Chapter XV · THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION: OLD WORLD HISTORY AND ETHNOLOGY (continued 2)

260. Indo-China

Farther India or Indo-China, the great southeastern peninsula of Asia, falls somewhat short of India and China in area, is less densely inhabited, and contains a population which is of definitely Mongolian type except for some scattered fragments of hill tribes. On the basis of speech, four groups are to be distinguished. In the southwestern and southeastern corners of the peninsula, in the former kingdoms of Pegu and Cambodia, are the Mon and the Khmer, certainly related to each other and perhaps distantly connected with the Malayo-Polynesian family. On the east are the Anamese, with a monosyllabic, tonal language whose affiliations are doubtful. It contains a Chinese element, but perhaps by absorption rather than by original connection. The center and west of Indo-China are occupied respectively by the peoples of the T’ai or Siamese-Shan and Tibeto-Burman groups, both probably collateral offshoots with Chinese from what may be called the original Sinitic stock (§ 50). The movement of population has clearly been out of inner Asia into the peninsula. The Mon-Khmer are situated like half submerged remnants. Burma on the map hangs from Tibet like the outgrowth that it probably is. Seven centuries ago, the T’ai empire was centered in Yünnan, in southwestern China. Siam represents a southward shift of the seat of T’ai power after Mongol conquest (Fig. 12).

The Malay peninsula is Siamese in its narrow or neck portion. The head is inhabited by three racial groups. The Semang in the interior are pure Negritos. The Sakai or Senoi, also in the interior, are short in stature, dark, and broad nosed, but wavy-haired. They resemble a series of hill tribes scattered from India to the East Indies: the Vedda of Ceylon, the Irula and other tribes of southern India, the Toala of Celebes (§ 27, 257). Perhaps the Kolarians or Munda-Kol of central India, the Moi and other groups of Indo-China, the Nicobar islanders, and certain nationalities of Sumatra are also to be reckoned as partial representatives of the same type. This race, if it is such, is generalized, with certain Caucasian and other Negroid but few Mongoloid resemblances. It is perhaps to be classed as Australoid, and has been named Indo-Australoid. The third racial group of the peninsula are the Malays, who, at least in large part, are emigrants in comparatively recent centuries from Sumatra. Culturally the Malay peninsula belongs with the East Indies rather than with Indo-China.

Three main layers of civilization are evident in Indo-China. The old native culture was allied to that of the East Indies and the islands beyond—whatever the speech may have been. Even to-day backward tribes of both regions, especially inland, often show strikingly similar customs: the use of bark cloth, for instance, separate houses for unmarried men and girls. This culture remains fairly well defined in spots as far west as Assam and the Kolarian region of India.

The two other civilizations have flowed in from India and China. Practically everything of higher culture in Indo-China traces back directly to these two countries. The Indian influence has been both wider and deeper than the Chinese. It brought in Buddhism and writing, and colored art and architecture. This Indian influence began more than two thousand years ago, and while it may have weakened somewhat after India’s return from Buddhism to Brahmanism, it has never ceased. As there were no notable Indian conquests, this influence is an excellent example of the normal, gradual type of cultural pervading. Chinese contacts are equally old as the Indian, but have mostly remained confined to the area adjacent to the Middle Kingdom. The Anamese have adopted the Chinese system of family names, Confucianism, literary examinations, and the like, sometimes more largely as a conscious endeavor than in fact.

261. Oceania

From the Malay peninsula the vast island region of Oceania stretches eastward to within two thousand miles of America. Australia deserves to be set apart on account of its continental size, isolation, and ancient biological independence. Oceania proper falls into five natural divisions. These are Indonesia or Malaysia[38] or the East Indies, where large islands are scattered among many small ones; Papua or New Guinea; and three tracts of relatively small, widely separated islands rising out of the depths of the Pacific: Melanesia, a broken chain southeastward from New Guinea; Micronesia, to the northeast; and Polynesia, far eastward. Two primary facts stand out in regard to the inhabitants. Papua and Melanesia are peopled with blacks, the Oceanic Negroids; the other regions have brown inhabitants of prevailingly Mongoloid affiliations. Linguistically a single fundamental speech, the Malayo-Polynesian, prevails over all of Oceania except Papua, whose tongues so far as known fail to connect with any others or with one another. Large unanswered problems inhere in these distributions: how the Oceanic Negroids are related to those of Africa, from whom they are so remote geographically but whom they resemble so strikingly in type; how the black Melanesians came to talk dialects of Malayo-Polynesian,[39] which otherwise is a speech of brown peoples. More in detail, there are questions such as where and how the Polynesians developed their somewhat aberrant racial characteristics; what may be the relations of a more and a less specifically Mongoloid, a broader and a longer headed strain, among the East Indians; and whether the latter of these connects racially with the “Indo-Australians.”

