THE HELIOTYPE PRINTING CO., BOSTON
TYPICAL SERI WARRIOR
While the highly developed traits represented by pedestrian habit and hand-and-tooth habit and segregative habit expressing race-sense are conspicuous during exercise, each carries an equally well-marked obverse. Thus, while the Seri are known as runners par excellence in a region of runners, and were named by aboriginal neighbors from their spryness of movement, they have been no less notorious among the Caucasian settlers of two generations for unparalleled laziness—for a lethargic sloth beyond that of sluggish ox and somnolent swine, which was an irritating marvel to the patient padres of the eighteenth century, and is today a byword in the even-tempered Land of Mañana; concordantly the sinewy hands and muscular jaws are noticeably inert during the intervals between intense functionings, are practically free from the spontaneous or nervous movements of habitually busy persons, and contribute by their immobility to the air of indolence or languor which so impressed padres and rancheros; concordantly also, the manifestations of race hate, doubtless culminating among warriors on the warpath, are strongly contrasted with the abject docility of the Seri groups when at peace and in camp near Costa Rica and other ranchos—a docility far exceeding that of the Papago, whose personal dignity is an ever-present possession, or that of Yaqui, whose strong spirit so often breaks the curb of Caucasian control. So the observer of the Seri is impressed by the intensity of functioning along lines defined by their characteristic traits, and equally by the capriciousness of the functioning and the remarkably wide range between activity and inactivity which render them aggregations of extremes—the Seri are at once the swiftest and the laziest, the strongest and the most inert, the most warlike and the most docile of tribesmen; and their transitions from rôle to rôle are singularly capricious and sudden. At the same time the observer is impressed by the relatively long intervals between the periods of activity; true, the intense activity may cover hours, as in the chase of a deer, or days, as in a distant predatory raid, or perhaps even weeks, when the tribe is on the warpath; yet all the known facts indicate that far the greater portion of the time of warriors, women, and children is spent in idle lounging about rancherias and camps, in lolling and slumbering in the sun by day and in huddling under the scanty shelter of jacales or shrubbery by night—i. e., when their activity is measured by hours, their intervals of repose must be measured by days.
Summarizing those somatic traits connected with habitual functioning, the Seri may be considered as characterized by (1) distinctive pedestrian habit, (2) conspicuous hand-and-tooth habit correlated with defective tool-sense, and (3) pronounced segregative habit correlated with a highly specialized race-sense; yet they are characterized no less by extreme alternations from the most intense functioning to complete quiescence—the periods of intensity being relatively short, and the intervals of quiescence notably long.
On reviewing the more conspicuous somatic structures and functions jointly, they are found to throw some light on their own development, and hence on the natural history of the Seri tribe.
Certain characteristics of the tribe strongly suggest lowly condition, i. e., a condition approaching that of lower animals, especially of carnivorous type; among these are the specific color, the centripetally developed body, the tardy adolescence, the defective tool-sense, the distinctive food habits (especially the consumption of raw offal and carrion), the independence of fixed habitations, and the extreme alternations between the rage of chase and war and the quiescence of sluggish repose. But these primitive characteristics are opposed or qualified by such features as the noble stature, the capacious and shapely brain-case, the well-developed hands, and the considerable intelligence revealed in native shrewdness as well as in organization and belief. Collectively the characteristics are in some measure incongruous; yet all are at least fairly compatible with the inference that the tribe is exceptionally (if not incomparably) low in the scale of general human development, yet at the same time highly specialized along certain lines; and the inference in turn is corroborated by the coincidence between the special lines of development and the peculiar conditions of environment characterizing the habitat of the tribe.
BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY
SEVENTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT PL. XX
