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

Heredity and environment do not, indeed, lie utterly beyond the range of our control. As they are viewed from the standpoint of human history as a whole, they show each in its own fashion a certain capacity to meet the needs and purposes of the life-force halfway. Regarded abstractly, however, they may conveniently be treated as purely passive and limiting conditions. Here we are with a constitution not of our choosing, and in a world not of our choosing. Given this inheritance, and this environment, how are we, by taking thought and taking risks, to achieve the best-under-the-circumstances? Such is the vital problem as it presents itself to any particular generation of men.

The environment is as it were the enemy. We are out to conquer and enslave it. Our inheritance, on the other hand, is the impelling force we obey in setting forth to fight; it tingles in our blood, and nerves the muscles of our arm. This force of heredity, however, abstractly considered, is blind. Yet, corporately and individually, we fight with eyes that see. This supervening faculty, then, of utilizing the light of experience represents a third element in the situation; and, from the standpoint of man's desire to know himself, the supreme element. The environment, inasmuch as under this conception are included all other forms of life except man, can muster on its side a certain amount of intelligence of a low order. But man's prerogative is to dominate his world by the aid of intelligence of a high order. When he defied the ice-age by the use of fire, when he outfaced and outlived the mammoth and the cave bear, he was already the rational animal, homo sapiens. In his way he thought, even in those far-off days. And therefore we may assume, until direct evidence is forthcoming to the contrary, that he likewise had language of an articulate kind. He tried to make a speech, we may almost say, as soon as he had learned to stand up on his hind legs.

Unfortunately, we entirely lack the means of carrying back the history of human speech to its first beginnings. In the latter half of the last century, whilst the ferment of Darwinism was freshly seething, all sorts of speculations were rife concerning the origin of language. One school sought the source of the earliest words in imitative sounds of the type of bow-wow; another in interjectional expressions of the type of tut-tut. Or, again, as was natural in Europe, where, with the exception of Basque in a corner of the west, and of certain Asiatic languages, Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish, on the eastern border, all spoken tongues present certain obvious affinities, the comparative philologist undertook to construct sundry great families of speech; and it was hoped that sooner or later, by working back to some linguistic parting of the ways, the central problem would be solved of the dispersal of the world's races.

These painted bubbles have burst. The further examination of the forms of speech current amongst peoples of rude culture has not revealed a conspicuous wealth either of imitative or of interjectional sounds. On the other hand, the comparative study of the European, or, as they must be termed in virtue of the branch stretching through Persia into India, the Indo-European stock of languages, carries us back three or four thousand years at most—a mere nothing in terms of anthropological time. Moreover, a more extended search through the world, which in many of its less cultured parts furnishes no literary remains that may serve to illustrate linguistic evolution, shows endless diversity of tongues in place of the hoped-for system of a few families; so that half a hundred apparently independent types must be distinguished in North America alone. For the rest, it has become increasingly clear that race and language need not go together at all. What philologist, for instance, could ever discover, if he had no history to help him, but must rely wholly on the examination of modern French, that the bulk of the population of France is connected by way of blood with ancient Gauls who spoke Celtic, until the Roman conquest caused them to adopt a vulgar form of Latin in its place. The Celtic tongue, in its turn, had, doubtless not so very long before, ousted some earlier type of language, perhaps one allied to the still surviving Basque; though it is not in the least necessary, therefore, to suppose that the Celtic-speaking invaders wiped out the previous inhabitants of the land to a corresponding extent. Races, in short, mix readily; languages, except in very special circumstances, hardly at all.

Disappointed in its hope of presiding over the reconstruction of the distant past of man, the study of language has in recent years tended somewhat to renounce the historical—that is to say, anthropological—method altogether. The alternative is a purely formal treatment of the subject. Thus, whereas vocabularies seem hopelessly divergent in their special contents, the general apparatus of vocal expression is broadly the same everywhere. That all men alike communicate by talking, other symbols and codes into which thoughts can be translated, such as gestures, the various kinds of writing, drum-taps, smoke signals, and so on, being in the main but secondary and derivative, is a fact of which the very universality may easily blind us to its profound significance. Meanwhile, the science of phonetics—having lost that "guid conceit of itself" which once led it to discuss at large whether the art of talking evolved at a single geographical centre, or at many centres owing to similar capacities of body and mind—contents itself now-a-days for the most part with conducting an analytic survey of the modes of vocal expression as correlated with the observed tendencies of the human speech-organs. And what is true of phonetics in particular is hardly less true of comparative philology as a whole. Its present procedure is in the main analytic or formal. Thus its fundamental distinction between isolating, agglutinative and inflectional languages is arrived at simply by contrasting the different ways in which words are affected by being put together into a sentence. No attempt is made to show that one type of arrangement normally precedes another in time, or that it is in any way more rudimentary—that is to say, less adapted to the needs of human intercourse. It is not even pretended that a given language is bound to exemplify one, and one alone, of these three types; though the process known as analogy—that is, the regularizing of exceptions by treating the unlike as if it were like—will always be apt to establish one system at the expense of the rest.

