HEREDITY, CLIMATE, AND CIVILIZATION
82. Heredity.—83. Geographical environment.—84. Diet.—85.
Agriculture.—86. Cultural factors.—87. Cultural
distribution.—88. Historical induction.
82. HEREDITY
The first of the several factors through which it is logically possible
to explain the life and conduct and customs of any people is race or
heredity: in other words, the inborn tendencies, bodily and mental, of
the people that carry these customs. At first sight it may seem that
this element of race might be quite influential. Since peoples differ in
inherited characteristics of body—complexion, features, hair, eye color,
head form, and the like—these bodily inherited peculiarities ought to
be accompanied by mentally inherited traits, such as greater or less
inclination to courage, energy, power of abstract thought, mechanical
ingenuity, musical or æsthetic proclivities, swift reactions, ability to
concentrate, gift of expression. Such racial mental traits, again, might
conceivably be expressed in the conduct and culture of each people. Races
born to a greater activity of the mechanical faculties would achieve more
or higher inventions, those innately gifted in the direction of music
would develop more subtly melodious songs, and so on.
Yet in every particular case it is difficult or impossible to establish
by incontrovertible evidence that heredity is the specific cause of this
accomplishment, of this point of view, or of this mode of life; that
it is the determining factor to such and such degree of such and such
customs. This is not a denial of the probability that inborn racial
differences exist. It is an affirmation of the difficulty, discussed in
Chapters I, IV, and V, of knowing what is inborn; and more specifically,
of the difficulty of tracing particular customary activities back
to particular racial qualities. The problem of connecting specific
race traits with specific phenomena of culture or group conduct, such
as settled life, architecture in stone, religious symbolism, and
the like,—of determining how much of this type of architecture or
symbolism is instinctive in the race and how much of it is the result of
traditional or social influences,—remains unsolved.
For example, should one try to apply to the explanation of the mode
of life or culture of the Indians of the Southwestern United States
biological facts, such as their head form, one would be confronted
by the difficulty that long heads are characteristic of some of the
town-building tribes, or Pueblos, and also of some of the tribes living
in brush huts. Broad heads are also found among both the settled and
nomadic tribes. The Pueblo Taos and non-Pueblo Pima are narrow-headed,
the Pueblo Zuñi and non-Pueblo Apache broad-headed. So with the pulse
rate, which has been already mentioned (§ 70) as unusually slow among the
Southwestern Indians. It is the same for the nomadic Apache who lived by
fighting, and for the Hopi and Zuñi who are famous for their timidity and
gentleness. Similar cases might be cited almost endlessly. It is evident
that they are of a kind with the lack of correspondence between race and
speech, or race and nationality, among the European peoples.
83. GEOGRAPHICAL ENVIRONMENT
When it comes to the second factor by which culture might theoretically
be explained—physical environment or geography—similar difficulties are
encountered.
It is of course plain that a primitive tribe under the equator would
never invent the ice box, and that the Eskimo will not keep their food
and water in buckets of bamboo, although it is possible that if the
Eskimo had had bamboo carried to them by ocean currents, they would
have been both glad and able to use it. The materials and opportunities
provided by nature may be made use of by each people, while other
materials not being provided, other arts or customs can therefore not
be developed. But evidently this correspondence is mainly negative.
Not performing an act because one lacks the opportunity by no means
proves that the opportunity will necessarily lead to the performance.
Two nations will live where there is ice to store and one will invent
and the other fail to invent the ice chest. Whole series of peoples
possess bamboo and clay, and yet some of them draw water in bamboo joints
and others in pots. Obviously, natural environment does impose certain
_limiting conditions_ on human life; but equally obviously, it does not
_cause_ inventions or institutions.
The native Australians have wood and cord and flint but do not make bows
and arrows. Their civilization had not advanced to the point where they
were able to devise an efficient bow, and the requisite idea failed to be
carried to them from elsewhere as it was to other peoples who also did
not invent the weapon. The Polynesians, on the other hand, seem once to
have had the weapon, as evidenced by their retaining it as a toy, but to
have disused it, perhaps because they specialized on fighting with spears
and clubs. Modern civilized people fight at long range, but have let bows
go out of use, except for sport, because their knowledge of metallurgy
and chemistry centuries ago progressed to the point where they could
produce firearms. Development or lack of development or specialization
of other cultural activities—social causes—thus determine more directly
than other factors whether or not a people employ the bow and arrow. Of
those mentioned, the Australians are the only ones with whom a factor of
natural environment might be alleged to enter: namely, their isolation,
which cut them off from communications and the opportunity to learn
from other races. Yet such isolation is as much a matter of inability
to traverse space as it is a matter of physical distance. A developed
art of navigation would have abolished the Australian isolation. Thus,
this seemingly environmental cause of a cultural fact depends for its
effectiveness on a co-existing cultural cause. It is the latter which is
the most immediate or specific cause.
