Part 4

Thus, we find that of the Northern Athabaskans of western Canada, the southern Carrier and the Chilcotin Indians share with the Shuswap Indians of Salish stock the use of semi-subterranean huts which even in winter seem like ovens. Are we to recognize in this an adaptation to the inclemencies of the climate? Hardly, when we find that this type of dwelling is used precisely by those Athabaskans living farthest south, where of course the climate is much milder, while the more northern tribes of the family get along with crude double shelters about a central fireplace. The use of the semi-subterranean lodge by the Carrier and Chilcotin is perfectly explained as a contact phenomenon. They have simply adopted the idea from their Salish neighbors: the cultural environment has proved more effective than the physical environment in determining a cultural trait. Other members of the same family furnish corresponding instances. Though many of the Northern Athabaskans have long, snowy winters, only the Loucheux, who are in contact with the Eskimo, have adopted the wooden goggles of the Eskimo, which serve as a protection against snow-blindness. Similarly, they are the only members of the stock to substitute for the widespread Canadian toboggan the Eskimo sledge with runners.[6]

As the physical environment is overshadowed in cultural significance by a neighboring culture, so it may vanish into nothingness in the face of what we may call cultural inertia--the tendency of a preëxisting cultural trait of indigenous growth to assert itself. A familiar example of this tendency is the exact imitation of forms of implements in quite different and often refractory material. Thus, the Central Eskimo generally make lamps and pots out of soapstone. In Southampton Island, where this material is lacking, they have not devised a new form but have at the expenditure of much ingenuity and labor cemented together slabs of limestone so as to produce the traditional shape.[7] The same phenomenon appears in other fields. Grooved copper axes have been found in parts of the United States; their shape is patterned exactly on the stone axes characteristic of the same localities. The beginnings of the copper and bronze ages in Europe are equally suggestive in this regard. The incipient metallurgist does not automatically make the most of his material but slavishly follows his stone or bone models. His copper ornaments imitate bear’s teeth or bone beads, his implements resemble the stone celts and hammers of an earlier era.[8] As Professor Boas points out on the basis of Bogoras’ descriptions, an equivalent development may be traced in the history of the Chukchee tent. This type of habitation is extremely clumsy and not at all well adapted to the roving life of the Reindeer division of the tribe, considerably hampering their progress. It represents, however, a variety of the older form of stationary house used when the Chukchee were a purely maritime people.[9]

It might be objected that maladjustments of this sort are transitional, that just as the copper and bronze workers ultimately freed themselves from the influence of the preëxisting stone technique so the Chukchee would finally have abandoned their inconvenient tent and developed a new and more readily transportable lodge. This sounds, of course, very plausible but misses the point of the argument. Undoubtedly, a more and more perfect adaptation to elements of the physical surroundings has repeatedly taken place. But the very fact that culture history, on its material side, implies this progressive adjustment also implies that the cultural phenomena at different periods of time differ where the same environmental stimuli persist and therefore cannot be explained by them, which is what we have been trying to prove.

Indeed, environment is not only unable to create cultural features, in some instances it is even incapable of perpetuating them. Thus, pottery was once distributed over an extensive region in the New Hebrides but is now restricted to a few isolated localities on a single island. Again, in southeastern New Guinea ancient pottery has been found that vastly surpasses its present representatives in point of craftsmanship.[10] A similar phenomenon has been noted in the Southwest of the United States, where the evolution and deterioration of glazed earthenware may be clearly traced in the same region.[11] Dr. Rivers has pointed out an even more instructive example of cultural degeneration. In the Torres Islands of Melanesia the natives have no canoes for traversing the channels which separate their islands from one another but are obliged to use unseaworthy bamboo rafts inadequate even for fishing purposes. Yet there is evidence that the Torres Islanders once shared the art of canoe-making with their fellow-Oceanians and that it has died out in recent times independently of European influence. It is difficult to conceive of any people less likely _a priori_ to lose the art of navigation than a South Sea Island group; yet, their maritime environment proved inadequate to preserve so vital a feature of their daily life.

To sum up: Environment cannot explain culture because the identical environment is consistent with distinct cultures; because cultural traits persist from inertia in an unfavorable environment; because they do not develop where they would be of distinct advantage to a people; and because they may even disappear where one would least expect it on geographical principles.