262. The East Indies

Culturally, the East Indies are the most diverse of the Oceanic regions, in that the various islands, and within the larger islands adjacent districts, sometimes contain populations heavily tinctured with Asiatic civilization, sometimes tribes whose customs are far more aboriginal. However, there is no people in the East Indies that has wholly escaped the influence of Asiatic culture: the difference is always one of degree, although ranging from what is currently called semi-civilization to savagery. The profoundest influence has been exerted by India. This began nearly two thousand years ago and remained active for over a thousand; it introduced architecture, sculpture, writing, monarchy, religion, iron, cotton, and a host of other elements of higher culture. The earlier Indian influence was Buddhist and its seat of power centered in southern Sumatra; the later was Brahman and reached its zenith in Java. The number of immigrants was probably small, their effect enormous. A group of refugees, a younger son of a royal house with his retinue, a band of adventurers, would found a colony, sometimes conquering the natives, sometimes attaching them peacefully to their leadership, and soon a little kingdom was flourishing, which in time sent out other offshoots or absorbed its rivals until its name commanded respect and tribute for long distances across the sea. It was a procedure which the Mohammedanized Malays later repeated over the East Indies, and which on the Asiatic continent some centuries earlier had carried Chinese civilization far to the north and south of its original limits, and Aryan speech and culture throughout India. The kingdoms struggled, throve, decayed, and succeeded one another; the permanent aspect of the process was the ever deeper though irregular permeation of life with new arts and ideas.

The influence of China came later and was less than that of India. In the thirteenth century the Sumatran Malays were converted to Mohammedanism and began a career of expansion which culminated in the complete conquest of Java by 1478, carried their faith over much of the area, and was checked only by the advent of the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Dutch. Mohammedanism, besides its cult and law, introduced some new elements of culture, such as firearms; but perhaps its most important effect was that it put an end to the growth of the specifically Indian type of influence in Malaysia.

Underlying these strains from the historic civilizations of Asia was a semi-primitive culture, many of whose elements were shared by the East Indians with the Indo-Chinese and Melanesians, and which in part can be traced from India to Polynesia. This Indo-Oceanic culture included agriculture—with rice and sugar cane in Malaysia and on the mainland; domestic animals of its own—the buffalo, pig, and fowl—different from those of north and west Asia; pottery, bark clothing, possibly bronze, though if so this was intrusive; men’s clubs or sleeping houses; a non-political organization of society on the basis of kinship and tribal community; and such practices as head hunting and skull cult. The employment of bamboo and rattan was a prime characteristic, and seems to have prevented a vigorous stone age from having flourished in the East Indies and adjacent regions. Bamboo is perhaps capable of serving more different cultural uses than any one other plant. It makes satisfactory houses, rafts, knives, spears, bows, arrows, blowguns, textiles, cooking vessels, receptacles, and musical instruments, with a minimum of labor. It is best worked with metal tools, and has therefore perhaps experienced its most thorough utilization at the hands of peoples too backward to secure a large supply of metals for themselves but able to obtain a limited stock of iron from their neighbors. Nevertheless even the prehistoric culture of the region is likely to have made large use of bamboo.

This primitive culture of course varied locally. It was also not of unitary origin. It certainly contained elements that were older than others, or that originated in different parts of the area. Rice and fowls for instance are likely to be more recent than skull cult and use of bamboo. The culture may even resolve, when it shall have been analyzed more intensively, into two or more fairly separable strata. But, taken in block, it must once have prevailed with fundamental similarity from eastern India well out into the Pacific, since everywhere within this tract there are to-day hill and jungle peoples whose culture conforms at least roughly to the type. It is necessary to remember, however, that nowhere does this culture survive in purity. To some degree the influence of the greater Asiatic civilizations has made itself felt among the most aloof tribes. They mix a few Hindu religious concepts with their head hunting rituals, for instance, or know how to forge imported iron, or even grow American maize. They have everywhere been exposed in some degree to contact with cultures of subsequent level. Thus it is characteristic that the Negritos, whose scattered distribution indicates that they may have been the first inhabitants of the East Indies, possess a debased or parasitic Malaysian culture instead of a specific Negrito one.