In general, then, it may be concluded that the directly determining
factors of cultural phenomena are not nature which gives or withholds
materials, but the general state of knowledge and technology and
advancement of the group; in short, historical or cultural influences.
84. DIET
The greater part of the Southwest is arid. Fish are scarce. The result
is that most of the tribes get little opportunity to fish. Most of these
Southwestern Indians will not eat fish; in fact, think them poisonous.
This circumstance might lead to the following inference: nature does
not furnish fish in abundance; therefore the Indians got out of the
habit of eating them, and finally came to believe them poisonous. At
first blush this may seem a sufficient explanation. But it is well to
note that the explanation has two parts and that only one of them has
to do with nature: the habit of not eating fish because they are too
scarce to make it worth while. As soon as one proceeds to the second
step, that the disuse led to aversion and then to a false belief of
poisonousness, one has gone on to a different matter. Disuse, aversion,
and belief lie wholly within the field of human conduct. To derive a
psychological phenomenon, such as a belief, from another psychological
phenomenon such as a particular disuse, because this disuse is founded
on a geographical factor, would of course be a logical fallacy. It can
also be shown not to hold, since we prize caviar and oysters and venison
in proportion to their rarity. Scarcity in this case thus leads to the
contrary psychological attitude, and either fails to establish beliefs or
establishes favorable ones.
Again, either through a change in climate or through the improvement
of trade, a food that was scarce may become plentiful. Or a people may
remove to a new habitat, different from that in which their customs of
eating were formed. If environment alone were the dominating cause of
their customs, these customs should then immediately alter. As a fact, a
group sometimes adheres to its old customs. The immediate cause of such
conservatism is habit or inertia or inclination toward superstition or
fear of taboo, all of which are mental reactions expressed in folkways or
social customs. Thus environment remains at most a partial and indirectly
operating cause.
A case in point is that of the Jews. It is often said that the Jew’s
prohibition against eating pork and oysters and lobsters originated in
hygienic considerations; that these were climatically unsafe foods for
him in Palestine. This explanation is more simple than true. Ancient
Palestine was an arid country in which hogs could not be raised with
economic profit, and so they were not raised; and the Philistine and
Phœnician kept the Jew from the coast along which he might have obtained
shellfish. Eating neither food, he happened to acquire a distrust of
them; having the distrust, he rationalized it by saying that it was
foreign and wicked and irreligious to act counter to his habits—just like
the Pueblo Indian; and in the end had the Lord issue the prohibition for
him. Yet this outcome is a long way from the starting point of natural
environment. The environment may indeed be said to have furnished the
first occasion, but the determining causes of the taboos in the Mosaic
law are of an entirely different kind—distrust, custom, rationalization,
psychological or cultural factors. If doubt remains, it is dispelled
by the orthodox Jew of to-day, whose environment thrusts some of his
forbidden foods at him as economically and hygienically satisfactory,
whereas he still shudders at the thought of tasting them.
If this sort of cultural crystallizing of custom and subsequent
rationalizing or ritual sanctioning takes place among civilized and
intelligent people, the like must occur among uncivilized tribes.
85. AGRICULTURE
Attempts have been made to derive the invention of agriculture from
climatic factors. The first theory was that farming took its rise in the
tropics, where agriculture came naturally, almost without effort, under
a bounteous sky. Only after people had acquired the habit of farming and
had moved into other less favorably endowed countries, did they take
their agriculture seriously in order to survive. But a second, equally
plausible, and quite contradictory theory has been advanced, which looks
toward the duress rather than the easy favors of nature. On the basis of
conditions among the modern Papago Indians and the ancient inhabitants
of the Southwest, it has been argued that it must have been the peoples
of arid countries who invented agriculture, necessity driving them to it
through shortage of wild supplies.
Between such flat opposites, the choice is merely one of unscientific
guessing. In this particular case of the Southwest it is certain that
both guesses are wrong. Agriculture did not come to the natives of this
area because nature was favorable or because it was unfavorable. It came
because through increase of knowledge and change of attitude, some people
in the region of Southern Mexico or Guatemala or beyond first turned
agriculturists, and from them the art was gradually carried, through
nation after nation, to the Southwestern tribes, and finally even to the
Indians of the North Atlantic coast.
