



Produced by Adrian Mastronardi, Chuck Greif and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)











                          CULTURE & ETHNOLOGY




                          CULTURE & ETHNOLOGY

                                  BY

                        ROBERT H. LOWIE, PH.D.

                    Associate Curator, Anthropology
                  American Museum of Natural History

                               NEW YORK
                         DOUGLAS C. McMURTRIE
                                 1917




CONTENTS


                                    Page

  I. Culture and Psychology            5

 II. Culture and Race                 27

III. Culture and Environment          47

 IV. The Determinants of Culture      66

  V. Terms of Relationship            98




PREFACE


This booklet is an attempt at popularization. The first four chapters
are practically identical with as many lectures, delivered in 1917 as
the January course offered by the Department of Anthropology of the
American Museum of Natural History. The purpose of the January series,
which was instituted in 1914 by Dr. P. E. Goddard and the writer, is to
acquaint an audience of intelligent laymen with some of the results of
modern ethnological work, the emphasis being on principles and problems,
rather than on purely descriptive detail. The course, in short, occupies
an intermediate position between technical discourses addressed to
scientists and the more popular lectures which are designed to furnish
mainly entertainment. Each year different topics have been chosen and
several members of the staff have cooperated. Owing to the dearth of
recent ethnological literature reflecting the position of American
field-workers, and at the same time accessible to the interested
outsider, I was easily persuaded to issue the 1917 lectures in the
present form.

The last chapter may not seem to fit within the scope of this
publication. It is obviously more technical than the rest in treatment
and may appear to deal with too special a topic. My object, however, was
to conclude with a concrete illustration of ethnological method, and I
naturally selected a subject to which I had paid considerable attention
during the last two years. It is a subject in which Morgan was able to
arouse the interest of hundreds of laymen; and I can see no reason why
an up-to-date exposition of the problems involved should not be able to
hold their attention.

ROBERT H. LOWIE

_May, 1917_




I. CULTURE AND PSYCHOLOGY[1]


With the beginning of the European war the word ‘culture’ acquired a
sense in popular English usage which had long prevailed in ethnological
literature. Culture is, indeed, the sole and exclusive subject-matter of
ethnology, as consciousness is the subject-matter of psychology, life of
biology, electricity of a branch of physics. Culture shares with these
other fundamental concepts the peculiarity that it can be properly
understood only by an enlarged familiarity with the facts it summarizes.
There is no royal shortcut to a comprehension of culture as a whole by
definition any more than to a comprehension of consciousness; but as
every analysis and explanation of particular conscious states adds to
our knowledge of what consciousness is, so every explanation of
particular cultural phenomena adds to our insight into the nature of
culture. We must, however, start with some proximate notion of what we
are to discuss, and for this purpose Tylor’s definition in the opening
sentence of his _Primitive Culture_ will do as well as any: “Culture...
is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals,
law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society.”

For purely practical reasons, connected with the minute division of
labor that has become imperative with modern specialization, ethnology
has in practice concerned itself with the cruder cultures of peoples
without a knowledge of writing. But this division is an illogical and
artificial one. As the biologist can study life as manifested in the
human organism as well as in the amoeba, so the ethnologist might
examine and describe the usages of modern America as well as those of
the Hopi Indians. In these lectures I shall therefore not hesitate to
draw upon illustrations from the higher civilizations where these seem
most appropriate.

Indeed, it may be best for pedagogical reasons to commence with an
enumeration of instances of cultural activity in our own midst. And
since there is a persistent tendency to associate with culture the more
impressive phenomena of art, science, and technology, it is well to
insist at the outset that these loftier phases are by no means necessary
to the concept of culture. The fact that your boy plays ‘button, button,
who has the button?’ is just as much an element of our culture as the
fact that a room is lighted by electricity. So is the baseball
enthusiasm of our grown-up population, so are moving picture shows,
_thés dansants_, Thanksgiving Day masquerades, bar-rooms, Ziegfeld
Midnight Follies, evening schools, the Hearst papers, woman suffrage
clubs, the single-tax movement, Riker drug stores, touring-sedans, and
Tammany Hall.

These, then, represent the type of phenomena comprised under the caption
of culture. They exist, and science, as a complete view of reality,
cannot ignore them. But a question ominous for the worker who derives
his bread and butter from ethnological investigation arises. All the
phenomena mentioned and the rest of the same order relate to man, and
they relate to man not as an animal but as an organism endowed with a
higher mentality. Tylor’s definition expressly speaks of ‘capabilities
and habits’. But there is a science that deals with capabilities and
habits, to wit, psychology. Is it, then, necessary to have a distinct
branch of knowledge, or can we not simply merge the cultural phenomena
in those of the older science of psychology? It is this question that
concerns us here. On the answer must depend our conception of culture
and our attitude towards a science purporting to deal with cultural
phenomena as something distinct from other data of reality.

In seeking light on this subject we must understand what sort of
problems arise from the contemplation of cultural facts and attempt to
connect them with the established principles of psychology. A few
concrete examples will illustrate the situation.