Shall we then cavalierly banish geography from cultural considerations? This would be manifestly going beyond the mark. Geographical phenomena can no more be discarded than can psychological phenomena. They represent in the first place a limiting condition. As cultures cannot contravene psychological principles so they cannot, except in a limited measure, override geographical factors. To use some drastically clear if somewhat hackneyed examples, the Eskimo do not eat coconuts nor do the Oceanians build snow-houses; where the horse does not occur it cannot be domesticated; in the Hopi country where watercourses are lacking navigation naturally did not develop. As Jochelson points out, the Koryak of northeastern Siberia cannot cultivate cereals because of the low temperature and they cannot succeed as cattle-breeders because of the poor quality of the grasses.[12] This minimum recognition of environment as a purely negative factor, however, does not do full justice to it. Take the bison out of the Plains Indian’s life and his cultural atmosphere certainly changes. Nevertheless, we have seen that the presence of the bison by no means fully determined the cultural employment possible. Instead of hunting it as the Solutrean Europeans did the wild horse, the Indian might have domesticated it as his namesake by misnomer in Asia domesticated the buffalo. The environment, then, enters into culture, not as a formative but rather as an inert element ready to be selected from and molded. It is, of course, a matter of biological necessity for a people to establish some sort of adaptation to surrounding conditions, but such adaptation is no more spontaneously generated by the environment than are strictly biological adaptations. There are alternatives to adaptation--migration and destruction.

It is true, as Dr. Wissler has forcibly pointed out, that when some kind of adjustment has once been established it will tend to persist in the region of its origin.[13] This, however, illustrates not so much the active influence of environment as rather the tremendous force of cultural inertia which tends to perpetuate an old muddling-along adjustment, however imperfect, provided only it has bare survival value.

Altogether we may illustrate the relations of culture to environment by an analogy used by Dr. Wissler in another connection, which also brings us back to my initial analogy of the environmental theory with the associationist system in psychology. The environment furnishes the builders of cultural structures with brick and mortar but it does not furnish the architect’s plan. As the illustrations cited clearly prove, there is a variety of ways in which the same materials can be put together, nay, there is always a range of choice as regards the materials themselves. The development of a particular architectural style and the selection of a special material from among an indefinite number of possible styles and materials are what characterize a given culture. Since geography permits more than a single adjustment to the same conditions, it cannot give the interpretation sought by the student of culture. Culture can no more be built up of environmental blocks than can consciousness out of isolated ideas; and as the association of ideas already implies the synthetizing faculty of consciousness, so the assemblage and use of environmental factors after a definite plan already implies the selective and synthetic agency of a preëxisting or nascent culture.

IV. THE DETERMINANTS OF CULTURE

Psychology, racial differences, geographical environment, have all proved inadequate for the interpretation of cultural phenomena. The inference is obvious. Culture is a thing _sui generis_ which can be explained only in terms of itself. This is not mysticism but sound scientific method. The biologist, whatever metaphysical speculations he may indulge in as to the ultimate origin of life, does not depart in his workaday mood from the principle that every cell is derived from some other cell. So the ethnologist will do well to postulate the principle, _Omnis cultura ex cultura_.[1] This means that he will account for a given cultural fact by merging it in a group of cultural facts or by demonstrating some other cultural fact out of which it has developed. The cultural phenomenon to be explained may either have an antecedent within the culture of the tribe where it is found or it may have been imported from without. Both groups of determinants must be considered.

The extraneous determinants of culture summed up under the heading of ‘diffusion’ or ‘contact of peoples’ have been repeatedly referred to in the preceding pages. A somewhat detailed examination seems desirable, for it is difficult to exaggerate their importance.

“Civilization,” says Tylor, “is a plant much oftener propagated than developed;”[2] and the latest ethnographic memoir that comes to hand voices the same sentiment: “It is and has always been much easier to borrow an idea from one’s neighbors than to originate a new idea; and transmission of cultural elements, which in all ages has taken place in a great many different ways, is and has been one of the greatest promoters of cultural development.”[3]

A stock illustration of cultural assimilation is that of the Japanese, who in the nineteenth century adopted our scientific and technological civilization ready-made, just as at an earlier period they had acquired wholesale the culture of China. It is essential to note that it is not always the people of lower culture who remain passive recipients in the process of diffusion. This is strikingly shown by the spread of Indian corn. The white colonist “did not simply borrow the maize seed and then in conformity with his already established agricultural methods, or on original lines, develop a maize culture of his own,” but “took over the entire material complex of maize culture” as found among the aborigines.[4] The history of Indian corn also illustrates the remarkable rapidity with which cultural possessions may travel over the globe. Unknown in the Old World prior to the discovery of America, it is mentioned as known in Europe in 1539 and had reached China between 1540 and 1570.[5]

