Industries form the chief bond between man and his environment. The
esthetic activities arise in the individual and extend to his fellows;
the institutional activities express the relations among individual
men and groups; the linguistic activities serve to extend social
relations in space and time, and the sophic activities to integrate and
perpetuate all relations; but it is through the industrial activities
that human intelligence interacts with physical nature and makes
conquest of the material world. Accordingly, industries act as a
steady and never-ceasing stimulus to intelligence; accordingly, too,
the industrial activities afford the simplest and surest measure of
intellectual advancement.
Under this view of the place of industrial activities in human
phylogeny, certain phases of Seri technology acquire importance and
especial significance.
1. One of the most conspicuous features of Seri craft is its
local character. The foodstuffs, the materials for appareling and
habitations, and the substances utilized in the several lines of
simple handicraft are essentially local; moreover, the characteristic
methods and devices evidently reflect local environmental conditions.
There are, indeed, a few phenomena suggesting, and a still less
number demonstrating, extraneous origin; the balsa and the kilt are
sufficiently similar to devices of other districts to suggest, though
not to prove, genetic identity (indeed, the sum of indications of local
origin is much weightier than the several suggestions of extraneous
derivation); the iron harpoon-points and arrow-tips are mainly of local
flotsam, and are essentially provincial in modes of employment; the
chipped stone arrow-tips, though local in material, are foreign in
motive; but on summarizing the industrial phenomena, it would appear
that by far the greater share are essentially local, while the few of
exceptional (and extraneous) character can be pretty definitely traced
to importation through the social interactions of recent centuries.
2. An equally conspicuous feature of the industrial craft of the
Seri is the dominance of chance in both processes and devices. The
traditional “fisherman’s luck” is made exceptionally uncertain by
the sudden gales and shifting currents of Seriland shores, while the
absolute necessaries of life on land are still more capricious than
those alongshore; this uncertainty of resources has profoundly affected
the somatic features of the tribesman, as indicated elsewhere (ante,
p. 159); and that the mental attributes of the folk are even more
profoundly affected is attested by the role played by chance in the
selection and shapement of the prevailing tools of stone and shell.
The large role of chance in Seri life is also revealed, though less
directly, in the overweening mysticism of zootheistic faith, with its
material reflection in zoomimic craft.
3. When the local and fortuitous features of the Seri industries are
juxtaposed they are found to express a notably inchoate or primitive
stage of industrial development. In both the local and the fortuitous
or accidental aspects, the activities are so closely adjusted to the
immediate environment as to approach the instinctive agencies and
movements of bestial life, and correspondingly to diverge from the
composite and cosmopolite characters of higher humanity; the dearth of
extraneous devices denotes absence or intolerance of that accultural
interchange accompanying and marking the progress of peoples; and the
dearth of inventions denotes feebleness of creative faculty and absence
of that self-confidence which accompanies and measures progress in
nature-conquest.
4. When the local and fortuitous features of the Seri craft are viewed
in their serial or sequential relations, they are found to reflect
and attest autochthonal development. Excepting the few accultural
processes and devices whose acquisition may confidently be traced to
certain social interactions of the historic period, the Seri technic
is too closely tied to local environment to warrant any supposition of
importation from other districts. The question of the birthplace of
the people may be left open in this case as in every other; but the
birthplace of practically all those activities and activital products
which define the folk as human was manifestly Seriland itself—so that
the tribe, considered as a human folk rather than as a zoic variety,
must be classed as autochthonous.
Summarily, then, the Seri industries are significant as (1) local, (2)
fortuitous, (3) primitive, and (4) autochthonous; and these features
combine to illumine a noteworthy stage in primitive thought.
