Part 16 (1/2)

ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONDITIONS

In dealing with the folklore of any country, it is important to note the general bearing of anthropological conditions. The earliest inhabitants, to whom part of the folklore belonged, and the later peoples, to whom part belonged, have both arrived at their ultimate point of settlement in the country where we discover their folklore after being in touch with many points of the world's surface. They are both world-people as well as national people--they belonged to anthropology before they came under the dominion of history. This important fact is often or nearly always neglected. We are apt to treat of Greek and Roman and Briton, of Cretan, Scandinavian, and Russian, as bounded by the few thousands of years of life which have fixed them with their territorial names, and to ignore all that lies behind this historic period. There is, as a matter of fact, an immense period behind it, reckoned according to geological time in millions of years, and this period, longer in duration, more strenuous in its influences upon character and mind, containing more representatives in peoples, societies, and races than the later period, has affected the later period to a far greater extent than is generally conceded or understood. We cannot understand the later period without knowing something of the earlier period.

There is more than this; for the dominating political races occupying European countries to-day were, in most cases, preceded by a non-political people. Thus, if we turn to Britain for ill.u.s.tration, we find evidence of a people physically allied with a race which cannot be identified with Celt or Teuton,[284] philologically allied with a people which spoke a non-Aryan language,[285] archaeologically allied with the prehistoric stone-circle and monolith builders,[286] and we find custom, belief, and myth in Britain retaining traces of a culture which is not Celtic and not Teutonic, and which contains survivals of the primitive system of totemism.[287] These four independent cla.s.ses of evidence have to be combined if we would ascertain the true position they occupy in the history of Britain, and it is perfectly clear that, apart from general considerations, a direct appeal to anthropology is necessary to help out the deficiencies of both history and folklore. The questions involved in totemism alone compel us to this course. It is questionable whether there is any existing savage or barbaric people who are non-totemic in the sense of either not possessing the rudimentary beginnings of totemism, or not having once possessed a full system of totemism. Totemism, at one stage or another of its development, is, in fact, one of the universal elements of man's life, and all consideration of its traces in civilised countries must begin with some conception of its origin. Its origin must refer back to conditions of human life which are also universal. Special circ.u.mstances, special peoples, special areas could not have produced totemism unless we proceed to the somewhat violent conclusion that beginning in one area it has spread therefrom to all areas. I know of no authority who advocates such a theory and no evidence in its favour. We are left therefore with the proposition that the origin of totemism must be sought for in some universal condition of human life at one of its very early stages, which would have produced a state of things from which would inevitably arise the beliefs, customs, and social organisations which are included under the term totemism.

There is therefore ample ground for a consideration of anthropological conditions as part of the necessary equipment of the study of folklore as an historical science. Unfortunately, authorities are now greatly divided on several important questions in anthropology, and it is not possible to speak with even a reasonable degree of certainty on many things. This compels further research than the mere statement of the present position, and I find myself obliged even for my present limited purpose to suggest many new points beyond the stage reached by present research. There is one advantage in this. It allows of a hypothesis by which to present the subject to the student, and a working hypothesis is always a great advantage where research is not founded entirely on actual observation by trained experts in the field. Where, therefore, I depart from the guidance of conclusions already arrived at by scholars in this department of research, it will be in order to subst.i.tute an opinion of my own which I think it is necessary to consider, and the whole study of the anthropological problems in their relation to folklore will a.s.sume the shape of a restatement of the entire case.

I am aware that a subject of this magnitude is too weighty and far-reaching to be properly considered in a chapter of a book not devoted to the single purpose, but it is necessary to attempt a rough statement of the evidence, though it will take us somewhat beyond the ordinary domain of folklore; but, while dealing with the anthropological position at sufficient length to make a complicated subject clear, if I can do so, I shall limit both my arguments and the evidence in support of them to the narrowest limits.

