Anthropology by Robert Ranulph Marett (top ten books to read txt) 📕

When a child is born it has been subjected for some three-quarters of a year already to the influences of environment. Its race, indeed, was fixed once for all at the moment of conception. Yet that superadded measure of plasticity, which has to be treated as something apart from the racial factor, enables it to respond for good or for evil to the pre-natal—that is to say, maternal—environment. Thus we may easily fall into the mistake of supposing our race to be degenerate, when poor feeding and exposure to unhealthy surroundings on the part of the mothers are really responsible for the crop of weaklings that we deplore. And, in so far as it turns out to be so, social reformers ought to heave a sigh of relief. Why? Because to improve the race by way of eugenics, though doubtless feasible within limits, remains an unrealized possibility through our want of knowledge. On the other hand, to improve the physical environment is fairly straight-ahead work, once we can awake the public conscience to the need of undertaking this task for the benefit of all classes of the community alike. If civilized man wishes to boast of being clearly superior to the rest of his kind, it must be mainly in respect to his control over the physical environment. Whatever may have been the case in the past, it seems as true now-a-days to say that man makes his physical environment as that his physical environment makes him.

Even if this be granted, however, it remains the fact that our material circumstances in the widest sense of the term play a very decisive part in the shaping of our lives. Hence the importance of geographical studies as they bear on the subject of man. From the moment that a child is conceived, it is subjected to what it is now the fashion to call a "geographic control." Take the case of the child of English parents born in India. Clearly several factors will conspire to determine whether it lives or dies. For simplicity's sake let us treat them as three. First of all, there is the fact that the child belongs to a particular cultural group; in other words, that it has been born with a piece of paper in its mouth representing one share in the British Empire. Secondly, there is its race, involving, let us say, blue eyes and light hair, and a corresponding constitution. Thirdly, there is the climate and all that goes with it. Though in the first of these respects the white child is likely to be superior to the native, inasmuch as it will be tended with more careful regard to the laws of health; yet such disharmony prevails between the other two factors of race and climate, that it will almost certainly die, if it is not removed at a certain age from the country. Possibly the English could acclimatize themselves in India at the price of an immense toll of infant lives; but it is a price which they show no signs of being willing to pay.

What, then, are the limits of the geographical control? Where does its influence begin and end? Situation, race and culture—to reduce it to a problem of three terms only—which of the three, if any, in the long run controls the rest? Remember that the anthropologist is trying to be the historian of long perspective. History which counts by years, proto-history which counts by centuries, pre-history which counts by millenniums—he seeks to embrace them all. He sees the English in India, on the one hand, and in Australia on the other. Will the one invasion prove an incident, he asks, and the other an event, as judged by a history of long perspective? Or, again, there are whites and blacks and redskins in the southern portion of the United States of America, having at present little in common save a common climate. Different races, different cultures, a common geographical situation—what net result will these yield for the historian of patient, far-seeing anthropological outlook? Clearly there is here something worth the puzzling out. But we cannot expect to puzzle it out all at once.

In these days geography, in the form known as anthropo-geography, is putting forth claims to be the leading branch of anthropology. And, doubtless, a thorough grounding in geography must henceforth be part of the anthropologist's equipment.[3] The schools of Ratzel in Germany and Le Play in France are, however, fertile in generalizations that are far too pretty to be true. Like other specialists, they exaggerate the importance of their particular brand of work. The full meaning of life can never be expressed in terms of its material conditions. I confess that I am not deeply moved when Ratzel announces that man is a piece of the earth. Or when his admirers, anxious to improve on this, after distinguishing the atmosphere or air, the hydrosphere or water, the lithosphere or crust, and the centrosphere or interior mass, proceed to add that man is the most active portion of an intermittent biosphere, or living envelope of our planet, I cannot feel that the last word has been said about him.

[Footnote 3: Thus the reader of the present work should not fail to study also Dr. Marion Newbigin's Geography in this series.]

Or, again, listen for a moment to M. Demolins, author of a very suggestive book, Comment la route crée le type social ("How the road creates the social type"). "There exists," he says in his preface, "on the surface of the terrestrial globe an infinite variety of peoples. What is the cause that has created this variety? In general the reply is, Race. But race explains nothing; for it remains to discover what has produced the diversity of races. Race is not a cause; it is a consequence. The first and decisive cause of the diversity of peoples and of the diversity of races is the road that the peoples have followed. It is the road that creates the race, and that creates the social type." And he goes further: "If the history of humanity were to recommence, and the surface of the globe had not been transformed, this history would repeat itself in its main lines. There might well be secondary differences, for example, in certain manifestations of public life, in political revolutions, to which we assign far too great an importance; but the same roads would reproduce the same social types, and would impose on them the same essential characters."

