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Page 1 of 2 Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir, 1832-1917 "Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom" PRIMITIVE CULTURE.
CHAPTER I.
THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE. PAGE
Culture or Civilization Its phenomena related according to definite
Laws Method of classification and discussion of the evidence
Connexion of successive stages of culture by Permanence, Modifica-
tion, and Survival Principal topics examined in the present work. I
Author: Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir, 1832-1917
Volume: 1
Subject: Prehistoric peoples; Animism; Mythology; Civilization
Publisher: London : Murray
Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
Language: English
Call number: AMO-0964
Digitizing sponsor: MSN
Book contributor: Robarts - University of Toronto
Collection: toronto
[Open Library icon] This book has an editable web page on Open Library.
PRIMITIVE CULTURE.
CHAPTER I.
THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.
Culture or Civilization Its phenomena related according to definite Laws
Method of classification and discussion of the evidence Connexion
of successive stages of culture by Permanence, Modification, and
Survival Principal topics examined in the present work.
CULTURE or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic
sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other (capabilities
and habits! acquired by man as a member of society. The
condition of culture among the various societies of mankind,
in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general
principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human
thought and action. On the one hand, the uniformity
which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in
great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes :
while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded
as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of
previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping
the history of the future. To the investigation of these
two great principles in several departments of ethnography,
with especial consideration of the civilization of the lower
tribes as related to the civilization of the higher nations,
the present volumes are devoted.
2 THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.
Our modern investigators in the sciences of inorganic
nature are foremost to recognize, both within and without
their special fields of work, the unity of nature, the fixity of
its laws, the definite sequence of cause and effect through
which every fact depends on what has gone before it, and
acts upon what is to come after it. They grasp firmly the
Pythagorean doctrine of pervading order in the universal
Kosmos. They affirm, with Aristotle, that nature is not
full of incoherent episodes, like a bad tragedy. They agree
with Leibnitz in what he calls ' my axiom, that nature
never acts by leaps (la nature n'agit jamais par saut),' as
well as in his 'great principle, commonly little employed,
that nothing happens without sufficient reason.' Nor
again, in studying the structure and habits of plants and
animals, or in investigating the lower functions even of
man, are these leading ideas unacknowledged. But when
we come to talk of the higher processes of human feeling
and action, of thought and language, knowledge and art,
a change appears in the prevalent tone of opinion. The
world at large is scarcely prepared to accept the general
study of human life as a branch of natural science, and to
carry out, in a large sense, the poet's injunction, to ' Ac-
count for moral as for natural things/ To many educated
minds there seems something presumptuous and repulsive
in the view that the history of mankind is part and parcel
of the history of nature, that our thoughts, wills, and
actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern
the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases,
and the growth of plants and animals.
The main reasons of this state of the popular judgment
are not far to seek. There are many who would willingly
accept a science of history if placed before them with sub-
stantial definiteness of principle and evidence, but who not
unreasonably reject the systems offered to them, as falling
too far short of a scientific standard. Through resistance
such as this, real knowledge always sooner or later makes
its way, while the habit of opposition to novelty does such
DEFINITE LAWS. 3
excellent service against the invasions of speculative dog-
matism, that we may sometimes even wish it were stronger
than it is. But other obstacles to the investigation of laws
of human nature arise from considerations of metaphysics
and theology. The popular notion of free human will in-
volves not only freedom to act in accordance with motive,
but also a power of breaking loose from continuity and
acting without cause, a combination which may be roughly
illustrated by the simile of a balance sometimes acting in
the usual way, but also possessed of the faculty of turning
by itself without or against its weights. This view of an
anomalous action of the will, which it need hardly be said is
incompatible with scientific argument, subsists as an opinion
patent or latent in men's minds, and strongly affecting their
theoretic views of history, though it is not, as a rule,
brought prominently forward in systematic reasoning.
Indeed the definition of human will, as strictly according
with motive, is the only possible scientific basis in such en-
quiries. Happily, it is not needful to add here yet another
to the list of dissertations on supernatural intervention and
natural causation, on liberty, predestination, and accounta-
bility. We may hasten to escape from the regions of trans-
cendental philosophy and theology, to start on a more hope-
ful journey over more practicable ground. None will deny
that, as each man knows by the evidence of his own con-
sciousness, definite and natural cause does, to a great
extent, determine human action. Then, keeping aside
from considerations of extra-natural interference and cause-
less spontaneity, let us take this admitted existence of
natural cause and effect as our standing-ground, and travel
on it so far as it will bear us. It is on this same basis
that physical science pursues, with ever-increasing success,
its quest of laws of nature. Nor need this restriction
hamper the scientific study of human life, in which the
real difficulties are the practical ones of enormous com-
plexity of evidence, and imperfection of methods of obser-
vation.
