special features as those of ethnogamic mating, ceremonial scatophagy, and mortuary magnification of the blood-carriers, the folk mark the most primitive known phase of cultural advancement; and although language and faith yield less definite measure, their testimony is coincident with that of the other lines of activity. Accordingly the Seri must be assigned to the initial place in the scale of cultural development represented by the American aborigines, and hence to the lowest recognized phase of savagery.
Two or three corollaries of this placement are noteworthy: (1) In most of the researches concerning human development conducted by the anthropologists of the world, attention has been given chiefly or wholly to the somatic or biotic characters of Homo sapiens; but while various physical features of the Seri suggest bestial affinities (as has been pointed out in an earlier chapter), it is especially significant that the nearest and clearest indications of bestial relationship are found in the psychical features of the lowly folk—for zoic faith in its multifarious manifestations is but a reflection of burgeoning yet still bestial mind.
(2) While human independence of environment culminates in socialry, the interdependence of activital lines so well revealed in lowest savagery demonstrates that institutions and all government necessarily reflect environment; and, at the same time, that the progressive emancipation from environment signalized in the higher culture-grades measures the conquest of Nature through industrial activity—for both the productive work and the attendant exercise cumulatively elevate sapient Man above mindless Nature.
(3) An adjunct of progress in every stage of development, as indicated with especial clearness in the earliest stages, is the annulment or curtailment of both physical and formal law, and the substitution of cumulatively growing volition: the development of the esthetic passes from the intuitive toward the ratiocinative, that of the industrial from the instinctive toward the inventive, and that of the social from the merely reflective to the vigorously constructive; with every pulse of progress the subservience to blind chance and imaginative figment diminishes; and with each increment of sound confidence the ability to surmount physical obstruction and to dispense with primitive formality is cumulatively augmented.