The reasons for acceptance of this explanation are several. First is the
distribution of native agriculture, whose practice was about equally
spread in the two American continents with its middle in or near Central
America. If a geographical diffusion of the art from a center took place,
its radiation or extension would probably be about equal to the north
and south. Then, the middle portions of the new world held the greatest
concentration of native population, such as would have tended to produce
a pressure in the direction of the establishment of agriculture and would
also normally be a consequence of the continued custom of farming, as
opposed to unsettled life. Again, the Southwestern tribes planted only
maize, beans, and squashes; the Mexicans grew in addition tomatoes, chili
peppers, cacao, and sweet potatoes. It looks as if they had carried their
agriculture farther through having been at it longer. Then, pottery has
evidently spread out from the same center, and the two arts seem to go
hand in hand. Other evidence might be adduced, such as archæological
excavations and the botanical fact that the home of the nearest wild
relatives of the plants cultivated in the Southwest is the central or
middle American area (§ 183).
In short, the Southwestern Indians did not farm because nature induced
them to make the invention. They did not make the invention at all. A far
away people made it, and from them it was transmitted to the Southwest
through a series of successive tribal contacts. These contacts, which
then are the specific cause of Southwestern agriculture, constitute a
human social factor; a cultural or civilizational factor. Climatic or
physical environment did not enter into the matter at all, except to
render agriculture somewhat difficult in the arid Southwest, though not
difficult enough to prevent it. Had the Southwest been thoroughly desert,
agriculture could not have got a foot-hold there. But this would be only
a limiting condition; the active or positive causes that brought about
the Southwestern agriculture are its invention farther South, the spread
of the invention to the North, and its acceptance there.
Of course this conclusion sheds no light on the causes of the first
invention in the middle American region. The ultimate origin of the
phenomenon has not been penetrated. But the prevalence of agriculture in
the aboriginal Southwest for several thousand years past has been pretty
certainly accounted for, and by an explanation in terms of culture or
civilization, or the activity of societies of human beings.
86. CULTURAL FACTORS
Such cultural causes constitute the third set or kind of factors by
which civilization is explainable. If the example just discussed is
representative, it is clear that cultural factors ordinarily interpret
more phenomena of civilization, and interpret them more fully, than
factors either of racial heredity or physical environment.
It is different in zoölogy and botany. The forms and behavior of
animals and plants are explainable in terms of heredity and environment
because animals and plants have no culture. It is true that the forms
and behavior are determined also by other animals and plants, their
characteristics, habits, and abundance, but these factors are in a
larger sense part of the environment. They are at any rate sub-cultural.
But since anthropology deals with beings whose distinctive trait in
social relations is the possession of the thing that we call culture,
the factors which biology employs are insufficient. It is not that
heredity and natural environment fail to apply to man, but that they
apply only indirectly and remotely to his civilization. This fundamental
fact has often been overlooked, especially in modern times, because the
biological sciences having achieved successful increases of knowledge
and understanding, the temptation was great to borrow their method
outright and apply it without serious modification to the human material
of anthropology. This procedure simplified the situation, but yielded
inadequate and illusory results. For a very long time the idea that man
possessed and animals lacked a soul influenced people’s thought to such a
degree that they scarcely thought of human beings in terms of biological
causality, of heredity and environment. Then when a reaction began to set
in, less than two centuries ago, and it became more generally recognized
that man was an animal, the pendulum swung to the other extreme and
the tendency grew of seeing in him only the animal, the cultureless
being, and of either ignoring his culture or thinking that it could be
explained away by resolving it into the factors familiar from biology.
The just and wise course lies between. The biological aspects of man must
be interpreted in terms of biological causation, his cultural aspects
in terms first of all of cultural causation. After they have been thus
resolved, the cultural causes may reduce to ultimate factors of heredity
and natural environment.
87. CULTURAL DISTRIBUTION
The Southwest also provides an example of how cultural phenomena can be
seen to be arranged geographically so as to yield a meaning or to outline
their history, without reference to climate or natural influences. Near
the center of the area, in northern New Mexico and Arizona, live four
groups of Pueblo or town building Indians—the Hopi, Zuñi, Keres, and Tewa
or Tano—who represent a sort of élite of the native culture. They farm,
make pottery, accumulate wealth in turquoise, are governed by priests,
worship under a remarkably complex set of rituals, which involve altars,
masks, symbols of all sorts, and a rude sort of philosophy.
As one goes from the Pueblo center to the less settled tribes, one
encounters first the Navaho, who are earth hut builders and farm but
little, yet share much of the Pueblo elaborateness of ritual, including
altars, masks, and symbols. A little farther out, among the Apache and
Pima, the cults have perceptibly diminished in intricacy and symbolic
value: altars and masks are lacking.