4 ' THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.
Now it appears that this view of human will and conduct
as subject to definite law, is indeed recognised and acted
upon by the very people who oppose it when stated in
the abstract as a general principle, and who then complain
that it annihilates man's free will, destroys his sense of per-
sonal responsibility, and degrades him to a soulless machine.
He who will say these things will nevertheless pass much of
his own life in studying the motives which lead to human
action, seeking to attain his wishes through them, framing
in his mind theories of personal character, reckoning what
are likely to be the effects of new combinations, and giving
to his reasoning the crowning character of true scientific
enquiry, by taking it for granted that in so far as his
calculation turns out wrong, either his evidence must have
been false or incomplete, or his judgment upon it unsound.
Such a one will sum up the experience of years spent in
complex relations with society, by declaring his persuasion
that there is a reason for everything in life, and that where
events look unaccountable, the rule is to wait and watch in
hope that the key to the problem may some day be found.
This man's observation may have been as narrow as his in-
ferences are crude and prejudiced, but nevertheless he has
been an inductive philosopher ' more than forty years with-
out knowing it.' He has practically acknowledged definite
laws of human thought and action, and has simply thrown
out of account in his own studies of life the whole fabric
of motiveless will and uncaused spontaneity. It is assumed
here that they should be just so thrown out of account in
wider studies, and that the true philosophy of history lies
in extending and improving the methods of the plain people
who form their judgments upon facts, and check them
upon new facts. Whether the doctrine be wholly or but
partly true, it accepts the very condition under whickwe
search for new knowledge in the lessons of experience,
and in a word the whole course of our rational life is based
upon it.
' One event is always the son of another, and we must
CONNECTED STAGES.
never forget the parentage/ was a remark made by a
Bechuana chief to Casalis the African missionary. Thus
at all times historians, so far as they have aimed at being
more than mere chroniclers, have done their best to show
not merely succession, but connexion, among the events
upon their record. Moreover, they have striven to elicit
general principles of human action, and by these to explain
particular events, stating expressly or taking tacitly for
granted the existence of a philosophy of history. Should any
one deny the possibility of thus establishing historical laws,
the answer is ready with which Boswell in such a case
turned on Johnson : ' Then, sir, you would reduce all
history to no better than an almanack.' That nevertheless
the labours of so many eminent thinkers should have as yet
brought history only to the threshold of science, need cause
no wonder to those who consider the bewildering complexity
of the problems which come before the general historian.
The evidence from which he is to draw his conclusions is at
once so multifarious and so doubtful, that a full and distinct
view of its bearing on a particular question is hardly to be
attained, and thus the temptation becomes all but irre-
sistible to garble it in support of some rough and ready
theory of the course of events. The philosophy of history
at large, explaining the past and predicting the future phe-
nomena of man's life in the world by reference to general
laws, is in fact a subject with which, in the present state of
knowledge, even genius aided by wide research seems but
hardly able to cope. Yet there are departments of it which,
though difficult enough, seem comparatively accessible. If
the field of enquiry be narrowed from IJistory as a whole
to that branch of it which is here called Culture, the
history, not of tribes or nations, but of the condition of
knowledge, religion, art, custom, and the like among them,
the task of investigation proves to lie within far more
moderate compass. We suffer still from the same kind of
difficulties which beset the wider argument, but they are
much diminished. The evidence is no longer so wildly
6 THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.
heterogeneous, but may be more simply classified and com-
pared, while the power of getting rid of extraneous matter,
and treating each issue on its own proper set of facts,
makes close reasoning on the whole more available than in
general history. This may appear from a brief preliminary
examination of the problem, how the phenomena of Culture
may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in a probable
order of evolution.
Surveyed in a broad view, the character and habit of
mankind at once display that similarity and consistency of
phenomena which led the Italian proverb-maker to declare
that 'all the world is one country/ 'tutto il mondo &
paese.' To general likeness in human nature on the one
hand, and to general likeness in the circumstances of life on
the other, this similarity and consistency may no doubt be
traced, and they may be studied with especial fitness in
comparing races near the same grade of civilization. Little
respect need be had in such comparisons for date in history
or for place on the map ; the ancient Swiss lake-dweller may
be set beside the mediaeval Aztec, and the Ojibwa of North
America beside the Zulu of South Africa. As Dr. Johnson
contemptuously said when he had read about Patagonians
and South Sea Islanders in Hawkesworth's Voyages, ' one
set of savages is like another/ How true a generalization
this really is, any Ethnological Museum may show. Examine
for instance the edged and pointed instruments in such a
collection ; the inventory includes hatchet, adze, chisel,
knife, saw, scraper, awl, needle, spear and arrow-head, and
of these most or all belong with only differences of detail to
races the most various. So it is with savage occupations ;
the wood-chopping, fishing with net and line, shooting and
spearing game, fire-making, cooking, twisting cord and
plaiting baskets, repeat themselves with wonderful uni-
formity in the museum shelves which illustrate the life of
the lower races from Kamchatka to Tierra del Fuego, and
from Dahome to Hawaii. Even when it comes to comparing
barbarous hordes with civilized nations, the consideration
thrusl
CLASSIFICATION OF EVIDENCE.