I

Mr. Wallace, I think, supplies the dominant note of the anthropological position when he suggests, though in a strangely unsatisfactory terminology, that it is the conscious use by man of his experience which causes his superior mental endowments, and his superior range of development.[288] We must lay stress upon the important qualification ”conscious.” It is conscious use of experience which is the great factor in man's progress. It is the greatest possession of man in his beginning, and has remained his greatest possession ever since. His experience did not always lead him to the best paths of progress, but it has led him to progress.

Even Mr. Wallace did not appreciate the full significance of this principle. The conscious adoption of a natural fact, of an observation from nature, or an a.s.sumed observation from nature, for social purposes, is an altogether different thing from the unconscious knowledge which man might have been possessed of, but which he never put to any use in his social development. Anthropologists must note not the natural facts known to later man or known to science, but the facts, or a.s.sumed facts, which early man consciously adopted for his purpose during the long period of his development from savage to civilised forms of life. The unconscious acts of mankind are of no use, or of very little use. It is only the conscious acts that will lead us along the lines of man's development. Man did not begin to build up his social system with the scientific fact of blood kins.h.i.+p through father and mother, but he evolved a theory of social relations.h.i.+p which served his purpose until the fact of blood kins.h.i.+p supplied a better basis. At almost the first point of origin in savage society we see man acting consciously, and it is amongst his conscious acts that we must place those traces of a sort of primitive legislation which have been found.[289]

Now this being the basis of anthropological observation, we have to apply it to the question of man's earliest progress. It is at its base an economic question. Primitive economics dominated the movements and condition of early man in a far more thorough manner than modern economics affect civilisation, and between the two systems lies the whole history of man. It reveals man adapting the social unit to the productive powers of its food supply, and developing towards the adaptation of the productive powers of food supply to the social unit.

In the various stages that accompany this great change, there is no defined separation of peoples according to stages of culture, savage, barbaric, or civilised. There is nothing to suggest that all peoples do not come from one centre of human life. On the contrary, the evidence is strong that the primal stages in human evolution are traceable in all the culture stages, and, therefore, that they fit in with the general conclusions of anthropologists and naturalists as to man's origin in one definite centre, and his gradual spreading out from that centre.

I will take the chief conclusions arrived at in respect of this condition of birth at one centre and subsequent spreading out. Darwin has summarised the problem between the monogenists and polygenists in a manner which still ranks as a sufficient statement of the case, and his conclusion that ”all the races of man are descended from a single primitive stock”[290] is accepted by the most prominent naturalists,[291] and confirmed by recent discoveries, which go to prove that this primitive stock began in miocene or pliocene times in the Indo-Malaysian intertropical lands.[292]

Anthropologists, who have been deeply interested in the controversy ranging round the origin of man, have in a remarkable manner neglected to take into full account the most significant phenomenon of spreading out.[293] They either neglect it altogether, or they relegate it to so small a place in their argument as to become a practical neglect. They treat of man as if he were always in a stationary condition, and exclude the important condition of movement as an element in his development. Mr. Spencer's general dictum that geological changes and meteorological changes, as well as the consequent changes of flora and fauna, must have been causing over all parts of the earth perpetual emigrations and immigrations,[294] does not help much, because it refers to special and cataclysmic events. Lord Avebury, though stating the true case, unfortunately contents himself at the end of his book on prehistoric man with a short summary of the evidence as to the equipment of primitive man in mental and social qualities when he began the great movement, and gives only a few lines to his conclusion that ”there can be no doubt that he originally crept over the earth's surface little by little, year by year, just, for instance, as the weeds of Europe are now gradually but surely creeping over the surface of Australia.”[295]

Mr. Keane is the first authority who thinks it appropriate to commence his treatise on man with an examination of the facts which show that ”the world was peopled by migration from one centre by pleistocene man ... who moved about like other migrating faunas, unconsciously, everywhere following the lines of least resistance, advancing or receding, and acting generally on blind impulse rather than of set purpose;”[296] and it still remains with Dr. Latham to have formulated some fixed principles of the migratory movement in his admirable though, of course, wholly inadequate summary of man and his migrations. I will quote the pa.s.sage in full: ”So long as any continental extremities of the earth's surface remained unoccupied--the stream (or rather the enlarging circle of migration) not having yet reached them--the _primary_ migration is going on; and when all have got their complement, the primary migration is over.