263. Melanesia and Polynesia

As one passes out from the East Indies into New Guinea and Melanesia, the mass effect of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization comes to an end, and the primitive culture that has been outlined is altered. Metals, rice, the buffalo, disappear. The growing of taro and other tropical plants, the pig and fowl, the use of bamboo where nature permits, skull cult or cannibalism, remain. Other features, such as the totemic and matrilinear moiety organization of society and adolescence rites for girls, obtrude, and are sometimes elaborately developed. How far such traits represent secondary local developments or on the other hand survivals from a Negroid culture phase anterior to that of primitive Malaysian-Southeast Asiatic culture, is not clear. Local diversity of custom is unusually great in both New Guinea and Melanesia.

Micronesia and Polynesia present a different although allied set of problems. The Polynesians in particular manifest a remarkable uniformity of speech and, on the whole, of culture, especially in view of the thousands of miles of ocean through which their island groups are dispersed. This uniformity suggests that the language and culture became characterized in a limited area from which they spread over Polynesia after or while contact with the remainder of the world was lost. But it is difficult to settle even tentatively on such an area of original characterization because certain sides of Polynesian culture are relatively high and carry suggestions of Asia, whereas other elements are lacking which would be expectable if higher Asiatic influences had ever carried to the ancestral Polynesians. Royal lineage, for example, bears to the Polynesians a powerful implication of sanctity, of descent from the gods, such as is unparalleled among any truly primitive people. Religion and mythology also contain an abstract, spiritual strain that is almost reminiscent of Buddhism. Yet there seems no single specific idea or name that can be traced to an Asiatic source; and the essentially ancient ideas of magic and taboo are strong—the word taboo itself is Polynesian. There are structures and sculpture in stone, sometimes monumental, but never more than barbaric in quality. The absence of metals may mean little, since they might have been possessed but the art have been lost in the island habitat, often coralline. Yet pottery, the bow and arrow, the men’s club house, the clan or moiety type of society, are also wanting or weakly developed. On the other hand, the dog, pig, and fowl, cultivated plants like taro, bark cloth, cannibalism, and human sacrifice are shared with the island regions to the west.

The various Polynesians possess genealogies and often migration traditions which on comparison, and after computation of the number of generations, seem to point to two waves of migration, both within the Christian era, perhaps about the fifth and tenth centuries respectively. The traditions fail, however, to throw clear light on the area of origin, since they attribute this either to Hawaiki, which may be either Java or a mythical land, or crisscross back and forth among the island groups within Polynesia. Something of the mysteriousness which the discoverers felt continues to attach to the origin and history of this people, and is deepened by the fact that the affiliations of their racial type remain ambiguous.

264. Australia

The human history of Australia is as detached from that of the remainder of the world as its biological history. The race is distinctive: sub-Negroid, it might be called. The languages relate to no other. The culture is primitive and well characterized. The isolation of Australia was aided by the fact that the one approach to it other than by a sea-voyage of some length, the approach across Torres Straits, was blocked by New Guinea, the area of most backward culture in Oceania. The Papuans did not possess enough civilization to hand on much to the Australians; but they prevented higher elements from Asia from flowing to them.

The Australians lacked not only all agriculture and domestic animals, but pottery, the bow, and apparently the harpoon. These deficiencies would at once stamp their culture as pre-Neolithic in type, were it not that they grind some stone implements.

All in all, Australian culture is unusually meager on the industrial and economic side. Houses, clothing, weapons, boats, tools, are most scantily developed: often lacking and always rude. This poverty of Australian material culture cannot be explained wholly from the prevailing desert character of a large part of the continent, since the natives of the most favored regions were not appreciably better off as regards variety of arts conducive to comfort.

Social organization is much more complicated than the arts. Most of the Australians are divided into moieties, which frequently are subdivided into four classes or eight-sub-classes, all exogamous. A frequent peculiarity is that the child belongs to a different class from both its parents. So far as the moiety is concerned, custom varies locally as to whether the child is born into the mother’s or father’s side of the community. Frequently there are also hereditary totemic groups. These may be subdivisions of the moieties or descend independently of them. A few tribes, chiefly in southeastern Australia, are without moieties or classes; some are totemless (Fig. 29). The moiety scheme of course prescribes equally that one must marry into the opposite moiety and out of one’s own. The extension of this principle to classes and sub-classes still farther limits the group among whom marriage is permissible, thereby emphasizing its prescriptive character. Where the individual belongs to a third or different class from his parents, his wife must come from the fourth or remaining one, and his children will belong again to the first or second, according as moiety descent is patrilinear or matrilinear. Consequently he has blood relatives in every class; and conversely all the members of each class stand in a certain defined kinship to every individual in the community, according to their respective sex and age. This means not only that certain relatives are within the absolutely prohibited degrees, but that others are prescriptive spouses. These are only a few of the innumerable ramifications and variations of Australian social organization.