There is no contending with a pious opinion, especially when it takes the form of an unverifiable prophecy. Let the level-headed anthropologist beware, however, lest he put all his eggs into one basket. Let him seek to give each factor in the problem its due. Race must count for something, or why do not the other animals take a leaf out of our book and build up rival civilizations on suitable sites? Why do men herd cattle, instead of the cattle herding the men? We are rational beings, in other words, because we have it in us to be rational beings. Again, culture, with the intelligence and choice it involves, counts for something too. It is easy to argue that, since there were the Asiatic steppes with the wild horses ready to hand in them, man was bound sooner or later to tame the horse and develop the characteristic culture of the nomad type. Yes, but why did man tame the horse later rather than sooner? And why did the American redskins never tame the bison, and adopt a pastoral life in their vast prairies? Or why do modern black folk and white folk alike in Africa fail to utilize the elephant? Is it because these things cannot be done, or because man has not found out how to do them?

When all allowances, however, are made for the exaggerations almost pardonable in a branch of science still engaged in pushing its way to the front, anthropo-geography remains a far-reaching method of historical study which the anthropologist has to learn how to use. To put it crudely, he must learn how to work all the time with a map of the earth at his elbow.

First of all, let him imagine his world of man stationary. Let him plot out in turn the distribution of heat, of moisture, of diseases, of vegetation, of food-animals, of the physical types of man, of density of population, of industries, of forms of government, of religions, of languages, and so on and so forth. How far do these different distributions bear each other out? He will find a number of things that go together in what will strike him as a natural way. For instance, all along the equator, whether in Africa or South America or Borneo, he will find them knocking off work in the middle of the day in order to take a siesta. On the other hand, other things will not agree so well. Thus, though all will be dark-skinned, the South Americans will be coppery, the Africans black, and the men of Borneo yellow.

Led on by such discrepancies, perhaps, he will want next to set his world of man in movement. He will thereupon perceive a circulation, so to speak, amongst the various peoples, suggestive of interrelations of a new type. Now so long as he is dealing in descriptions of a detached kind, concerning not merely the physical environment, but likewise the social adjustments more immediately corresponding thereto, he will be working at the geographical level. Directly it comes, however, to a generalized description or historical explanation, as when he seeks to show that here rather than there a civilization is likely to arise, geographical considerations proper will not suffice. Distribution is merely one aspect of evolution. Yet that it is a very important aspect will now be shown by a hasty survey of the world according to geographical regions.

Let us begin with Europe, so as to proceed gradually from the more known to the less known. Lecky has spoken of "the European epoch of the human mind." What is the geographical and physical theatre of that epoch? We may distinguish—I borrow the suggestion from Professor Myres—three stages in its development. Firstly, there was the river-phase; next, the Mediterranean phase; lastly, the present-day Atlantic phase. Thus, to begin with, the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates were each the home of civilizations both magnificent and enduring. They did not spring up spontaneously, however. If the rivers helped man, man also helped the rivers by inventing systems of irrigation. Next, from Minoan days right on to the end of the Middle Ages, the Mediterranean basin was the focus of all the higher life in the world, if we put out of sight the civilizations of India and China, together with the lesser cultures of Peru and Mexico. I will consider this second phase especially, because it is particularly instructive from the geographical standpoint. Finally, since the time of the discovery of America, the sea-trade, first called into existence as a civilizing agent by Mediterranean conditions, has shifted its base to the Atlantic coast, and especially to that land of natural harbours, the British Isles. We must give up thinking in terms of an Eastern and Western Hemisphere. The true distinction, as applicable to modern times, is between a land-hemisphere, with the Atlantic coast of Europe as its centre, and a sea-hemisphere, roughly coinciding with the Pacific. The Pacific is truly an ocean; but the Atlantic is becoming more of a "herring-pond" every day.

Fixing our eyes, then, on the Mediterranean basin, with its Black Sea extension, it is easy to perceive that we have here a well-defined geographical province, capable of acting as