One of the striking characteristics of our civilization, a trait of our
material culture that is nevertheless an invaluable, nay indispensable,
means for the propagation of knowledge under modern conditions, is the
existence of paper, that is, of a cheap, readily manufactured material
for writing and printing. The obvious problem that develops from this
fact is, How did we get the art of paper-manufacture? Now we shall
search in vain our psychological literature in quest of an explanation.
Höffding and James, Wundt and Titchener have no answer to offer. An
answer, nevertheless, exists. Europe learnt the art of paper-making from
the Arabs, who as early as 795 A. D. had established a paper factory in
Bagdad. These in turn got their knowledge from the Chinese, who must be
regarded as the originators of the technique. The answer is a perfectly
satisfactory one, but it is obviously not couched in psychological
terms: its nature is purely _historical_.

Nevertheless, an objection may plausibly be raised here. Though an
explanation has certainly been given, it does not account for all
aspects of the phenomena we are considering. There is a psychological
basis for each and every one of the events in our historical series.
This series we may subdivide into three stages--the invention by the
Chinese, the borrowing of this invention by the Arabs, and its
transmission from Arab to European. Now the two last-named processes of
transmission may not suggest the necessity of a special explanation at
all. One may think that all that was required was for the Europeans to
watch the Arabs and for the Arabs to watch the Chinese, and presto! the
thing was done. This indeed, seems to be the view of an influential
school of modern ethnologists. But the case is far from being so simple.
We know of many instances, in the higher no less than in the lower
cultures, corresponding to what the biologist calls symbiosis--a
condition where distinct communities or countries persist in a division
of labor for mutual benefit, each trading some of its intellectual or
material products for equivalents secured from the other. In many parts
of Africa there are fixed markets in which <DW64>s from fairly remote
localities congregate for the barter of wares, which are thus diffused
far from their source of origin; but it is the finished products, not
the arts, that are diffused. In New Guinea trading-vessels carry such
objects as pottery hundreds of miles from the area of manufacture to
natives who remain as ignorant of the ceramic technique as before. In
northern Arizona the Hopi Indians occupying three eminences not more
than eight miles distant from one another have no perfect uniformity of
industrial knowledge. Pottery, which flourishes on the eastern Mesa, is
wholly unknown as an art, though constantly used in its specimens, by
the people of the central Mesa; a certain type of basketry plaque is
made only at Oraibi village; another type is manufactured exclusively on
the central Mesa. Conditions more ideal _a priori_ for a transfer of
knowledge than among the practically homogeneous neighboring Hopi groups
could not be conceived. Nevertheless, it has not taken place. Cultural
diffusion, therefore, cannot be taken for granted. We cannot take one
people, place it alongside of another, and effect a cultural osmosis in
the same way in which we produce a chemical reaction when two substances
are brought together under proper conditions of temperature. We are face
to face with a selective, with a _psychological_ condition. But when we
turn once more to our text-books of psychology, we again find nothing
that fits the case. About choice in general we get ample information.
But we may rummage all the psychological seminar rooms in the world and
yet shall find no reason why the Arabs learned the technique of
paper-making from the Chinese instead of ignoring it or only importing
Chinese paper.

Nor are we more fortunate when we turn to psychology for an account of
how the original Chinese inventor came to conceive his epoch-making
idea. This fact, of course, falls under the heading of ‘imagination’,
and about imagination psychologists have much to tell us. But what,
after all, does their interpretation amount to? We learn that
imagination, as distinguished from the power of abstract thought, is the
power of forming new concrete ideas. Since even the concrete individual
idea is complex, being a product of association, its elements may be
linked differently so as to produce new combinations. “The inventor of a
new mechanism,” says Höffding, “combines given elements, the laws of
whose activity he knows, into a totality and a connection which has no
complete parallel in experience.” The scientist tries all possible
combinations among his elements of experiences, forming a succession of
individual ideas, which are rejected until the one appears that
adequately represents reality.

We need hardly go farther to realize the impotence of psychological
science for illuminating the _psychology_ as well as the history of the
paper-making art. The formulation of psychological science is admirable,
but it is too general. It explains the invention of the steam-engine and
the phonograph, the sewing-machine and the harvester no less than the
origin of paper-making. We, however, do not want to know merely what
ultimate psychological processes the invention of paper-making shares
with all other inventions whatsoever, but also the _differential_
conditions that produced this one and unique result under the given
circumstances. It is as though we asked about a man’s character and were
told that he was a vertebrate. The type of psychological explanation we
want is by no means unknown; however, we shall find its illustrations
not in text-books of psychology, but in histories of literature,
science, and art. When Taine raises the question how such a bore as Dr.
Samuel Johnson could conceivably have attained his position in English
literature and answers that it is because of the English predilection
for sermons, he is giving the type of solution--whether right or
wrong--that we want to secure for our cultural problem; it explains why
the average Englishman, as a member of English society, acquires the
habit of regarding Johnson in a certain way. When we inquire why Newton
closes his treatise on optics with a statement as to the vanity of human
things, our curiosity is satisfied when this expression appears as only
one instance of the blending of theological and scientific thought
current in his day. It is nonsense to say that these explanations are
purely historical; they are psychological, for they take fully into
account the subjective attitudes involved in the phenomena studied; and
it is hopeless to expect this sort of explanation from psychological
science, which deals with a quite distinct and far more generalized form
of mental activity.