The origin of these social schemes is in dispute. Some ethnologists interpret them as original inventions of the Australians, manifestations of their peculiar primitiveness. Others look upon then as evolved somewhere in the region between India and Melanesia where analogous institutions are frequently encountered, and as carried into Australia by diffusion or migrations. The contiguity of Australia to the Indo-Melanesian area of totems, moieties, unilateral descent, etc., is not likely to be wholly a matter of coincidence (§ 110). Moreover, the strongest development of this type of organization within Australia is on the whole in the northern part, the tribes that show least or none of it being in the south, farthest from the presumptive entrance via New Guinea. On the other hand, certain features of the systems are confined to Australia: the classes and sub-classes, the occasional coexistence but non-relation of totems and moieties, for instance. These variations must have originated among the Australians; and this raises the question whether many other traits may also be indigenous. The most probable course of events would appear to have been the importation of the basic pattern of exogamy, followed by its diffusion with numerous new growths in Australia.

Religious status fits the same interpretation. Ceremonial practices are often, both abundant and elaborate, but ring the changes on fundamentally primitive concepts like imitative magic, bewitching, taboo, adolescence and other crisis rites. These concepts, as implicit in a series of customary acts, might all have been imported at a very early time; in fact in the main very likely go back to Palæolithic culture. On this foundation the Australians developed their locally varying superstructures of religion, which often differ conspicuously in specific content, and into which they poured a notable quantity of imagination or social creativeness. They evolved nothing of a fundamentally “higher” type of cult because of their unusual degree of insulation from all the more important later streams of culture. There occurred no significant import of either new religious elements as such, nor of material factors like agriculture which might have raised the economic status, increased the population,[40] forced a political organization, and ultimately led to the growth of basically new religious patterns among the Australians themselves.

To return to material culture, it may be noted that the boomerang groups with Australian rites and social organization in being a highly specialized form of a fundamentally simple and presumably early type, namely the throwing stick or flat club. Crescentic throwing sticks are in use in Asia and America: they fly faster and straighter than rod shaped or knobbed ones. The Australians alone added the twist which gives the boomerang its peculiar flight. They may have been led to evolve this feature through not having higher types of weapons such as bows and arrows to engage their interest and energies. At any rate, the discovery of the quality imparted by the twist may have been made by accident, such as the warping of an implement, and random experimenting may have brought the improvements.

Whether the relatively unimportant implements of ground stone in Australia represent an invention made there or should be considered one of the small group of culture elements which like the moiety system may have been imported subsequently to the main stock of Australian culture, remains to be ascertained. This main stock is certainly ancient, and in its content may be regarded as approximately equivalent to the Palæolithic culture of Europe and probably connected with it by an early diffusion; although in the specific forms taken by their corresponding types the two cultures obviously differ greatly, as indeed the lapse of time and stretch of distance between them would render inevitable.

265. Tasmania

Tasmania is situated toward Australia as Australia is toward Asia-Oceania. It constitutes an ultimate periphery. Of what little culture Australia had received from the remainder of the hemisphere, Tasmania again received only a part. The prevailing opinion that the Tasmanians were the most primitive of recent peoples is therefore probably justified. They lacked everything that the Australians lacked; and in addition lacked spear-throwers, boomerangs, shields, and ground stone tools. They are the one population among whom it seems reasonably certain that a culture of Palæolithic type was preserved unmixed until modern times. They had chipped knives, axes, scrapers, and similar tools; wooden spears and clubs; bark rafts; windbreak huts; cordage and baskets; paint; ornaments of bone and other animal parts. Unfortunately the Tasmanians numbered only a few thousands, died rapidly on contact with civilization, and became extinct in the nineteenth century before scientific study of their culture or speech had been made. Their religion and society therefore perished almost unrecorded. Their racial type is preserved in skeletal material and photographs. It is clear that it differed from that of the Australians. Their hair was woolly. They have consequently sometimes been reckoned as Oceanic Negroes rather than as an Australian sub-type. It is likely that they represent the first human strain to enter Australia, which was later absorbed or exterminated on that continent by the Australians, surviving only in the protected island of Tasmania.

266. Africa

Africa is the second largest of the continents, the most compact and least indented, and, except for Australia, the most deficient in great mountain systems and the most arid. The only considerable forested area lies in its west central portion; the remainder ranges from parkland through steppe to desert. The population is the densest of any continent reckoned as prevailingly uncivilized: a hundred and twenty-five millions or more, some ten to a dozen souls to the square mile.