During this primary migration, the relations of man, thus placed in movement and in the full, early and guiltless exercise of his high function of subduing the earth, are in conflict with physical obstacles and with the resistance of the lower animals only. Unless, like Lot's wife, he turn back upon the peopled parts behind him, he has no relations with his fellow-men--at least none arising out of the claim of previous occupancy. In other words, during the primary migration, the world that lay before our progenitors was either brute or inanimate. But before many generations have pa.s.sed away, all becomes full to overflowing, so that men must enlarge their boundaries at the expense of their fellows. The migrations that now take place are _secondary_. They differ from the primary in many respects. They are slower, because the resistance is that of humanity to humanity, and they are violent, because dispossession is the object. They are partial, abortive, followed by the fusion of different populations, or followed by their extermination as the case may be.”[297] This pa.s.sage, written so long ago as 1841, is still applicable to the facts of modern science, and there is only to add to it that the migration of man from a common centre, where life was easy, to all parts of the world, where life has been difficult, must have been undertaken in order to meet some great necessity, and must have become possible by reason of some great force which man alone possessed. The necessity was economic; the force was social development. If the movement has not been geographically ever forward, it has been ethnographically constant.[298] Movement always; sometimes the pressure has come from one direction, sometimes from another; sometimes it has caused compression and at other times expansion; sometimes it has sent humanity to inhabit regions that required generations of victims before it could hold its own. At all times the essential condition of life has been that of constant movement in face of antagonistic forces.[299] In whatever form the movement has come about, movement of a very definite character has taken place over an immense period of time, and sufficient to cover practically the whole earth with descendants from the original human stock. This conclusion is enormously strengthened by the acc.u.mulating evidence for the world-wide area covered by the remains of man's earliest weapon, the worked stone implement. It is everywhere. It is practically co-extensive with man's wanderings, and the greatness of the territory it covers marks it off as another of the universal relics of man's primitive life. Of no other weapon or instrument or a.s.sociated object can this be said. The bow and arrow are unknown to the Australians and other peoples; pottery is unknown to the Bushmen and other peoples; the use of fire in cookery is not found among the South Sea Islanders, and is not claimed for other peoples.[300] We can get behind the development of these and other arts and come upon the ruder people who had not arrived at the stage they represent. But we cannot get behind the worked flint. It must have been the chief material cause of man's success in the migratory movement, and with the social development accompanying it must have made migration not only possible, but the only true method of meeting the earliest economic difficulties. It also provides us with the elements of a chronological basis. Behind palaeolithic times there is an immensity of time when man struggled with his economic difficulties and spread out slowly and painfully.

During palaeolithic times the movement was more rapid and more general.

Obstacles were overcome by palaeolithic man becoming superior to his enemies by the use of weapons, and use of weapons caused, or at all events aided, the development of social inst.i.tutions capable of bearing the new force of movement.

These two factors of economic necessity and social development are of equal importance in man's history, and they interlace at all points.

They lead straight to the necessity for always taking count of the fact that man is primarily a migratory being, and that he has spread over the earth. Everywhere we find man. There is no habitable part of the world where he has not found a home. But we do not find him under equal conditions everywhere, and the different conditions afford evidence of the main lines of development. Roughly speaking, it may be put in this way. In the savage world the people appear as aborigines, that is to say, the first and only occupiers of the territory where they are located. In the barbaric world the condition of aboriginal settlement is tinged with the result of conquest, namely, the pus.h.i.+ng out or absorption of the aboriginal folk in favour of a more powerful and conquering folk. In the political world, and in the political world only, there is not only the element of conquest, but the definite aim of conquest, which is to retain the aboriginal or conquered people as part of the political fabric necessary to the settlement of the conqueror, and at the same time to keep intact the superior position of the conqueror. In the savage world, society and religion are based upon locality; in the barbaric world there is the first sign of the element of kins.h.i.+p consciously used in the effort of conquest, which dies away gradually as successful settlement, by which conqueror and conquered become merged in one people, follows conquest; in the political world, and in the political world only, kins.h.i.+p is elevated into a necessary inst.i.tution, is made sacred to the minds of tribesmen, and becomes an essential part of the religion of the tribe in order to keep the organisation of the tribal conquerors intact and free from the perils of dissolution when conquerors and conquered become members of one political unit. The savage and barbaric worlds are the homes of the backward peoples, the non-advanced or fossilised types of early humanity. The political world is the domain for the most part of the Aryan-speaking people, and of the Semitic people, and of those people who in Egypt within the Mediterranean area, and in China in the eastern Asian area, have built up civilisations which have only recently come under scientific observation.