To turn from the technique of paper manufacture to a very different
cultural feature in order to test the possibility of merging the
observed phenomena in the principles of psychology. In several parts of
the globe, and most prominently in parts of South America, the
aborigines practise a custom known as the ‘couvade’, which forces the
father of a new-born child to subject himself to a period of inactive
confinement and a series of rigorously observed dietary and other
regulations. Let us, for the sake of bringing out the point in high
relief, ignore all historical considerations and concentrate exclusively
on the subjective elements involved. Whence, then, this strange and
wholly irrational association of ideas between fatherhood and a group of
taboos? Now the subject of the association of ideas occupies hundreds of
pages in psychological literature, yet all this, in itself valuable
enough, material has no bearing on our problem, because it is again far
too general. We do not doubt for a moment that the association we desire
to have illuminated is due either to contiguity or to a perceived
similarity of ideas, but why have we this particular association instead
of the limitless multitude of associations that would be equally
intelligible by the same formulae?

Again, many aboriginal tribes of Australia are subdivided into two
halves, membership in which is inherited through the father, in some
cases, through the mother in others. These moieties are what is
technically called ‘exogamous’, _i.e._, marriage with a fellow-member is
strictly forbidden. The regulation is, indeed, so stringent, the feeling
of horror evoked by a transgression so violent, that in former times
offenders were promptly put to death. This sentiment is so strong that
even when visiting a remote tribe, perhaps a hundred miles away, where
there is no possibility of blood-kinship, an Australian will avoid
marriage with a member of the moiety bearing the same name as his own.
Here, surely, there is matter for psychology. An Australian has a
violent emotional reaction akin to our aversion to incest, and may
translate his feelings into the most violent action. Or, looking at the
matter from another angle, the Australian exercises an admirable
self-control, eschewing on principle marital relations with half the
women of his community. Yet all that psychologists tell us of the
ethical feelings and the will leaves the problem before us wholly
untouched. Why this particular curious feeling developed, what place it
occupies in mental life, the psychologist fails to explain. We get,
again, simply general formulæ about feeling and will that are equally
applicable to the case of a man’s beating his wife or a boy’s resisting
the temptations of a lollypop. And this, it must be noted, is dealing
with the distinctively psychological aspect of the data. Whether the
rule in question originated in a common center and thence spread to
other tribes, is also a cultural question of great importance, and this
historical phase of the subject psychology is avowedly incompetent to
deal with. Psychology, then, fails throughout to supply us with the
interpretation we want. It is as impotent to reduce to really
interpretative psychological principles the subjective aspect of
cultural phenomena as it is to explain the historical sequence of
events.

It is not necessary to multiply examples to establish the point. It is
clear that cultural phenomena contain elements that cannot be reduced to
psychological principles. The reason for the insufficiency is already
embodied in Tylor’s definition of culture as embracing ‘capabilities and
habits _acquired_ by man as a member of _society_’. The science of
psychology, even in its most modern ramifications of abnormal psychology
and the study of individual variations, does not grapple with _acquired_
mental traits nor with the influence of _society_ on individual thought,
feeling and will. It deals on principle exclusively with _innate_ traits
of the _individual_. Now, whether the sharp separation assumed here
between the innate and the acquired, between individual activity as
determined by uniquely individual potentialities and as determined by
social environment, can be made in practice or not, one thing is clear:
there _are_ phenomena that are acquired and in no sense innate, that are
socially and not individually determined. When a Christian reacts in a
definite way to the perception of a cross, it is clearly not because of
an individual psychic peculiarity, for other Christians react in the
same way. On the other hand, we are not dealing with a general human
trait since the reactions of a Mohammedan or a Buddhist will be quite
different. Innumerable instances of this sort show that individual
thought, feeling and volition are co-determined by social influences. In
so far forth as the potency of these social factors extends we have
culture; in so far forth as knowledge, emotion, and will are neither the
result of natural endowment shared with other members of the species nor
rest on an individual organic basis, we have a thing _sui generis_ that
demands for its investigation a distinct science.

Does it follow from the foregoing that there is no possible relation
between psychology and culture, that psychological results are a matter
of utter indifference to the ethnologist? In their desire to vindicate
for their own branch of knowledge a place in the sun, some ethnologists
have come very near, if they have not actually reached such a
conclusion. To me the case appears in a somewhat different light.
Whatever division of labor may be desirable for the economy of
scientific work, knowledge as a whole knows nothing of watertight
compartments. Further, the nominally distinct sciences are not
subordinated to one another,