As regards its races, it is important to remember that the northern third or half of Africa is inhabited by native “whites.” There is much confusion on this point. We tend to say African when we mean Negro. Until recently the word Moor in north European countries often meant Negro, although it denotes Mauretanians, Moroccans, who are Caucasians. It is true that almost across the breadth of Africa there is a transition zone in which it is arbitrary to classify the population as definitely Negro or Caucasian. But over the vaster bulk of the continent, there is never doubt as to the substantial distinctness of the racial stocks.

The oldest stone age is well represented. Implements of Chellean type in particular have been discovered in a number of areas. Whether these are contemporary with the Chellean remains of Europe is not wholly certain, since they are generally surface finds. An Upper Palæolithic phase, the Capsian, with three sub-periods, is well established for North Africa (§ 215). It was approximately coeval with the Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and probably Azilian of western Europe, and influenced them. Syria and Spain were largely Capsian in culture. The Neolithic is less well marked as a distinctive phase in Africa; and evidences of a separate Bronze Age, other than in Egypt, have nowhere been discerned. There is a bronze art with casting in lost molds in Benin. This is of undetermined origin. It may be ancient; but so far as can be told to-day, iron came into use in much of Africa as early as bronze, and is worked by modern tribes who do not know bronze. Dolmens and other megalithic monuments are abundant in north Africa, absent south of the Sahara. Some of them are later than the similar European megaliths, since iron horse-bits have been found associated with them. It is evident from this summary that Europe and Africa have been closely associated in their prehistoric culture, especially in its remote stages. Two sets of fossil human remains corroborate the connection: Grimaldi man of Italy was pre-Negroid in type, Rhodesian man more or less Neandertaloid.

Iron is smelted, worked, and used throughout Africa except among the dwarf tribes. Apparatus and technique are usually simple, but efficient. Smiths often constitute a caste, sometimes a wandering one. Some tribes rank them highly, others repute them wizards, nearly all accord them a special social position. There is no other area so large and culturally so backward as Africa south of the Mohammedan belt, in which an iron industry flourishes. The existence of the art therefore raises a problem. Some have thought that its origin was indigenous, that perhaps even Egypt derived its knowledge of iron from Negro peoples. On the whole, however, it is much more probable that the reverse holds. In the more than three thousand years since iron was worked in Egypt, the process could readily have been transmitted through the continent. The long lapse of time, the distances traversed, the comparative cultural backwardness of central and south Africa, would allow for, in fact would almost dictate, both the simplicity and the specializations of the technique.

267. Egyptian Radiations

Ancient Egyptian influences have penetrated Africa more significantly than has generally been thought. It is only recently that a beginning has been made in tracing them out in detail in the Nile Sudan. For so intensive a civilization as that of Egypt to exist in juxtaposition to the southeastern Hamitic tribes and the Negroes for five or six thousand years without radiating innumerable elements of culture into their life would be unparalleled. In fact the dynastic Egyptians used materials like ostrich feathers that were imported from far south, and depicted Negroid physical types. The trade and association involved must have flowed both ways. The elements most typical of Egyptian civilization, and its fabric and organization, need by no means have been imparted along with the elements that were transmitted. The fact that they were not seems to be what has delayed wide recognition of Egyptian influence in Negro Africa. The general character of the culture of a modern central African tribe and of the ancient Egyptians being so profoundly different, diffused culture ingredients would therefore often appear among the Negroes in a different form, and always in a different setting, thus tending to disguise their historic connection. The failure of certain Egyptian traits to seep through Africa is also readily accounted for. A backward population broken up into small communities without much stability would have difficulty fitting such an art as writing into their scheme of life, in fact would find it useless. It is therefore not surprising that none of the un-Mohammedanized tribes of the continent write. Similarly, masonry would be needless, perhaps economically unfeasible, under the prevailing social conditions of central Africa. On the other hand, so obviously utilitarian an art as iron working might be quickly taken up, once it had been brought into a simple technique. In the same way, an adaptable domestic animal or plant would tend to be accepted and diffused, while a concomitant scheme of political organization or elaborated religious system might fail to make even a beginning of penetration. It is in this way that several animals of Asiatic origin came to be kept through considerable parts or almost the whole of Africa; the horse, camel, sheep, fowl, for instance, of which at least the first two entered through the gateway of Egypt.

This does not mean that all constituents of African culture have their origin in Egypt; still less that the colors or patterns of African cultures can be derived from that country. However great a bulk of culture may be absorbed by one people from another, the organization which is given this, the stamp put upon it, is necessarily more or less distinctive, because the introduced constituents meet others already established; and especially because the recipient culture, even if low, already possesses a form of its own into which it unconsciously attempts to fit the new content, and into which, unless the influx is sudden and great, it usually succeeds in fitting the imports for a time. However, any specific culture trait common to ancient Egypt and the modern Negroes is suspect of a common origin, which ordinarily—though not universally—would mean an Egyptian or more remote origin. Yet the resolution of such a suspicion is not always easy. Much depends on the extent and continuity of the geographical distribution of the trait, and on the actuality and specificity of the resemblance. On these points the necessary information is often still incomplete.

