Robert Marett - Anthropology

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One more remark upon the subject of colour. Now-a-days civilized
peoples, as well as many of the ruder races that the former govern,
wear clothes. In other words they have dodged the sun, by developing,
with the aid of mind, a complex society that includes the makers of
white drill suits and solar helmets. But, under such conditions, the
colour of one's skin becomes more or less of a luxury. Protective
pigment, at any rate now-a-days, counts for little as compared with
capacity for social service. Colour, in short, is rapidly losing its
vital function. Will it therefore tend to disappear? In the long run,
it would seem--perhaps only in the very long run--it will become
dissociated from that general fitness to survive under particular
climatic conditions of which it was once the innate mark. Be this as
it may, race-prejudice, that is so largely founded on sheer
considerations of colour, is bound to decay, if and when the races
of darker colour succeed in displaying, on the average, such qualities
of mind as will enable them to compete with the whites on equal terms,
in a world which is coming more and more to include all climates.

* * * * *

Thus we are led on to discuss race in its mental aspect. Here, more
than ever, we are all at sea, for want of a proper criterion. What
is to be the test of mind? Indeed, mind and plasticity are almost the
same thing. Race, therefore, as being the stiffening in the evolution
of life, might seem by its very nature opposed to mind as a limiting
or obstructing force. Are we, then, going to return to the old
pre-scientific notion of soul as something alien to body, and thereby
simply clogged, thwarted and dragged down? That would never do. Body
and soul are, for the working purposes of science, to be conceived
as in perfect accord, as co-helpers in the work of life, and as such
subject to a common development. Heredity, then, must be assumed to
apply to both equally. In proportion as there is plastic mind there
will be plastic body.

Unfortunately, the most plastic part of body is likewise the hardest
to observe, at any rate whilst it is alive, namely, the brain. No
certain criterion of heredity, then, is likely to be available from
this quarter. You will see it stated, for instance, that the size of
the brain cavity will serve to mark off one race from another. This
is extremely doubtful, to put it mildly. No doubt the average European
shows some advantage in this respect as compared, say, with the Bushman.
But then you have to write off so much for their respective types of
body, a bigger body going in general with a bigger head, that in the
end you find yourself comparing mere abstractions. Again, the European
may be the first to cry off on the ground that comparisons are odious;
for some specimens of Neanderthal man in sheer size of the brain cavity
are said to give points to any of our modern poets and politicians.
Clearly, then, something is wrong with this test. Nor, if the brain
itself be examined after death, and the form and number of its
convolutions compared, is this criterion of hereditary brain-power
any more satisfactory. It might be possible in this way to detect the
difference between an idiot and a person of normal intelligence, but
not the difference between a fool and a genius.

We cross the uncertain line that divides the bodily from the mental
when we subject the same problem of hereditary mental endowment to
the methods of what is known as experimental psychology. Thus acuteness
of sight, hearing, taste, smell and feeling are measured by various
ingenious devices. Seeing what stories travellers bring back with them
about the hawk-like vision of hunting races, one might suppose that
such comparisons would be all in their favour. The Cambridge Expedition
to Torres Straits, however, of which Dr. Haddon was the leader,
included several well-trained psychologists, who devoted special
attention to this subject; and their results show that the sensory
powers of these rude folk were on the average much the same as those
of Europeans. It is the hunter's experience only that enables him to
sight the game at an immense distance. There are a great many more
complicated tests of the same type designed to estimate the force of
memory, attention, association, reasoning and other faculties that
most people would regard as purely mental; whilst another set of such
tests deals with reaction to stimulus, co-ordination between hand and
eye, fatigue, tremor, and, most ingenious perhaps of all, emotional
excitement as shown through the respiration--phenomena which are, as
it were, mental and bodily at once and together. Unfortunately,
psychology cannot distinguish in such cases between the effects of
heredity and those of individual experience, whether it take the form
of high culture or of a dissipated life. Indeed, the purely temporary
condition of body and mind is apt to influence the results. A man has
been up late, let us say, or has been for a long walk, or has missed
a meal; obviously his reaction-times, his record for memory, and so
on, will show a difference for the worse. Or, again, the subject may
confront the experiment in very various moods. At one moment he may
be full of vanity, anxious to show what superior qualities he
possesses; whilst at another time he will be bored. Not to labour the
point further, these methods, whatever they may become in the future,
are at present unable to afford any criterion whatever of the mental
ability that goes with race. They are fertile in statistics; but an
interpretation of these statistics that furthers our purpose is still
to seek.

