Robert Marett - Anthropology

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Without attempting to go thoroughly into the efforts of primitive
speech to curtail its interest in the personnel of its world by
gradually acquiring a stock of de-individualized words, let us glance
at another aspect of the subject, because it helps to bring out the
fundamental fact that language is a social product, a means of
intersubjective intercourse developed within a society that hands on
to a new generation the verbal experiments that are found to succeed
best. Payne shows reason for believing that the collective "we"
precedes "I" in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in
America and elsewhere, "we" may be inclusive and mean "all-of-us,"
or selective, meaning "some-of-us-only." Hence, we are told, a
missionary must be very careful, and, if he is preaching, must use
the inclusive "we" in saying "we have sinned," lest the congregation
assume that only the clergy have sinned; whereas, in praying, he must
use the selective "we," or God would be included in the list of sinners.
Similarly, "I" has a collective form amongst some American languages,
and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selective
form is used only in special cases. Thus if the question be "Who will
help?" the Apache will reply "I-amongst-others," "I-for-one"; but,
if he were recounting his own personal exploits, he says _sheedah_,
"I-by-myself," to show that they were wholly his own. Here we seem
to have group-consciousness holding its own against individual
self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more
normal attitude of mind.

Another illustration of the sociality engrained in primitive speech
is to be found in the terms employed to denote relationship.
"My-mother," to the child of nature, is something more than an ordinary
mother like yours. Thus, as we have already seen, there may be a special
particle applying to blood-relations as non-transferable possessions.
Or, again, one Australian language has special duals, "we-two," one
to be used between relations generally, another between father and
child only. Or an American language supplies one kind of plural suffix
for blood-relations, another for the rest of human beings. These
linguistic concretions are enough to show how hard it is for primitive
thought to disjoin what is joined fast in the world of everyday
experience.

No wonder that it is usually found impracticable by the European
traveller who lacks an anthropological training to extract from
natives any coherent account of their system of relationships; for
his questions are apt to take the form of "Can a man marry his deceased
wife's sister?" or what not. Such generalities do not enter at all
into the highly concrete scheme of viewing the customs of his tribe
imposed on the savage alike by his manner of life and by the very forms
of his speech. The so-called "genealogical method" initiated by Dr.
Rivers, which the scientific explorer now invariably employs, rests
mainly on the use of a concrete type of procedure corresponding to
the mental habits of the simple folk under investigation. John, whom
you address here, can tell you exactly whether he may, or may not,
marry Mary Anne over there; also he can point out his mother, and tell
you her name, and the names of his brothers and sisters. You work round
the whole group--it very possibly contains no more than a few hundred
members at most--and interrogate them one and all about their
relationships to this and that individual whom you name. In course
of time you have a scheme which you can treat in your own analytic
way to your heart's content; whilst against your system of reckoning
affinity you can set up by way of contrast the native system; which
can always be obtained by asking each informant what relationship-terms
he would apply to the different members of his pedigree, and,
reciprocally, what terms they would each apply to him.

* * * * *

Before closing this altogether inadequate sketch of a vast and
intricate subject, I would say just one word about the expression of
ideas of number. It is quite a mistake to suppose that savages have
no sense of number, because the simple-minded European traveller,
compiling a short vocabulary in the usual way, can get no equivalent
for our numerals, say from 5 to 10. The fact is that the numerical
interest has taken a different turn, incorporating itself with other
interests of a more concrete kind in linguistic forms to which our
own type of language affords no key at all. Thus in the island of Kiwai,
at the mouth of the Fly River in New Guinea, the Cambridge Expedition
found a whole set of phrases in vogue, whereby the number of subjects
acting on the number of objects at a given moment could be concretely
specified. To indicate the action of two on many in the past, they
said _rudo_, in the present _durudo_; of many on many in the past _rumo_,
in the present _durumo_; of two on two in the past, _amarudo_, in the
present _amadurudo_; of many on two in the past _amarumo_; of many
on three in the past _ibidurumo_, of many on three in the present
_ibidurudo_; of three on two in the present, _amabidurumo_, of three
on two in the past, _amabirumo_, and so on. Meanwhile, words to serve
the purpose of pure counting are all the scarcer because hands and
feet supply in themselves an excellent means not only of calculating,
but likewise of communicating, a number. It is the one case in which
gesture-language can claim something like an independent status by
the side of speech.

