Robert Marett - Anthropology

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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.

CHAPTER V
LANGUAGE

The differentia of man--the quality that marks him off from the other
animal kinds--is undoubtedly the power of articulate speech. Thereby
his mind itself becomes articulate. If language is ultimately a
creation of the intellect, yet hardly less fundamentally is the
intellect a creation of language. As flesh depends on bone, so does
the living tissue of our spiritual life depend on its supporting
framework of steadfast verbal forms. The genius, the heaven-born
benefactor of humanity, is essentially he who wrestles with "thoughts
too deep for words," until at last he assimilates them to the scheme
of meanings embodied in his mother-tongue, and thus raises them
definitely above the threshold of the common consciousness, which is
likewise the threshold of the common culture.

There is good reason, then, for prefixing a short chapter on language
to an account of those factors in the life of man that together stand
on the whole for the principle of freedom--of rational self-direction.
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 Levy-Bruhl
is led, largely by the consideration of this same American group of
languages, in his recent work, _Les Fonctions Mentales dans les
Societes Inferieures_ ("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 languages of the ruder sort, by running a great number of
sounds or syllables together, manage to utter a portmanteau
word--"holophrase" is the technical name for it--into which is packed
away enough suggestions to reproduce the situation in all its detail,
the cutting, the fact that I did it, the object, the instrument, the
time of the cutting, and who knows what besides. Amusing examples of
such portmanteau words meet one in all the text-books. To go back to
the Fuegians, their expression _mamihlapinatapai_ is said to mean "to
look at each other hoping that either will offer to do something which
both parties desire but are unwilling to do." Now, since exactly the
same situation never recurs, but is partly the same and partly
different, it is clear that, if the holophrase really tried to hit
off in each case the whole outstanding impression that a given
situation provoked, then the same combination of sounds would never
recur either; one could never open one's mouth without coining a new
word. Ridiculous as this notion sounds, it may serve to mark a downward
limit from which the rudest types of human speech are not so very far
removed. Their well-known tendency to alter their whole character in
twenty years or less is due largely to the fluid nature of primitive
utterance; it being found hard to detach portions, capable of repeated
use in an unchanged form, from the composite vocables wherein they
register their highly concrete experiences.

Thus in the old Huron-Iroquois language _eschoirhon_ means
"I-have-been-to-the-water," _setsanha_ "Go-to-the-water,"
_ondequoha_ "There-is-water-in-the-bucket," _daustantewacharet_
"There-is-water-in-the-pot." In this case there is said to have been
a common word for "water," _awen_, which, moreover, is somehow
suggested to an aboriginal ear as an element contained in each of these
longer forms. In many other cases the difficulty of isolating the
common meaning, and fixing it by a common term, has proved too much
altogether for a primitive language. You can express twenty different
kinds of cutting; but you simply cannot say "cut" at all. No wonder
that a large vocabulary is found necessary, when, as in Zulu, "my
father," "thy father," "his-or-her-father," are separate
polysyllables without any element in common.

The evolution of language, then, on this view, may be regarded as a
movement out of, and away from, the holophrastic in the direction of
the analytic. When every piece in your play-box of verbal bricks can
be dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sorts
of ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructions
to your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown by English, and still
more conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building. Ideally,
words should be individual and atomic. Every modification they suffer
by internal change of sound, or by having prefixes or suffixes tacked
on to them, involves a curtailment of their free use and a sacrifice
of distinctness. It is quite easy, of course, to think confusedly,
even whilst employing the clearest type of language; though in such
a case it is very hard to do so without being quickly brought to book.
On the other hand, it is not feasible to attain to a high degree of
clear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one that
tends towards wordlessness--that is to say, is relatively deficient
in verbal forms that preserve their identity in all contexts. Wordless
thinking is not in the strictest sense impossible; but its somewhat
restricted opportunities lie almost wholly on the farther side, as
it were, of a clean-cut vocabulary. For the very fact that the words
are crystallized into permanent shape invests them with a suggestion
of interrupted continuity, an overtone of un-utilized significance,
that of itself invites the mind to play with the corresponding fringe
of meaning attaching to the concepts that the words embody.

It would prove an endless task if I were to try here to illustrate
at all extensively the stickiness, as one might almost call it, of
primitive modes of speech. Person, number, case, tense, mood and
gender--all these, even in the relatively analytical phraseology of
the most cultured peoples, are apt to impress themselves on the very
body of the words of which they qualify the sense. But the meagre list
of determinations thus produced in an evolved type of language can
yield one no idea of the vast medley of complicated forms that serve
the same ends at the lower levels of human experience. Moreover, there
are many other shades of secondary and circumstantial meaning which
in advanced languages are invariably represented by distinct words,
so that when not wanted they can be left out, but in a more primitive
tongue are apt to run right through the very grammar of the sentence,
thus mixing themselves up inextricably with the really substantial
elements in the thought to be conveyed. For instance, in some American
languages, things are either animate or inanimate, and must be
distinguished accordingly by accompanying particles. Or, again, they
are classed by similar means as rational or irrational; women, by the
bye, being designated amongst the Chiquitos by the irrational sign.
Reverential particles, again, are used to distinguish what is high
or low in the tribal estimation; and we get in this connection such
oddities as the Tamil practice of restricting the privilege of having
a plural to high-caste names, such as those applied to gods and human
beings, as distinguished from the beasts, which are mere casteless
"things." Or, once more, my transferable belongings, "my-spear," or
"my-canoe," undergo verbal modifications which are denied to
non-transferable possessions such as "my-hand"; "my-child," be it
observed, falling within the latter class.

Most interesting of all are distinctions of person. These cannot but
bite into the forms of speech, since the native mind is taken up mostly
with the personal aspect of things, attaining to the conception of
a bloodless system of "its" with the greatest difficulty, if at all.
Even the third person, which is naturally the most colourless, because
excluded from a direct part of the conversational game, undergoes
multitudinous leavening in the light of conditions which the primitive
mind regards as highly important, whereas we should banish them from
our thoughts as so much irrelevant "accident." Thus the Abipones in
the first place distinguished "he-present," _eneha_, and
"she-present," _anaha_, from "he-absent" and "she-absent." But
presence by itself gave too little of the speaker's impression. So,
if "he" or "she" were sitting, it was necessary to say _hiniha_ and
_haneha_; if they were walking and in sight _ehaha_ and _ahaha_, but,
if walking and out of sight, _ekaha_ and _akaha_; if they were lying
down, _hiriha_ and _haraha_, and so on. Moreover, these were all
"collective" forms, implying that there were others involved as well.
If "he" or "she" were alone in the matter, an entirely different set
of words was needed, "he-sitting (alone)" becoming _ynitara_, and so
forth. The modest requirements of Fuegian intercourse have called more
than twenty such separate pronouns into being.

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