>ts itself upon our minds, how far item after item of the
life of the lower races passes into analogous proceedings of
the higher, in forms not too far changed to be recognized,
and sometimes hardly changed at all. Look at the modern
European peasant using his hatchet and his hoe, see his
food boiling or roasting over the log-fire, observe the exact
place which beer holds in his calculation of happiness, hear
his tale of the ghost in the nearest haunted house, and of
the farmer's niece who was bewitched with knots in her
inside till she fell into fits and died. If we choose out in
this way things which have altered little in a long course of
centuries, we may draw a picture where there shall be scarce
a hand's breadth difference between an English ploughman
and a negro of Central Africa. These pages will be so
crowded with evidence of such correspondence among man-
kind, that there is no need to dwell upon its details here,
but it may be used at once to override a problem which
would complicate the argument, namely, the question of
race. For the present purpose it appears both possible^md |
desirable to eliminate considerations of hereditary varieties '
or races of man, and to treat mankind as homogeneous in
nature, though placed in different grades of civilization.
The details of the enquiry will, I think, prove that stages !
of culture may be compared without taking into account
how far tribes who use the same implement, follow the
same custom, or believe the same myth, may differ in >
their bodily configuration and the colour of their skin ;1
and hair.
A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into
details, and to classify these in their proper groups. Thus,
in examining weapons, they are to be classed under spear,
club, sling, bow and arrow, and so forth ; among textile arts
are to be ranged matting, netting, and several grades of
making and weaving threads ; myths are divided under such
headings as myths of sunrise and sunset, eclipse-myths,earth-
quake-myths, local myths which account for the names of
places by some fanciful tale, eponymic myths which account
8 THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.
for the parentage of a tribe by turning its name into the
name of an imaginary ancestor ; under rites and ceremonies
occur such practices as the various kinds of sacrifice to the
ghosts of the dead and to other spiritual beings, the turning
to the east in worship, the purification of ceremonial or
moral uncleanness by means of water or fire. Such are a
few miscellaneous examples from a list of hundreds, and
the ethnographer's business is to classify such details with
a view to making out their distribution in geography and
history, and the relations which exist among them. What
this task is like, may be almost perfectly illustrated by com-
paring these details of culture with the species of plants and
animals as studied by the naturalist. J To the ethnographer
jfEe~"b6w ana~arrow is a species, the habit of flattening
/children's skulls is a species, the practice of reckoning
numbers by tens is a species. The geographical distribu-
tion of these things, and their transmission from region to
region, have to be studied as the naturalist studies the
geography of his botanical and zoological species. Just as
certain plants and animals are peculiar to certain districts,
so it is with such instruments as the Australian boomerang,
the Polynesian stick-and-groove for fire-making, the tiny
bow and arrow used as a lancet or phleme by tribes about
the Isthmus of Panama, and in like manner with many an
art, myth, or custom, found isolated in a particular field.
Just as the catalogue of all the species of plants and animals
of a district represents its Flora and Fauna, so the list of
all the items of the general life of a people represents that
whole which we call its culture. And just as distant regions
so often produce vegetables and animals which are analo-
gous, though by no means identical, so it is with the details
of the civilization of their inhabitants. How good, a working
analogy there really is between the diffusion of plants and
animals and the diffusion of civilization, comes well into
view when we notice how far the same causes have produced
both at once. In district after district, the same causes
which have introduced the cultivated plants and domesti-
CORRESPONDENCE OF EVIDENCE. 9
cated animals of civilization, have brought in with them a
corresponding art and knowledge. The course of events
which carried horses and wheat to America carried with
them the use of the gun and the iron hatchet, while in
return the whole world received not only maize, potatoes,
and turkeys, but the habit of tobacco-smoking and the
sailor's hammock.