The general relation of Africa as a whole to Egypt is paralleled by the relation of western Europe of four thousand years ago to the Orient. The bronze, cereals, tamed animals, and many other culture elements of Europe, including religious traits like the ax cult, can be derived from the Near East. But the cities, monarchies, temples, inscriptions, astronomy, and art of the Orient had not penetrated to farther Europe. Moreover, European Bronze Age culture was not merely Oriental civilization with half or three-fourths its content omitted. It enjoyed an organization of its own, followed local and at least partly original trends, possessed what might metaphorically be called an organic unity as great as that of any Oriental culture.

268. The Influence of Other Cultures

Two other great cultural influences have long affected Africa. As far back as the strictly historic period extends, its Mediterranean shore has been generally under the control of peoples belonging to Western civilization—Carthaginians, Romans, or Arabs. As in the case of Egypt, it is unthinkable that the cultures thus planted in the north could have been wholly without effect on the remoter parts of the continent. In fact, for the Arabs, who both penetrated the farthest and are the most recent comers, influence far into the Sudan is manifest. The other exposure was toward the east, and here, as might be expected, Indian influences, chiefly sea-borne through Arab restlessness, have been potent. Eastern Africa has hump-backed cattle, cotton, the pit-loom, perhaps the fowl, from this source. Madagascar, though mainly Negro in race, is Malaysian in speech and prevailingly Malaysian in culture as the result of similar maritime influences from the east.

In these lights, much of African culture which cannot yet be definitely traced to an extra-African source and which until recently was generally assumed to be of purely native origin, may prove to be due to transmission from Asia or Europe. The powerful kingdoms repeatedly established by successful leaders among both Sudan and Bantu Negroes, kingdoms embracing diverse tribes and sometimes continuing under the same dynasty for several centuries, may be due to Egyptian or Mohammedan example. The same can be said for the prevalence of slavery, which is both more widespread and more important economically in Africa than in any other large region of similarly retarded cultural level. Possibly the frequency of polygyny belongs in the same category. It is true that Negro economic life is generally so organized that wives represent investment and create wealth. This fact might be the result of the influence of old economic tendencies upon introduced polygyny. Or the form of marriage might be the outcome of the economic scheme of life characteristic of Africa. Yet even in the latter case an indirect foreign causation can be suspected, since primitive peoples, at any rate those unquestionably beyond the influences of the Eur-Asian civilizations, like the Australians and Americans, generally do not place heavy social stress on wealth. The African point of view as regards economic success, with the African attitude toward marriage as a consequence, may therefore be partly due to extra-African stimulus and example.

Such stimulus seems more easily demonstrable for the proverbs and riddles which abound in Africa, since proverbs were completely and riddles almost wholly wanting in the western hemisphere, and are therefore not the native and spontaneous outflow of the human mind which our own familiarity with them might tempt us to take for granted (§ 90).

The totemic and exogamic institutions of Negro Africa (§ 110) are difficult to understand. Their distribution, both in totality and as regards their several forms, is patchy. Clans sometimes coexist with castes or occupational classes, sometimes tend to coincide with them. Matrilineal institutions crop up irregularly among prevailingly patrilineal ones. In several separate areas the totemic and exogamic groups are divorced, even following opposite lines of descent. The large blocks of peoples sharing substantially the same form of organization in Australia, the regularity of regional and typological graduation of forms of organization characteristic of North America, find no counterpart in Africa. The reason would seem to be that the Australian and American cultures developed in isolation and from within, undisturbed; whereas Africa has long been subjected to a cultural bombardment which constantly mingled new traits with old, foreign with acclimated, and acclimated with indigenous. The native cultures were therefore unable to follow the relatively smooth sequence of development by area or stage which occurred in Australia and America; the injected ferments caused a cultural bubbling in which elements dissociated, combined, intensified, or disappeared according to intricate circumstances. It is possible that other phases of African culture owe their appearance of randomness under classification to the same set of causes.[41]

269. The Bushmen

Two local culture-areas, as they would be called on American soil, emerge with fair distinctness: The Bushman and the West African.