If, then, the study of language is to recover its old pre-eminence amongst anthropological studies, it looks as if a new direction must be given to its inquiries. And there is much to be said for any change that would bring about this result. Without constant help from the philologist, anthropology is bound to languish. To thoroughly understand the speech of the people under investigation is the field-worker's master-key; so much so, that the critic's first question in determining the value of an ethnographical work must always be, Could the author talk freely with the natives in their own tongue? But how is the study of particular languages to be pursued successfully, if it lack the stimulus and inspiration which only the search for general principles can impart to any branch of science? To relieve the hack-work of compiling vocabularies and grammars, there must be present a sense of wider issues involved, and such issues as may directly interest a student devoted to language for its own sake. The formal method of investigating language, in the meantime, can hardly supply the needed spur. Analysis is all very well so long as its ultimate purpose is to subserve genesis—that is to say, evolutionary history. If, however, it tries to set up on its own account, it is in danger of degenerating into sheer futility. Out of time and history is, in the long run, out of meaning and use. The philologist, then, if he is to help anthropology, must himself be an anthropologist, with a full appreciation of the importance of the historical method. He must be able to set each language or group of languages that he studies in its historical setting. He must seek to show how it has evolved in relation to the needs of a given time. In short, he must correlate words with thoughts; must treat language as a function of the social life.

Here, however, it is not possible to attempt any but the most general characterization of primitive language as it throws light on the workings of the primitive intelligence. For one reason, the subject is highly technical; for another reason, our knowledge about most types of savage speech is backward in the extreme; whilst, for a third and most far-reaching reason of all, many peoples, as we have seen, are not speaking the language truly native to their powers and habits of mind, but are expressing themselves in terms imported from another stock, whose spiritual evolution has been largely different. Thus it is at most possible to contrast very broadly and generally the more rudimentary with the more advanced methods that mankind employs for the purpose of putting its experience into words. Happily the careful attention devoted by American philologists to the aboriginal languages of their continent has resulted in the discovery of certain principles which the rest of our evidence, so far as it goes, would seem to stamp as of world-wide application. The reader is advised to study the most stimulating, if perhaps somewhat speculative, pages on language in the second volume of E.J. Payne's History of the New World called America; or, if he can wrestle with the French tongue, to compare the conclusions here reached with those to which Professor Lévy-Bruhl is led, largely by the consideration of this same American group of languages, in his recent work, Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures ("Mental Functions in the Lower Societies").

If the average man who had not looked into the matter at all were asked to say what sort of language he imagined a savage to have, he would be pretty sure to reply that in the first place the vocabulary would be very small, and in the second place that it would consist of very short, comprehensive terms—roots, in fact—such as "man," "bear," "eat," "kill," and so on. Nothing of the sort is actually the case. Take the inhabitants of that cheerless spot, Tierra del Fuego, whose culture is as rude as that of any people on earth. A scholar who tried to put together a dictionary of their language found that he had got to reckon with more than thirty thousand words, even after suppressing a large number of forms of lesser importance. And no wonder that the tally mounted up. For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, some containing four syllables, to express what for us would be either "he" or "she"; then they had two names for the sun, two for the moon, and two more for the full moon, each of the last-named containing four syllables and having no element in common. Sounds, in fact, are with them as copious as ideas are rare. Impressions, on the other hand, are, of course, infinite in number. By means of more or less significant sounds, then, Fuegian society compounds impressions, and that somewhat imperfectly, rather than exchanges ideas, which alone are the currency of true thought.

For instance, I-cut-bear's-leg-at-the-joint-with-a-flint-now corresponds fairly well with the total impression produced by the particular act; though, even so, I have doubtless selectively reduced the notion to something I can comfortably take in, by leaving out a lot of unnecessary detail—for instance, that I was hungry, in a hurry, doing it for the benefit of others as well as myself, and so on. Well, American