But surely, it will be said, we can tell an instinct when we come across
it, so uniform as it is, and so independent of the rest of the system.
Not at all. For one thing, the idea that an instinct is apiece of
mechanism, as fixed as fate, is quite out of fashion. It is now known
to be highly plastic in many cases, to vary considerably in individuals,
and to involve conscious processes, thought, feeling and will, at any
rate of an elementary kind. Again, how are you going to isolate an
instinct? Those few automatic responses to stimulation that appear
shortly after birth, as, for instance, sucking, may perhaps be
recognized, since parental training and experience in general are out
of the question here. But what about the instinct or group of instincts
answering to sex? This is latent until a stage of life when experience
is already in full swing. Indeed, psychologists are still busy
discussing whether man has very few instincts or whether, on the
contrary, he appears to have few because he really has so many that,
in practice, they keep interfering with one another all the time. In
support of the latter view, it has been recently suggested by Mr.
McDougall that the best test of the instincts that we have is to be
found in the specific emotions. He believes that every instinctive
process consists of an afferent part or message, a central part, and
an efferent part or discharge. At its two ends the process is highly
plastic. Message and discharge, to which thought and will correspond,
are modified in their type as experience matures. The central part,
on the other hand, to which emotion answers on the side of consciousness,
remains for ever much the same. To fear, to wonder, to be angry, or
disgusted, to be puffed up, or cast down, or to be affected with
tenderness--all these feelings, argues Mr. McDougall, and various more
complicated emotions arising out of their combinations with each other,
are common to all men, and bespeak in them deep-seated tendencies to
react on stimulation in relatively particular and definite ways. And
there is much, I think, to be said in favour of this contention.

Yet, granting this, do we thus reach a criterion whereby the different
races of men are to be distinguished? Far from it. Nay, on the contrary,
as judged simply by his emotions, man is very much alike everywhere,
from China to Peru. They are all there in germ, though different customs
and grades of culture tend to bring special types of feeling to the
fore.

Indeed, a certain paradox is to be noted here. The Negro, one would
naturally say, is in general more emotional than the white man. Yet
some experiments conducted by Miss Kellor of Chicago on negresses and
white women, by means of the test of the effects of emotion on
respiration, brought out the former as decidedly the more stolid of
the two. And, whatever be thought of the value of such methods of proof,
certain it is that the observers of rude races incline to put down
most of them as apathetic, when not tuned up to concert-pitch by a
dance or other social event. It may well be, then, that it is not the
hereditary temperament of the Negro, so much as the habit, which he
shares with other peoples at the same level of culture, of living and
acting in a crowd, that accounts for his apparent excitability. But
after all, "mafficking" is not unknown in civilized countries. Thus
the quest for a race-mark of a mental kind is barren once more.

* * * * *

What, then, you exclaim, is the outcome of this chapter of negatives?
Is it driving at the universal equality and brotherhood of man? Or,
on the contrary, does it hint at the need of a stern system of eugenics?
I offer nothing in the way of a practical suggestion. I am merely trying
to show that, considered anthropologically--that is to say, in terms
of pure theory--race or breed remains something which we cannot at
present isolate, though we believe it to be there. Practice, meanwhile,
must wait on theory; mere prejudices, bad as they are, are hardly worse
guides to action than premature exploitations of science.

