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

variety; and, whilst rude in certain respects, they were almost civilized in others. Their racial affinities are somewhat complex. What is almost certain is that they only occupied the Eastern Pacific during the course of the last 1500 years or so. They probably came from Indonesia, mixing to a slight extent with Melanesians on their way. How the proto-Polynesians came into existence in Indonesia is more problematic. Possibly they were the result of a mixture between long-headed immigrants from eastern India, and round-headed Mongols from Indo-China and the rest of south-eastern Asia, from whom the present Malays are derived.

We have completed our very rapid regional survey of the world; and what do we find? By no means is it case after case of one region corresponding to one type of man and to one type of culture. It might be that, given persistent physical conditions of a uniform kind, and complete isolation, human life would in the end conform to these conditions, or in other words stagnate. No one can tell, and no one wants to know, because as a matter of fact no such environmental conditions occur in this world of ours. Human history reveals itself as a bewildering series of interpenetrations. What excites these movements? Geographical causes, say the theorists of one idea. No doubt man moves forward partly because nature kicks him behind. But in the first place some types of animal life go forward under pressure from nature, whilst others lie down and die. In the second place man has an accumulative faculty, a social memory, whereby he is able to carry on to the conquest of a new environment whatever has served him in the old. But this is as it were to compound environments—a process that ends by making the environment coextensive with the world. Intelligent assimilation of the new by means of the old breaks down the provincial barriers one by one, until man, the cosmopolitan animal by reason of his hereditary constitution, develops a cosmopolitan culture; at first almost unconsciously, but later on with self-conscious intent, because he is no longer content to live, but insists on living well.

As a sequel to this brief examination of the geographic control considered by itself it would be interesting, if space allowed, to append a study of the distribution of the arts and crafts of a more obviously economic and utilitarian type. If the physical environment were all in all, we ought to find the same conditions evoking the same industrial appliances everywhere, without the aid of suggestions from other quarters. Indeed, so little do we know about the conditions attending the discovery of the arts of life that gave humanity its all-important start—the making of fire, the taming of animals, the sowing of plants, and so on—that it is only too easy to misread our map. We know almost nothing of those movements of peoples, in the course of which a given art was brought from one part of the world to another. Hence, when we find the art duly installed in a particular place, and utilizing the local product, the bamboo in the south, let us say, or the birch in the north, as it naturally does, we easily slip into the error of supposing that the local products of themselves called the art into existence. Similar needs, we say, have generated similar expedients. No doubt there is some truth in this principle; but I doubt if, on the whole, history tends to repeat itself in the case of the great useful inventions. We are all of us born imitators, but inventive genius is rare.

Take the case of the early palæoliths of the drift type. From Egypt, Somaliland, and many other distant lands come examples which Sir John Evans finds "so identical in form and character with British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands." And throughout the palæolithic age in Europe the very limited number and regular succession of forms testifies to the innate conservatism of man, and the slow progress of invention. And yet, as some American writers have argued—who do not find that the distinction between chipped palæoliths and polished neoliths of an altogether later age applies equally well to the New World—it was just as easy to have got an edge by rubbing as by flaking. The fact remains that in the Old World human inventiveness moved along one channel rather than another, and for an immense lapse of time no one was found to strike out a new line. There was plenty of sand and water for polishing, but it did not occur to their minds to use it.

To wind up this chapter, however, I shall glance at the distribution, not of any implement connected directly and obviously with the utilization of natural products, but of a downright oddity, something that might easily be invented once only and almost immediately dropped again. And yet here it is all over the world, going back, we may conjecture, to very ancient times, and implying interpenetrations of bygone peoples, of whose wanderings perhaps we may never unfold the secret. It is called the "bull-roarer," and is simply a slat of wood on the end of a string, which when whirled round produces a rather unearthly humming sound. Will the anthropo-geographer, after studying the distribution of wood and stringy substances round the globe, venture to prophesy that, if man lived his half a million years or so over again, the bull-roarer would be found spread about very much where it is to-day? "Bull-roarer" is just one of our local names for what survives now-a-days as a toy in many an old-fashioned corner of the British Isles, where it is also known as boomer, buzzer, whizzer, swish, and so on. Without going farther afield we can get a hint of the two main functions which it seems to have fulfilled amongst ruder peoples. In Scotland it is, on the one hand, sometimes used to "ca' the cattle hame." A herd-boy has been seen to swing a bull-roarer of his own making, with the result that the beasts were soon running frantically towards the byre. On the other hand, it is sometimes regarded there as a "thunner-spell," a charm against thunder, the superstition being that like cures like, and whatever makes a noise like thunder will be on good terms, so to speak, with the real thunder.