These distinctions are not made by anthropologists as a rule, yet I cannot but think they are in the main the true distinctions which must be made if we are to arrive at any general conception of the progress of man from savagery to civilisation. The distinctions which seem to hold the field against those I have suggested, are those of hunter, pastoral, and agricultural. I say seem to hold the field, because they have never been scientifically worked out. They are stated in textbooks and research work almost as an axiom of anthropology, but their claim to this position is singularly weak and unsatisfactory, and has never been scientifically established. They are only economical distinctions, not social, and they do not properly express related stages. Hunting, cattle keeping, and agriculture are found in almost all stages of social evolution, and I, for one, deny that in the order they are generally given, they express anything approaching to accurate indication of the line of human progress. The distinctions I have suggested do not, of course, contain everything indicative of human progress. They are the first broad outlines to be filled up by the details of special peoples, special areas, and special ages. They involve many sub-stages which need to be properly worked out, and for which a satisfactory terminology is required. In the meantime, as measuring-posts of man's line of progress, they express the most important fact about man, namely, that his present enforced stationary condition has followed upon an enormous period of enforced movement. That movement has finally resulted in the presence of man everywhere on the earth's surface. This has been followed by the continued moving of savage man within the limited areas to which he has been finally pushed; by the movement of barbaric man from one place of settlement to another place of settlement, again within limited areas; and by the movement of political man through countries and continents of vast extent, and the final overlords.h.i.+p of political man over savage and barbaric man whom he has subjected and used for his purpose of final settlement in the civilised form of settlement.

It will be apparent from the terms I have used to express the three chief stages in man's progress, that I give a special significance to the use of blood kins.h.i.+p as a social force, and in the sequel I think this special significance will be justified.[301]

No one can properly estimate the tremendous amount of movement which preceded these later limitations to movement. Savage and barbaric races are now hemmed in by the forces of modern civilisation. This was not the case even a few hundred years ago, and though we cannot say when constant movement all over the world was stayed, we can form some idea of the comparatively late period when this took place by a contemplation of the very recent growth of the political civilisations known to history. At the most, this can only be reckoned at some ten thousand years. At the back of this short stretch of time, or of the successive periods at which the new civilisations have arisen, there are recollections of great movements and great migrations. Egypt, Babylonia, India, Persia, Greece, and Rome have preserved these recollections by tradition, and tradition has been largely confirmed by archaeology. Celts and Teutons have preserved parallel traditions which are confirmed by history observed from without. These traditions and memorials of the migration period have not been scientifically examined in each case, but where scholars have touched upon them, great and unexpected results have been produced.[302]

There was time enough, before these late and special movements which led to civilisation, for man, in the course of peopling the earth, to be brought at various stages to a standstill, and such a change in his life-history would have its own special results. One of the most momentous of these results is the fossilisation of social and mental conditions. Man stationary, or movable by custom within restricted areas, would live under conditions which must have produced forms of culture different from those under which man lived when he was always able to penetrate, not by custom but by the force of circ.u.mstances, into the unknown domain of unoccupied territory; and the fossilisation of his culture at various stages of development, in accord with the various periods of his being brought to a standstill, would be the most important result.[303] Whenever man was compelled to move onward the social forces which were demanded of him, as he proceeded from point to point, must have been quite different from those which he could have adopted if he had been allowed to stay in areas which suited him, if he could have selected his settlement grounds and awaited events. The calmness of the latter methods would perhaps have led to the unconscious development of social forms; the roughness of the actual method of constant movement led to the conscious adoption of social forms which has altered man's history. These considerations bring us to the conclusion that it is during the period of migratory movement that man has developed the social and religious elements with which the anthropologist finds him endowed, when at last in modern days he has been brought within the ken of scientific observation, and that therefore it is as a migratory not a stationary organism that the evolution of human society has to be studied, aided by the fact that enforced stationary conditions have produced in the savage world examples of perhaps the most remote as well as the more recent types of primitive humanity.