As regards the universal brotherhood of man, the most that can be said
is this: The old ideas about race as something hard and fast for all
time are distinctly on the decline. Plasticity, or, in other words,
the power of adaptation to environment, has to be admitted to a greater
share in the moulding of mind, and even of body, than ever before.
But how plasticity is related to race we do not yet know. It may be
that use-inheritance somehow incorporates its effects in the offspring
of the plastic parents. Or it may be simply that plasticity increases
with inter-breeding on a wider basis. These problems have still to
be solved.

As regards eugenics, there is no doubt that a vast and persistent
elimination of lives goes on even in civilized countries. It has been
calculated that, of every hundred English born alive, fifty do not
survive to breed, and, of the remainder, half produce three-quarters
of the next generation. But is the elimination selective? We can hardly
doubt that it is to some extent. But what its results are--whether
it mainly favours immunity from certain diseases, or the capacity for
a sedentary life in a town atmosphere, or intelligence and capacity
for social service--is largely matter of guesswork. How, then, can
we say what is the type to breed from, even if we confine our attention
to one country? If, on the other hand, we look farther afield, and
study the results of race-mixture or "miscegenation," we but encounter
fresh puzzles. That the half-breed is an unsatisfactory person may
be true; and yet, until the conditions of his upbringing are somehow
discounted, the race problem remains exactly where it was. Or, again,
it may be true that miscegenation increases human fertility, as some
hold; but, until it is shown that the increase of fertility does not
merely result in flooding the world with inferior types, we are no
nearer to a solution.

If, then, there is a practical moral to this chapter, it is merely
this: to encourage anthropologists to press forward with their study
of race; and in the meantime to do nothing rash.

CHAPTER IV
ENVIRONMENT

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 cree 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 an area of
characterization as perhaps no other in the world, once its various
peoples had the taste and ingenuity to intermingle freely by way of
the sea. The first fact to note is the completeness of the ring-fence
that shuts it in. From the Pyrenees right along to Ararat runs the
great Alpine fold, like a ridge in a crumpled table-cloth; the Spanish
Sierras and the Atlas continue the circle to the south-west; and the
rest is desert. Next, the configuration of the coasts makes for
intercourse by sea, especially on the northern side with its peninsulas
and islands, the remains of a foundered and drowned mountain-country.
This same configuration, considered in connection with the flora and
fauna that are favoured by the climate, goes far to explain that
discontinuity of the political life which encouraged independence
whilst it prevented self-sufficiency. The forest-belt, owing to the
dry summer, lay towards the snow-line, and below it a scrub-belt,
yielding poor hunting, drove men to grow their corn and olives and
vines in the least swampy of the lowlands, scattered like mere oases
amongst the hills and promontories.

For a long time, then, man along the north coasts must have been
oppressed rather than assisted by his environment. It made
mass-movements impossible. Great waves of migration from the
steppe-land to the northeast, or from the forest-land to the north-west,
would thunder on the long mountain barrier, only to trickle across
in rivulets and form little pools of humanity here and there. Petty
feuds between plain, shore, and mountain, as in ancient Attica, would
but accentuate the prevailing division. Contrariwise, on the southern
side of the Mediterranean, where there was open, if largely desert,
country, there would be room under primitive conditions for a
homogeneous race to multiply. It is in North Africa that we must
probably place the original hotbed of that Mediterranean race, slight
and dark with oval heads and faces, who during the neolithic period
colonized the opposite side of the Mediterranean, and threw out a wing
along the warm Atlantic coast as far north as Scotland, as well as
eastwards to the Upper Danube; whilst by way of south and east they
certainly overran Egypt, Arabia, and Somaliland, with probable
ramifications still farther in both directions. At last, however, in
the eastern Mediterranean was learnt the lesson of the profits
attending the sea-going life, and there began the true Mediterranean
phase, which is essentially an era of sea-borne commerce. Then was
the chance for the northern shore with its peninsular configuration.
Carthage on the south shore must be regarded as a bold experiment that
did not answer. The moral, then, would seem to be that the Mediterranean
basin proved an ideal nursery for seamen; but only as soon as men were
brave and clever enough to take to the sea. The geographical factor
is at least partly consequence as well as cause.

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