As regards its uses in the rest of the world, it may be said at once that here and there, in Galicia in Europe, in the Malay Peninsula in Asia, and amongst the Bushmen in Africa, it is used to drive or scare animals, whether tame or wild. And this, to make a mere guess, may have been its earliest use, if utilitarian contrivances can generally claim historical precedence, as is by no means certain. As long as man hunted with very inferior weapons, he must have depended a good deal on drives, that either forced the game into a pitfall, or rounded them up so as to enable a concerted attack to be made by the human pack. No wonder that the bull-roarer is sometimes used to bring luck in a mystic way to hunters. More commonly, however, at the present day, the bull-roarer serves another type of mystic purpose, its noise, which is so suggestive of thunder or wind, with a superadded touch of weirdness and general mystery, fitting it to play a leading part in rain-making ceremonies. From these not improbably have developed all sorts of other ceremonies connected with making vegetation and the crops grow, and with making the boys grow into men, as is done at the initiation rites. It is not surprising, therefore, to find a carved human face appearing on the bull-roarer in New Guinea, and again away in North America, whilst in West Africa it is held to contain the voice of a very god. In Australia, too, all their higher notions about a benevolent deity and about religious matters in general seem to concentrate on this strange symbol, outwardly the frailest of toys, yet to the spiritual eye of these simple folk a veritable holy of holies.

And now for the merest sketch of its distribution, the details of which are to be learnt from Dr. Haddon's valuable paper in The Study of Man. England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales have it. It can be tracked along central Europe through Switzerland, Germany, and Poland beyond the Carpathians, whereupon ancient Greece with its Dionysiac mysteries takes up the tale. In America it is found amongst the Eskimo, is scattered over the northern part of the continent down to the Mexican frontier, and then turns up afresh in central Brazil. Again, from the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra it extends over the great fan of darker peoples, from Africa, west and south, to New Guinea, Melanesia, and Australia, together with New Zealand alone of Polynesian islands—a fact possibly showing it to have belonged to some earlier race of colonists. Thus in all of the great geographical areas the bull-roarer is found, and that without reckoning in analogous implements like the so-called "buzz," which cover further ground, for instance, the eastern coastlands of Asia. Are we to postulate many independent origins, or else far-reaching transportations by migratory peoples, by the American Indians and the negroes, for example? No attempt can be made here to answer these questions. It is enough to have shown by the use of a single illustration how the study of the geographical distribution of inventions raises as many difficulties as it solves.

Our conclusion, then, must be that the anthropologist, whilst constantly consulting his physical map of the world, must not suppose that by so doing he will be saved all further trouble. Geographical facts represent a passive condition, which life, something by its very nature active, obeys, yet in obeying conquers. We cannot get away from the fact that we are physically determined. Yet, physical determinations have been surmounted by human nature in a way to which the rest of the animal world affords no parallel. Thus man, as the old saying has it, makes love all the year round. Seasonal changes of course affect him, yet he is no slave of the seasons. And so it is with the many other elements involved in the "geographic control." The "road," for instance—that is to say, any natural avenue of migration or communication, whether by land over bridges and through passes, or by sea between harbours and with trade-winds to swell the sails—takes a hand in the game of life, and one that holds many trumps; but so again does the non-geographical fact that your travelling-machine may be your pair of legs, or a horse, or a boat, or a railway, or an airship. Let us be moderate in all things, then, even in our references to the force of circumstances. Circumstances can unmake; but of themselves they never yet made man, nor any other form of life.