The Bushmen of the far south about the Kalahari desert are distinctive in both race (§ 26) and speech. Culturally they also stand apart as an exceptionally primitive people, lacking the agriculture, cattle and fowls, and iron working of the Negroes. They are expert hunters, stalking or wearing down game until it is within range of their poisoned bone or stone pointed arrows, while the women pry up roots with stone weighted digging sticks. They live under rock shelters or on the leeward side of rude windbreaks. Subterranean water is sucked up through reeds and kept in ostrich egg shells. All this suggests an early Neolithic or even largely Palæolithic culture type, which accords well with the remote and environmentally unfavorable habitat. It is as if the peripherally situated Bushmen had retained up to the present, and with few additions, the culture that prevailed in Europe ten thousand years ago. It is certainly striking that they carve and paint animal figures on rock faces and in caves with a fidelity and unconstrained naturalism that remind of Magdalenian art.

The Hottentots, who are neighbors of the Bushmen and approach them in physical type, appearing to be a mixture of Bushman and other blood, are culturally less retarded, having cattle and iron. In central Africa another dwarf black race, the Pygmies or Negrillos, probably represent a people of once primitive status. But their actual cultural condition is parasitic rather than natively primitive, thus resembling that of their relatives the East Indian Negritos. They live among Negro tribes, acknowledge their kings, trade forest and hunting products for the agricultural yield and manufactures of the Negroes, and speak dialects of the latter’s languages. They thus constitute a racially accentuated caste or economic class within Bantu culture; and although shy and backward, cannot be said to preserve a relatively pure early culture as do the Bushmen.

270. The West African Culture-area and Its Meaning

Over the larger northern portion of the Congo drainage and along the Guinea coast from the Niger mouth to the Senegal, there prevails a well defined West African culture. This is marked by a number of traits which within Africa are approximately confined to it. These traits include the cultivation of the banana but general absence of millet and cattle; gabled houses of thatch, other Africans building domed or conical structures or mud dwellings; clothing of palm fiber or bark; straight self-bows with pointed ends and encircling ridges for the attachment of the looped cord of rattan; shields of wood or cane, in place of which other Africans employ leather bucklers, shields of hide, or parrying sticks; face masks for religious purposes; carvings of the human form; slit wooden drums; xylophones; and a number of other traits.

Two interpretations can be suggested for this consistent and geographically limited association of traits. One makes use of the recurrence of many of the elements in the Indo-Oceanic and especially the Melanesian area. As the latter is also Negroid territory, an ancient connection is conceivable. This would obviously have to be old enough to precede the Egyptian, west Asiatic, and Indian-East African culture developments. These later growths would be interpreted as having spread less far, although obliterating the antecedent Negroid culture so far as they did diffuse. This explanation fits well with the principle that, other things equal, superposed culture strata appear centrally, underlying ones survive marginally. Proof, however, must depend on whether the parallel traits are really specifically similar, whether they constitute a reasonably large proportion of the culture of the two areas, and whether they are lacking in the intervening region. This evidence is naturally difficult to assemble.

The other interpretation is less incisive. It looks upon the resemblances as at least partly conditioned by environment; and would tend to explain the remainder as due to a diffusion, early indeed, but gradual and applying to single elements or small clusters of traits rather than to an association of traits large enough to form a culture and moving as a single block. In this connection it is significant that the Oceanic area is one of tropical forest, and the West African area the only large forested tract in its continent. Hence the absence of cattle and open-country grains, the use made of the banana. Hence too the possibility of bark cloth; and the extremely serviceable rattan cord, which in turn may have demanded a certain type of bow; whereas other types, like the sinew-backed bow, would be unsatisfactory in the humid climate. And the carving of wood, while not due to the forest, was at least made possible by it. In short, diffusion may have been the motive power involved, but like environmental conditions in the two areas caught and helped to preserve such elements as were diffused—stabilized the culture once it was adapted to the soil and rendered it more resistive to importations of traits worked out in different climates. This interpretation at any rate makes smaller assumptions than its competitor, and serves as an illustration of the need of environmental conditions being kept in mind in the explanation of culture, even though the essential explanation be in social or cultural terms.

271. Civilization, Race, and the Future

Culture may be independent of race; possibly is wholly so. But culture must be carried by races of some sort; and it may be of interest to consider whether the sweep of culture history reveals certain races as the most favorable carriers or as inherently constituted to be producers and dispensers of civilization (§ 44-46).

On the whole, the greatest share of culture production has fallen to Caucasians. The art of Upper Palæolithic Europe, the laying of the foundations of modern civilization along the Nile and Euphrates six or seven thousand years ago, the more special ancient efflorescences like that of Crete, not to mention most of the advances of the last twenty-five hundred years, all fall to the account of the white race.