The question naturally arises here, whether this process of diffusion, which in modern times is a matter of direct observation, could have been of importance during the earlier periods of human history when means of communication were of a more primitive order. So far as this point is concerned, we must always remember that methods of transportation progressed very slightly from the invention of the wheeled cart until the most recent times. As Montelius suggests, the periods of 1700 B. C. and 1700 A. D. differed far less in this regard than might be supposed on superficial consideration. Yet we know the imperfection of facilities for travel did not prevent dissemination of culture in historic times.

The great Swedish archæologist has, indeed, given us a most fascinating picture of the commercial relations of northern Europe in earlier periods and their effect on cultural development.[6] We learn with astonishment that in the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, trade was carried on with great intensity between the North of Europe and the Mohammedan culture sphere since tens of thousands of Arabic coins have been found on Swedish soil. But intercourse with remote countries dates back to a far greater antiquity. One of the most powerful stimuli of commercial relations between northern and southern Europe was the desire of the more southern populations to secure amber, a material confined to the Baltic region and occurring more particularly about Jutland and the mouth of the Vistula. Amber beads have been found not only in Swiss pile-dwellings[7] but also in Mycenæan graves of the second millennium B. C. Innumerable finds of amber work in Italy and other parts of southern Europe prove the importance attached to this article, which was exchanged for copper and bronze. The composition of Scandinavian bronzes indicates that their material was imported not from England but from the faraway regions of central Europe. That bronze was not of indigenous manufacture is certain because tin does not occur in Sweden at all while the copper deposits of northern Scandinavia remained untouched until about 1500 years after the end of the Bronze Age. Considering the high development of the bronze technique in Scandinavia and the fact that every pound of bronze had to be imported from without, it would be difficult to exaggerate the extent of contact with the southern populations. But intercourse was not limited to the South. For example, Swedish weapons and implements have been discovered in Finland. Again, crescent-shaped gold ornaments of Irish provenance have been found in Denmark, while a Swedish rock-painting represents with painstaking exactness a type of bronze shield common at a certain prehistoric period of England.

Montelius shows that historical connections of the type so amply attested for the Bronze Age also obtained in the preceding Neolithic era. Swedish hammers of stone dating back to the third pre-Christian millennium and flint daggers have been found in Finland, and earthenware characteristic of Neolithic Scandinavia also turns up on the Baltic coast of Russia. Stone burial cists with a peculiar oval opening at one end occur in a limited section of southwestern Sweden and likewise in England. Since such monuments have been discovered neither in other parts of Sweden nor in Jutland or the Danish islands, they point to a direct intercourse between Britain and western Sweden at about 2,000 B. C. A still older form of burial unites Scandinavia with other parts of the continent. Chambers built up of large stones set up edgewise and reaching from the floor to the roof, the more recent ones with and the older without a long covered passage, are highly characteristic of Sweden, Denmark, the British Isles, and the coasts of Europe from the Vistula embouchure to the coasts of France and Portugal, of Italy, Greece, the Crimea, North Africa, Syria, and India. Specific resemblances convince the most competent judges that some, at least, of these widely diffused ‘dolmens’ are historically connected with their Swedish equivalents, and since the oldest of these Northern chambers go back 3,000 years before our era, we thus have evidence of cultural diffusion dating back approximately five millennia.

It is highly interesting to trace under Montelius’ guidance the development of culture as it seems to have actually taken place in southern Sweden. Beginning with the earliest periods, we find the coastal regions inhabited by a population of fishermen and hunters. At a subsequent stage coarse pottery appears with articles of bone and antler, and there is evidence that the dog has become domesticated. In the later Neolithic era perfectly polished stone hammers and exquisitely chipped flint implements occur, together with indications that cattle, horses, sheep and pigs are domesticated and that the cultivation of the soil has begun. Roughly speaking, we may assume that the culture of Scandinavia at the end of the Stone Age resembled in advancement that of the agricultural North American and Polynesian tribes as found by the first European explorers. We may assume a long period of essentially indigenous cultural growth followed towards its close by intimate relations with alien populations. Nevertheless, it was the more extensive contact of the Bronze period that rapidly raised the ancestral Swedes to a cultural position high above a primitive level, with accentuation of agriculture, the use of woolen clothing, and a knowledge of metallurgy. It was again foreign influence that later brought the knowledge of iron and in the third century of our era transformed the Scandinavians into a literary people, flooded their country with art products of the highest then existing Roman civilization, and ultimately introduced Christianity.