For the rest, it does not follow that the mind fails to appreciate
numerical relations, because the tongue halts in the matter of
symbolizing them abstractly. A certain high official, when presiding
over the Indian census, was informed by a subordinate that it was
impossible to elicit from a certain jungle tribe any account of the
number of their huts, for the simple and sufficient reason that they
could not count above three. The director, who happened to be a man
of keen anthropological insight, had therefore himself to come to the
rescue. Assembling the tribal elders, he placed a stone on the ground,
saying to one "This is your hut," and to another "This is your hut,"
as he placed a second stone a little way from the first. "And now where
is yours?" he asked a third. The natives at once entered into the spirit
of the game, and in a short time there was plotted out a plan of the
whole settlement, which subsequent verification proved to be both
geographically and numerically correct and complete. This story may
serve to show how nature supplies man with a ready reckoner in his
faculty of perception, which suffices well enough for the affairs of
the simpler sort of life. One knows how a shepherd can take in the
numbers of a flock at a glance. For the higher flights of experience,
however, especially when the unseen and merely possible has to be dealt
with, percepts must give way to concepts; massive consciousness must
give way to thinking by means of representations pieced together out
of elements rendered distinct by previous dissection of the total
impression; in short, a concrete must give way to an analytic way of
grasping the meaning of things. Moreover, since thinking is little
more or less than, as Plato put it, a silent conversation with oneself,
to possess an analytic language is to be more than half-way on the
road to the analytic mode of intelligence--the mode of thinking by
distinct concepts.

If there is a moral to this chapter, it must be that, whereas it is
the duty of the civilized overlords of primitive folk to leave them
their old institutions so far as they are not directly prejudicial
to their gradual advancement in culture, since to lose touch with one's
home-world is for the savage to lose heart altogether and die; yet
this consideration hardly applies at all to the native language. If
the tongue of an advanced people can be substituted, it is for the
good of all concerned. It is rather the fashion now-a-days amongst
anthropologists to lay it down as an axiom that the typical savage
and the typical peasant of Europe stand exactly on a par in respect
to their power of general intelligence. If by power we are to understand
sheer potentiality, I know of no sufficient evidence that enables us
to say whether, under ideal conditions, the average degree of mental
capacity would in the two cases prove the same or different. But I
am sure that the ordinary peasant of Europe, whose society provides
him, in the shape of an analytic language, with a ready-made instrument
for all the purposes of clear thinking, starts at an immense advantage,
as compared with a savage whose traditional speech is holophrastic.
Whatever be his mental power, the former has a much better chance of
making the most of it under the given circumstances. "Give them the
words so that the ideas may come," is a maxim that will carry us far,
alike in the education of children, and in that of the peoples of lower
culture, of whom we have charge.

CHAPTER VI
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

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. Sutherland's statistics, and regard
his bold attempt to assign the world's peoples each to their own rung
on the ladder of universal culture as, in the present state of our
knowledge, no more than a clever hypothesis; which some keen
anthropologist of the future might find it well worth his while to
put thoroughly to the test. At a guess, however, I am disposed to accept
his general principle that, on the whole and in the long run, during
the earlier stages of human evolution, the complexity and coherence
of the social order follow upon the size of the group; which, since
its size, in turn, follows upon the mode of the economic life, may
be described as the food-group.

Besides food, however, there is a second elemental condition which
vitally affects the human race; and that is sex. Social organization
thus comes to have a twofold aspect. On the one hand, and perhaps
primarily, it is an organization of the food-quest. On the other hand,
hardly less fundamentally, it is an organization of marriage. In what
follows, the two aspects will be considered more or less together,
as to a large extent they overlap. Primitive men, like other social
animals, hang together naturally in the hunting pack, and no less
naturally in the family; and at a very rudimentary stage of evolution
there probably is very little distinction between the two. When,
however, for some reason or other which anthropologists have still
to discover, man takes to the institution of exogamy, the law of
marrying-out, which forces men and women to unite who are members of
more or less distinct food-groups, then, as we shall presently see,
the matrimonial aspect of social organization tends to overshadow the
politico-economic; if only because the latter can usually take care
of itself, whereas to marry a perfect stranger is an embarrassing
operation that might be expected to require a certain amount of
arrangement on both sides.

* * * * *

To illustrate the pre-exogamic stage of human society is not so easy
as it may seem; for, though it is possible to find examples, especially
amongst Negritos such as the Andamanese or Bushmen, of peoples of the
rudest culture, and living in very small communities, who apparently
know neither exogamy nor what so often accompanies it, namely, totemism,
we can never be certain whether we are dealing in such a case with
the genuinely primitive, or merely with the degenerate. For instance,
the chapter on the forms of social organization in Professor Hobhouse's
_Morals in Evolution_ starts off with an account of the system in vogue
amongst the Veddas of the Ceylon jungle, his description being founded
on the excellent observations of the brothers Sarasin. Now it is
perfectly true that some of the Veddas appear to afford a perfect
instance of what is sometimes called "the natural family." A tract
of a few miles square forms the beat of a small group of families,
four or five at most, which, for the most part, singly or in pairs,
wander round hunting, fishing, gathering honey and digging up the wild
yams; whilst they likewise take shelter together in shallow caves,
where a roof, a piece of skin to lie on--though this is not
essential--and, that most precious luxury of all, a fire, represent,
apart from food, the sum total of their creature comforts.

Now, under these circumstances, it is not, perhaps, wonderful that
the relationships within a group should be decidedly close. Indeed,
the correct thing is for the children of a brother and sister to marry;
though not, it would seem, for the children of two brothers or of two
sisters. And yet there is no approach to promiscuity, but, on the
contrary, a very strict monogamy, infidelities being as rare as they
are deeply resented. That they had clans of some sort was, indeed,
known to Professor Hobhouse and to the authorities whom he follows;
but these clans are dismissed as having but the slightest organization
and very few functions. An entirely new light, however, has been thrown
on the meaning of this clan-system by the recent researches of Dr.
and Mrs. Seligmann. It now turns out that some of the Veddas are
exogamous--that is to say, are obliged by custom to marry outside their
own clan--though others are not. The question then arises, Which, for
the Veddas, is the older system, marrying-out or marrying-in? Seeing
what a miserable remnant the Veddas are, I cannot but believe that
we have here the case of a formerly exogamous people, groups of which
have been forced to marry-in, simply because the alternative was not
to marry at all. Of course, it is possible to argue that in so doing
they merely reverted to what was once everywhere the primeval condition
of man. But at this point historical science tails off into mere
guesswork.

* * * * *

We reach relatively firm ground, on the other hand, when we pass on
to consider the social organization of such exogamous and totemic
peoples as the natives of Australia. The only trouble here is that
the subject is too vast and complicated to permit of a handling at
once summary and simple. Perhaps the most useful thing that can be
done for the reader in a short space is to provide him with a few
elementary distinctions, applying not only to the Australians, but
more or less to totemic societies in general. With the help of these
he may proceed to grapple for himself with the mass of highly
interesting but bewildering details concerning social organization
to be found in any of the leading first-hand authorities. For instance,
for Australia he can do no better than consult the two fascinating
works of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen on the Central tribes, or the no
less illuminating volume of Howitt on the natives of the South-eastern
region; whilst for North America there are many excellent monographs
to choose from amongst those issued by the Bureau of Ethnology of the
Smithsonian Institution. Or, if he is content to allow some one else
to collect the material for him, his best plan will be to consult Dr.
Frazer's monumental treatise, _Totemism and Exogamy_, which
epitomizes the known facts for the whole wide world, as surveyed region
by region.

The first thing to grasp is that, for peoples of this type, social
organization is, primarily and on the face of it, identical with
kinship-organization. Before proceeding further, let us see what
kinship means. Distinguish kinship from consanguinity. Consanguinity
is a physical fact. It depends on birth, and covers all one's real
blood-relationships, whether recognized by society or not. Kinship,
on the other hand, is a sociological fact. It depends on the
conventional system of counting descent. Thus it may exclude real
relationships; whilst, contrariwise, it may include such as are purely
fictitious, as when some one is allowed by law to adopt a child as
if it were his own. Now, under civilized conditions, though there is,
as we have just seen, such an institution as adoption, whilst, again,
there is the case of the illegitimate child, who can claim
consanguinity, but can never, in English law at least, attain to
kinship, yet, on the whole, we are hardly conscious of the difference
between the genuine blood-tie and the social institution that is
modelled more or less closely upon it. In primitive society, however,
consanguinity tends to be wider than kinship by as much again. In other
words, in the recognition of kinship one entire side of the family
is usually left clean out of account. A man's kin comprises either
his mother's people or his father's people, but not both. Remember
that by the law of exogamy, the father and mother are strangers to
each other. Hence, primitive society, as it were, issues a judgment
of Solomon to the effect that, since they are not prepared to halve
their child, it must belong body and soul either to one party or to
the other.

We may now go on to analyse this one-sided type of kinship-organization
a little more fully. There are three elementary principles that combine
to produce it. They are exogamy, lineage and totemism. A word must
be said about each in turn.

Exogamy presents no difficulty until you try to account for its origin.
It simply means marrying-out, in contrast to endogamy, or marrying-in.
Suppose there were a village composed entirely of McIntyres and
McIntoshes, and suppose that fashion compelled every McIntyre to marry
a McIntosh, and every McIntosh a McIntyre, whilst to marry an outsider,
say a McBean, was bad form for McIntyres and McIntoshes alike; then
the two clans would be exogamous in respect to each other, whereas
the village as a whole would be endogamous.

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