It is a matter worthy of consideration, that the accounts
of similar phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts
of the world, actually supply incidental proof of their own
authenticity. Some years since, a question which brings
out this point was put to me by a great historian ' How
can a statement as to customs, myths, beliefs, &c., of a
savage tribe be treated as evidence where it depends on the
testimony of some traveller or missionary, who may be a
superficial observer, more or less ignorant of the native
language, a careless retailer of unsifted talk, a man preju-
diced or even wilfully deceitful ?' This question is, indeed,
one which every ethnographer ought to keep clearly and
constantly before his mind. Of course he is bound to use
his best judgment as to the trustworthiness of all authors
he quotes, and if possible to obtain several accounts to
certify each point in each locality. But it is over and above
these measures of precaution that the test of recurrence
comes in. If two independent visitors to different countries,
say a mediaeval Mohammedan in Tartary and a modern
Englishman in Dahome, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil
and a Wesley an in the Fiji Islands, agree in describing some
analogous art or rite or myth among the people they have
visited, it becomes difficult or impossible to set down such
correspondence to accident or wilful fraud. A story by a
bushranger in Australia may, perhaps, be objected to as a
mistake or an invention, but did a Methodist minister in
"Guinea conspire with him to cheat the public by telling the
same story there ? The possibility of intentional or unin-
tentional mystification is often barred by such a state of
things as that a similar statement is made in two remote
I0 THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.
lands, by two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before
B, and B appears never to have heard of A. How distant
are the countries, how wide apart the dates, how different
the creeds and characters of the observers, in the catalogue
of facts of civilization, needs no farther showing to any one
who will even glance at the footnotes of the present work.
And the more odd the statement, the less likely that several
people in several places should have made it wrongly. This
being so, it seems reasonable to judge that the statements
are in the main truly given, and that their close and regular
coincidence is due to the cropping up of similar facts in
various districts of culture. Now the most important facts
of ethnography are vouched for in this way. Experience
leads the student after a while to expect and find that the
phenomena of culture, as resulting from widely-acting simi-
lar causes, should recur again and again in the world. He even
mistrusts isolated statements to which he knows of no paral-
lel elsewhere, and waits for their genuineness to be shown by
corresponding accounts from the other side of the earth, or
the other end of history. So strong, indeed, is this means
of authentication, that the ethnographer in his library may
sometimes presume to decide, not only whether a particular
explorer is a shrewd, honest observer, but also whether
what he reports is conformable to the general rules of civili-
zation. ' Non quis, sed quid.'
To turn from the distribution of culture in different
countries, to its diffusion within these countries. The
quality of mankind which tends most to make the syste-
matic study of civilization possible, is that remarkable tacit
consensus or agreement which so far induces whole popula-
tions to unite in the use of the same language, to follow the
same religion and customary law, to settle down to the same
general level of art and knowledge. It is this state of things
which makes it so far possible to ignore exceptional facts
and to describe nations by a sort of general average. It is
this state of things which makes it so far possible t\> represent
immense masses of details by a few typical facts, while, these
DISTRIBUTION AND DIFFUSION. II
once settled, new cases recorded by new observers simply
fall into their places to prove the soundness of the classifi-
cation. There is found to be such regularity in the compo-
sition of societies of men, that we can drop individual
differences out of sight, and thus can generalize on the arts
and opinions of whole nations, just as, when looking down
upon an army from a hill, we forget the individual soldier,
whom, in fact, we can scarce distinguish in the mass, while
we see each regiment as an organized body, spreading or
concentrating, moving in advance or in retreat. In some
branches of the study of social laws it is now possible to call
in the aid of statistics, and to set apart special actions of
large mixed communities of men by means of taxgatherers'
schedules, or the tables of the insurance office. Among
modern arguments on the laws of human action, none have
had a deeper effect than generalizations such as those of M.
Quetelet, on the regularity, not only of such matters as
average stature and the annual rates of birth and death, but
of the recurrence, year after year, of such obscure and
seemingly incalculable products of national life as the
numbers of murders and suicides, and the proportion of the
very weapons of crime. Other striking cases are the annual
regularity of persons killed accidentally in the London
streets, and of undirected letters dropped into post-office
letter-boxes. But in examining the culture of the lower
races, far from having at command the measured arithmeti-
cal facts of modern statistics, we may have to judge of the
condition of tribes from the imperfect accounts supplied by
travellers or missionaries, or even to reason upon relics of
prehistoric races of whose very names and languages we
are hopelessly ignorant. Now these may seem at the first
glance sadly indefinite and unpromising materials for
scientific enquiry. But in fact they are neither indefinite
nor unpromising, but give evidence that is good and definite
so far as it goes. They are data which, for the distinct way
in which they severally denote the condition of the tribe
they belong to, will actually bear comparison with the
12 THE SCIENCE OF CULTURE.
statistician's returns. The fact is that a stone arrow-head,
a carved club, an idol, a grave-mound where slaves and
property have been buried for the use of the dead an
account of a sorcerer's rites in making rain, a Kble of
numerals, the conjugation of a verb, are things which each
express the state of a people as to one particular point
of culture, as truly as the tabulated numbers of deaths
by poison, and of chests of tea imported, express in a differ-
ent way other partial results of the general life of a whole
community.
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