This last possibility, however, is not admitted by the best authorities. They endeavour to use biological methods in order to get behind existing savagery for the earliest period of human savagery.

Darwin is not satisfied with the evidence as to promiscuity, strong as it appeared to him to be, and he p.r.o.nounced it to be ”extremely improbable” in a state of nature, and falls back upon the evidence of the rudimentary stages of human existence, there being, as among the gorillas, but one adult male in the band, and ”when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for the mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community.”[304] Mr. McLennan nowhere states the evidence for his first stage of human society--the primitive horde without any ideas of kins.h.i.+p, and based upon a fellows.h.i.+p of common interests and dangers[305]--but arrives at it by argument deduced from the conditions of later stages of development, and from the necessary suppositions as to the pre-existing stage which must have led to the later. Mr. Westermarck leads us straight to the evidence of the lower animals, from which he arrives at the small groups of humans headed by the male, and provides us with the theory of a human pairing season.[306] Mr. Morgan claims that no exemplification of mankind in his a.s.sumed lower status of savagery remained to the historical period,[307] presumably meaning the anthropo-historical period. And finally, Mr. Lang definitely claims that conjecture, and conjecture alone, remains as the means of getting back to the earliest human origins.[308]

There is great danger in relying too closely upon conjecture. We shall be repeating in anthropology what the a.n.a.lytical jurists accomplished in law and jurisprudence, and it will then soon become necessary to do for anthropology what Sir Henry Maine did for comparative jurisprudence, namely, demonstrate that the a.n.a.lytical method does not take us back to human origins, but to highly developed systems of society. Law, in the hands of the a.n.a.lytical jurists, is merely one part of the machinery of modern government. Social beginnings in the hands of conjectural anthropologists are merely abstractions with the whole history of man put on one side. Mr. Lang in leading the way towards the a.n.a.lytical method in anthropology has avoided many of its pitfalls, but his disciples are not so successful. Thus, when Mr.

Thomas declares that ”custom which has among them [primitive peoples]

far more power than law among us, determines whether a man is of kin to his mother and her relatives alone, or to his father and father's relatives, or whether both sets of relatives are alike of kin to them,”[309] he is neglecting the whole significance and range of custom. His statement is true a.n.a.lytically, but it is not true anthropologically until we have ascertained what this custom to which he refers really is, whence it is derived, how it has obtained its force, what is its range of action, how it operates in differentiating among the various groups of mankind--in a word, what is the human history a.s.sociated with this custom.

We must, however, at certain points in anthropological inquiry have recourse to the conjectural method. Its value lies in the fact that it states, and states clearly, the issue which is before us, and it is always possible to take up the conjectural position and endeavour to ascertain whether the neglected facts of human history which it expresses can be recovered. Its danger lies in the neglect of certain anthropological principles which can only be noted from definite examples, and the significance of which can only be discovered by the handling of definite examples. I will refer to one or two of the principles which I have in mind. Thus, it is necessary to distinguish between what is a practice and what is a rule. A practice precedes a rule. A practice incidental to one stage of society must not be confused with a rule, similar to the practice, obtaining in a different stage of society. Again, it must be borne in mind that ident.i.ty of practice is no certain evidence of parallel stages of culture, and already it has been pointed out that identical practices do not always come from the same causes. Thirdly, it has to be borne in mind that primitive peoples specialise in certain directions to an extreme extent, and correspondingly cause neglect in other directions.

The normal, therefore, has to give way to the special, and it is the degree of specialisation and the degree of neglect which are measuring factors of progress; in other words, it is the conscious adoption of certain rules of life with which we alone have to do.