The simplification increases among the more remote Mohave, whose cults
are based on dreams instead of priestly tradition. Still farther, on
the shores of the Pacific among the Luiseño and Gabrielino, some Pueblo
traits can still be found; cult altars and pottery, for instance. But
agriculture, homes of stone, turquoise, priests, and the majority of
Pueblo institutions are unknown. Finally, still farther away in central
California, the Yokuts now and then show a culture trait reminiscent of
the Pueblos: grooved arrow straighteners, perhaps, or occasional rudely
made pottery vessels. These are suggestive bits; fragments that have been
whittled away or toned down. Pueblo culture as a whole has vanished at
this distance. In its place the Yokuts possess quite different arts and
institutions and beliefs.
What is the significance of this gradual fading away of one type of
civilization and its replacement by others? Evidently that certain
influences have radiated out from the higher Pueblo center, and that the
effect of these has diminished in proportion to the number of tribes
they have passed through. The Pueblos have succeeded in handing over the
largest share of their civilization to the adjacent Navaho—and no doubt
also received most from them. The Apache being more remote, were less
affected; and so on to the farthest limits of the influences.
It is also clear that a time element is involved. A people receiving an
art from another obviously acquires this later than the inventors. Most
traits which the central Pueblos share with peripheral tribes may be
assumed to have existed longer among the Pueblos, simply because they
possess more traits in their culture and the flow has prevailingly been
out from them. Thus they make uncolored, two-colored, and three-colored
pottery; the tribes on the margin of the Southwest, uncolored pottery
only; those beyond the range of immediate Southwestern influence,
no pottery at all. Unless therefore there should be special reasons
suggestive of a degenerative loss of the art among the marginal
tribes—and no such reasons are known—the conclusion is forced that
Southwestern pottery was first made by the ancestors of the Pueblos
or their predecessors in the central part of the area, presumably as
plain ware, and that thence knowledge of the art was gradually carried
outward. However while simple pottery making was thus being taken up by
the tribes nearest to the Pueblo district, the Pueblos were going ahead
and learning to ornament vessels with painted designs. In time this
added art also spread to the neighbors, but meanwhile these had passed
knowledge of the first stage on to the tribes still farther out than
themselves; and meanwhile also the Pueblos had perhaps gone on to a third
stage, that of combining colors in their decoration.
In this way, if nothing interrupted the even regularity of the process,
the focal people, with their lead in creating or inventing or improving,
might pass through half a dozen successive stages of the art, or of many
arts, while the outermost peoples were just beginning to receive the
rudiments. The intermediate tribes would show attainment of a less or
greater number of stages in proportion to their distance from the center.
In this event the main facts concerning the pottery art of the Southwest
could be represented by a diagram of a step pyramid, each level or step
picturing a new increment to the basic art. The Pueblos would be at the
peak of the pyramid, five or six steps high, the near-by tribes a step
or two lower; and so on to the outermost, who remain at, or have only
recently attained to, the first or lowest level; while beyond these would
be the non-pottery-making tribes wholly outside the Pueblo sphere of
influence.
Of course on the actual map the distribution of the various forms or
stages of pottery made does not work out with the perfect regularity
of our schematic diagram. Here and there a tribe has migrated from its
habitat and disturbed the symmetry of arrangement; or the population of
a district has been so thin that it could live on wild products without
resorting to agriculture, so that it remained more or less nomadic and
had no use for fragile pottery; or a third group of tribes developed
basket making to a pitch which yielded excellent vessels, with the result
that they were satisfied and failed to take up pottery, or took it up
half-heartedly, so that the art remained stunted among them—a stage or
two more backward than their position would lead one to expect. But on
the whole pottery distribution in the Southwest does follow the schematic
arrangement with sufficient closeness to warrant the assumption that
the history of its development has been, at least in outline, as just
reconstructed.
The facts conform still more closely to the step pyramid arrangement
when consideration is given not to pottery alone but to the whole
culture—agriculture, other arts, social forms, ritual, religious
organization, and the like. In that case Pueblo culture is seen to
comprise easily the greatest number of traits or component parts, and
these to grow fewer and fewer towards the edges of the Southwest.[13]
88. HISTORICAL INDUCTION
The sort of conclusion here outlined is really a historical induction
drawn from the facts of culture distribution among living but historyless
tribes. Where documents are available, the development, the growth of
the pyramid itself, as it were, can often be seen as it happened. Thus,
about the year 100 A.D., Rome, Italy, France, England, Scotland, stood
on successive descending culture levels related to one another much like
Pueblo, