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

If an explorer visits a savage tribe with intent to get at the true meaning of their life, his first duty, as every anthropologist will tell him, is to acquaint himself thoroughly with the social organization in all its forms. The reason for this is simply that only by studying the outsides of other people can we hope to arrive at what is going on inside them. "Institutions" will be found a convenient word to express all the externals of the life of man in society, so far as they reflect intelligence and purpose. Similarly, the internal or subjective states thereto corresponding may be collectively described as "beliefs." Thus, the field-worker's cardinal maxim can be phrased as follows: Work up to the beliefs by way of the institutions.

Further, there are two ways in which a given set of institutions can be investigated, and of these one, so far as it is practicable, should precede the other. First, the institutions should be examined as so many wheels in a social machine that is taken as if it were standing still. You simply note the characteristic make of each, and how it is placed in relation to the rest. Regarded in this static way, the institutions appear as "forms of social organization." Afterwards, the machine is supposed to be set going, and you contemplate the parts in movement. Regarded thus dynamically, the institutions appear as "customs."

In this chapter, then, something will be said about the forms of social organization prevailing amongst peoples of the lower culture. Our interest will be confined to the social morphology. In subsequent chapters we shall go on to what might be called, by way of contrast, the physiology of social life. In other words, we shall briefly consider the legal and religious customs, together with the associated beliefs.

How do the forms of social organization come into being? Does some one invent them? Does the very notion of organization imply an organizer? Or, like Topsy, do they simply grow? Are they natural crystallizations that take place when people are thrown together? For my own part, I think that, so long as we are pursuing anthropology and not philosophy—in other words, are piecing together events historically according as they appear to follow one another, and are not discussing the ultimate question of the relation of mind to matter, and which of the two in the long run governs which—we must be prepared to recognize both physical necessity and spiritual freedom as interpenetrating factors in human life. In the meantime, when considering the subject of social organization, we shall do well, I think, to keep asking ourselves all along, How far does force of circumstances, and how far does the force of intelligent purpose, account for such and such a net result?

If I were called upon to exhibit the chief determinants of human life as a single chain of causes and effects—a simplification of the historical problem, I may say at once, which I should never dream of putting forward except as a convenient fiction, a device for making research easier by providing it with a central line—I should do it thus. Working backwards, I should say that culture depends on social organization; social organization on numbers; numbers on food; and food on invention. Here both ends of the series are represented by spiritual factors—namely, culture at the one end, and invention at the other. Amongst the intermediate links, food and numbers may be reckoned as physical factors. Social organization, however, seems to face in both directions at once, and to be something half-way between a spiritual and a physical manifestation.

In placing invention at the bottom of the scale of conditions, I definitely break with the opinion that human evolution is throughout a purely "natural" process. Of course, you can use the word "natural" so widely and vaguely as to cover everything that was, or is, or could be. If it be used, however, so as to exclude the "artificial," then I am prepared to say that human life is preeminently an artificial construction, or, in other words, a work of art; the distinguishing mark of man consisting precisely in the fact that he alone of the animals is capable of art.

It is well known how the invention of machinery in the middle of the eighteenth century brought about that industrial revolution, the social and political effects of which are still developing at this hour. Well, I venture to put it forward as a proposition which applies to human evolution, so far back as our evidence goes, that history is the history of great inventions. Of course, it is true that climate and geographical conditions in general help to determine the nature and quantity of the food-supply; so that, for instance, however much versed you may be in the art of agriculture, you cannot get corn to grow on the shores of the Arctic sea. But, given the needful inventions, superior weapons for instance, you need never allow yourselves to be shoved away into such an inhospitable region; to which you presumably do not retire voluntarily, unless, indeed, the state of your arts—for instance, your skill in hunting or taming the reindeer—inclines you to make a paradise of the tundra.

Suppose it granted, then, that a given people's arts and inventions, whether directly or indirectly productive, are capable of a certain average yield of food, it is certain, as Malthus and Darwin would remind us, that human fertility can be reckoned on to bring the numbers up to a limit bearing a more or less constant ratio to the means of subsistence.

At length we reach our more immediate subject—namely, social organization. In what sense, if any, is social organization dependent on numbers? Unfortunately, it is too large a question to thrash out here. I may, however, refer the reader to the ingenious classification of the peoples of the world, by reference to the degree of their social organization and culture, which is attempted by Mr. Sutherland in his Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct. He there tries to show that a certain size of population can be correlated with each grade in the scale of human evolution—at any rate up to the point at which full-blown civilization is reached, when cases like that of Athens under Pericles, or Florence under the Medici, would probably cause him some trouble. For instance, he makes out that the lowest savages, Veddas, Pygmies, and so on, form groups of from ten to forty; whereas those who are but one degree less backward, such as the Australian natives, average from fifty to two hundred; whilst most of the North American tribes, who represent the next stage of general advance, run from a hundred up to five hundred. At this point he takes leave of the peoples he would class as "savage," their leading characteristic from the economic point of view being that they lead the more or less wandering life of hunters or of mere "gatherers." He then goes on to arrange similarly, in an ascending series of three divisions, the peoples that he terms "barbarian." Economically they are either sedentary, with a more or less developed agriculture, or, if nomad, pursue the pastoral mode of life. His lowest type of group, which includes the Iroquois, Maoris, and so forth, ranges from one thousand to five thousand; next come loosely organized states, such as Dahomey or Ashanti, where the numbers may reach one hundred thousand; whilst he makes barbarism culminate in more firmly compacted communities, such as are to be found, for example, in Abyssinia or Madagascar, the population of which he places at about half a million.

Now I am very sceptical about Mr.