5. On juxtaposing these significant features of Seri technic, they are
found to reflect the tribal mind with noteworthy fidelity, and hence to
indicate the sources of Seri mentations, and of the local culture in
which these mentations are integrated. The local foodstuffs—especially
that vital standard of values in arid regions, water—are periodic
sources of the strongest aspirations and inspirations of industrial
life, and the methods and devices for food-getting are but the
legitimate offspring of the inevitable relation between effort and
environment; the conspicuous role of chance is but the composite
of the hard and capricious environment on the one hand, and of the
lowly thought reflecting that environment on the other hand; the zoic
faith into which the magma of recurrent chance has semicrystallized
finds carnate symbols either in local beasts or in fantastic monsters
suggested by those beasts; even the mating instinct, second only
to thirst among the impelling action-factors of the folk, is so
profoundly and bitterly provincial as to exclude foreign ideals to
a degree unparalleled among known peoples. The industrial materials
are local—but not more local than the thoughts in which they are
reflected; the technical methods are unmistakably the offspring of the
environment—but they are equally the offspring of minds reflecting
that environment and no other; the few and simple devices stand for
integrations of experiences, instinctive rather than ratiocinative, the
germ of invention rather than even its opening bud—but the experiences
bear the marks of that environment and no other. Accordingly, the
mental side of Seri industry, and, indeed, of all Seri life, appears
to be the counterpart of the physical side. The Seri mind is (1)
local, (2) chance-dominated, (3) exceeding lowly, and especially (4)
autochthonal in its content and workings.
* * * * *
There is an aspect of the inference as to the local and autochthonal
character of the Seri mind which is of wide-reaching application. As
indicated by many tribes, though most clearly by the Seri, there is
a definite relation between the somatic characteristics of primitive
folk and their environment; the indications are that the relation
is inversely proportionate to development, the lowliest tribes
reflecting environment most closely, and the higher peoples responding
less delicately to the environmental pressure in the ratio of their
increased power of nature-conquest; and the relation is essentially
phylogenetic, in that it sums and integrates the innumerable
interactions between organic kind and environment during generations or
ages. It is to be realized that the relation is not simple and direct
or physiologic merely (e. g., like that between climate and the pelage
of an animal), but that it is linked through the human activities;
for, as is conspicuously the case in Seriland, the environment prompts
exercises of particular kinds, and it is these exercises that shape
the somatic features, such as strength of lung, length of limb, and
the soundness of constitution displayed in physical endurance; yet
the relation is none the less real, in that it operates through the
activities rather than directly. The relation may be characterized
with respect to mechanism as bodily responsion, or with respect to
capacity as _responsivity of body_. Now, as is well illustrated by the
provincial ideation of the Seri, the relation between environment and
physique is accompanied by a corresponding relation between environment
and thought. This relation, too, varies inversely with development,
the connection being closest among the most primitive tribes, and
growing less and less close with maturing mentality and proportionately
increasing power of nature-contest; and the relation is still less
direct (or physiologic merely) than that between the human body and its
environment, in that not only the bodily activities but the instinctive
and nascently ratiocinative processes are interposed. This relation
between mind and environment may be characterized as mental responsion
in its mechanical aspect, or as _responsivity_ of mind when regarded as
a psychic property.[312] Accordingly, the relation between the tribal
mind and its environment, as illumined by the peculiarly delicate
interactions observed among the Seri, seem to indicate the genesis and
earlier developmental stages of mentality in its multifarious aspects.
[312] The responsivity of mind has been defined elsewhere as the basis
of knowledge, and as one of five fundamental principles of science (The
Cardinal Principles of Science, Proceedings of the Washington Academy
of Sciences, vol. II, 1900, pp. 1-12).
The specially significant feature of the relation between environment
on the one hand and body + mind on the other is its diminishing value
with general intellectual advancement. Viewed serially, the relation
may be considered to begin in the animal realm with organisms adapted
to environment through physiologic processes, and to end in that
realm of enlightened humanity in which mind molds environment through
complete nature-conquest. In the serial scale so defined the various
primitive tribes and more advanced peoples may be arranged in the
order of mental power or culture-status; when the same arrangement
will express in inverse order the relative closeness with which the
several tribal minds reflect their environments. It follows that the
lowly minds and craft of the Seri reflect their distinctive environment
with exceeding, perhaps unparalleled, closeness, because of their
very lowliness; it follows, too, that any other equally lowly folk
imported into the region and perfectly wonted to it by generations of
experience would equally reflect the physical features of the region
in their craft and in their thinking; it follows, also, that if the
Seri were transported into any other district of equally distinctive
physical features, they would gradually adapt themselves to the new
environment—though with some added intelligence, and hence with
diminished closeness, as is the way of demotic development—in such
manner that their craft and thinking would reflect its features. In
a more general way it follows that those similarities in culture, or
activital coincidences, which have impressed the ethnologic students
of the world (notably Powell and Brinton), are normal and inevitable
in primitive culture and of diminishing prominence with cultural
advancement.