The case of Scandinavian culture is fairly typical. We have first a long-continued course of leisurely and relatively undisturbed development, which is superseded by a tremendously rapid assimilation of cultural elements from without. Through contact with tribes possessing a higher civilization the ancient Scandinavians came to participate in its benefits and even to excel in special departments of it, such as bronze work, which from lack of material, they would have been physically incapable of developing unaided. Diffusion was the determinant of Scandinavian cultural progress from savagery to civilization.

It is obvious that this insistence on contact of peoples as a condition of cultural evolution does not solve the ultimate problem of the origin of culture. The question naturally obtrudes itself: If the Scandinavians obtained their civilization from the Southeast, how did the Oriental cultures themselves originate? Nevertheless, when we examine these higher civilizations of the Old World, we are again met with indubitable evidence that one of the conditions of development is the contact of peoples and the consequent diffusion of cultural elements. This appears clearly from a consideration of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, and China.

We now have abundant evidence for a later Stone Age in Egypt with an exceptionally high development of the art of chipping, as well as specimens of pottery and other indications of a sedentary mode of life. About 5,000 B. C. this undisturbed evolution began to suffer from a series of migrations of West Asiatic tribes, bringing in their wake a number of cultivated plants and domesticated animals, as well as various other features which possibly included the art of smelting copper, while the ceramic ware of the earlier period agrees so largely with that of Elam in what is now southern Persia that a cultural connection seems definitely established.

If from Egypt we turn to the most probable source of alien culture elements found there, _viz._, to the region of Mesopotamia, possibly the oldest seat of higher civilization in Asia, we find again that the culture of Babylonia under the famous lawgiver Hammurabi (about 2,000 B. C.) is not the product of purely indigenous growth but represents the resultant of at least two components, that of the Sumerian civilization of southern Babylonia and the Accadian culture of the North. It is certain that the Accadians adopted the art of writing from the Sumerians and were also stimulated by this contact in their artistic development. The evolution of Sumerian civilization is lost in obscurity but on the basis of well-established historical cases we should hesitate to assign to them an exclusively creative, and to other populations an exclusively receptive, rôle. We may quite safely assume that the early splendor of Sumerian civilization was also in large part due to stimuli received through foreign relations. That cultural elements of value may be borrowed from an inferior as well as from a higher level, has already been exemplified by the case of maize. It is also, among other things, illustrated by the history of the Chinese.

The Chinese have generally been represented as developing in complete isolation from other peoples. This traditional conception, however, breaks down with more intimate knowledge. Dr. Laufer has demonstrated that Chinese civilization, too, is a complex structure due to the conflux of distinct cultural streams. As an originally inland people inhabiting the middle and lower course of the Yellow River, they gradually reached the coast and acquired the art of navigation through contact with Indo-Chinese seafarers. Acquaintance with the northern nomads of Turkish and Tungus stock led to the use of the horse, donkey and camel, as well as the practice of felt and rug weaving, possibly even to the adoption of furniture and the iron technique.[8] Most important of all, it appears that essentials of agriculture, cattle-raising, metallurgy and pottery, as well as less tangible features of civilization are common to ancient China and Babylonia, which forces us to the conclusion that both the Chinese and Babylonian cultures are ramifications from a common Asiatic sub-stratum. It would be idle to speculate as to the relative contributions of each center to this ancient cultural stock. The essential point is that the most ancient Asiatic civilizations of which we have any evidence already indicate close contact of peoples and the dispersal of cultural elements.

Contact of peoples is thus an extraordinary promoter of cultural development. By the free exchange of arts and ideas among a group of formerly independent peoples, a superiority and complexity is rendered possible which without such diffusion would never have occurred. The part played in this process by the cruder populations must not be underestimated. They may contribute both actively and passively; actively, by transmitting knowledge independently acquired, as in the case of the felt technique the Chinese learned from the northern nomads; passively, by forming a lower caste on which the economic labors devolve and thus liberating their conquerors for an enlarged activity in the less utilitarian spheres of culture.