The part of the Mongoloids must not be underestimated. Even if the foundation of Chinese civilization prove to be largely western, its main structure is native, and the alien elements that flowed in during the last three thousand years have been thoroughly adapted to this structure. The fact that derivative civilizations like the Japanese have succeeded in reaching a high degree of organization and refinement argues still further for the vigor of Chinese culture. Then, the East Indians, another Mongoloid branch, have shown a fair power of assimilation. In the past two thousand years they may be said to have accepted and digested at least as much of Hindu and Mohammedan civilization as the North Europeans took over from Mediterranean sources between 1500 B.C. and 500 A.D. Finally, the achievements of the American Mongoloids in Mexico and Peru must be given heavy weight because they appear to have been made in utter isolation, without the stimulus of contact or import, and on the basis of nothing more than a late Palæolithic or earliest Neolithic culture.

The share of the Negroids in the higher advances has been small. Africa, to be sure, lies off to one side from the great Eur-Asian axis, and like southern India and Arabia has suffered from constituting almost a blind alley. Yet central Africa is no farther from the Mediterranean than is northern Europe. East Africa lies open to Egypt which six and five and four thousand years ago represented the apex of civilization. Yet Negro Africa to-day possesses scarcely more culture elements of Egypto-Babylonian origin than remote Scandinavia had absorbed by 500 B.C., and far fewer than Scandinavia had in 1000 A.D. It is hard to believe that this difference is due wholly to desert and jungle and tropical heat.

There is a parallel in the Oceanic Negroes. The Australians may be disregarded in this connection, both on account of the isolation of their continent and the doubt whether they are to be reckoned as a branch of the Negroid stem. But the Papuans and Melanesians are undisputedly Negroid and far less touched by influences of higher culture than the adjacent East Indians. It may be only geographic accident that writing and iron and kingship and Hindu and Arab religion traversed the Oceanian islands as far as the brown Mongoloids inhabited them, but stopped dead at the threshold of the blacks. Even the brown Polynesians, much more remote in the central Pacific than the Melanesians, possess more elements that are presumably traceable to Asia—such as their cosmogony, genealogies, kingship.

It is of course not fair to argue from cultural accomplishment to racial faculty unless all times and parts of the world are considered equally, and not safe to interpret the evidence too rigorously then. But the consistent failure of the Negro race to accept the whole or even the main substance of the fairly near-by Mediterranean civilization, or to work out any notable sub-centers of cultural productivity, would appear to be one of the strongest of the arguments that can be advanced for an inferiority of cultural potentiality on their part.

Yet the weakness of correlation of race faculty and civilization, except in the most general way, can be driven home to North Europeans and North Americans as soon as the relative parts played in culture history by the several Caucasian divisions are examined. On the ground of long continued lead in productivity, of having reared the largest portion of the structure of existing civilization, the Mediterranean branch of the Caucasian race would have to be awarded the palm over all others. To it belonged the Egyptians; the Cretans and other Ægeans; the Semitic strain in the Babylonians; the Phœnicians and Hebrews; and a large element in the populations of classic Greece and Italy, as well as the originators of Mohammedanism. With the Hindus added as probably nearly related, the dark whites have a clear lead.

The next largest share civilization would owe to the Alpine-Armenoid broad-headed Caucasian branch. This may have included the Sumerians, if they were not Mediterranean; comprised the Hittites; and contributed important strains to the other peoples of Western Asia and Greece and Italy.

By comparison, the Nordic branch looms insignificant. Up to a thousand years ago the Nordic peoples had indeed contributed ferment and unsettling, but scarcely a single new culture element, certainly not a new element of importance and permanence. For centuries after that, the center of European civilization remained in Mediterranean Italy or Alpine France. It is only after 1500 A.D. that any claim for a shift of this center to the Nordic populations could be alleged. In fact, most of the national and cultural supremacy of the Nordic peoples, so far as it is real, falls within the last two hundred years. Against this, the Mediterraneans and Alpines have a record of leading in civilizational creativeness for at least six thousand years.

It is clear therefore that any fears of the arrest and decay of human progress if a particular race should lose in fertility or become absorbed in others, are unfounded. Such alarms may be attributed to egocentric imagination. They resemble the regrets of an individual at the loss which the world will suffer when he dies; what he really fears is his own death. When we loosen the hold of such narrow and essentially personal emotions, and allow our minds to range over the whole of the labors and gradual achievements of humanity, irrespective of millenium or continent, the result is an imperturbed equanimity as to the slight and temporary predominance of this or that racial strain and as to the stability or future of culture. To contribute to this larger tolerance and balance of mind is one of the functions of anthropology.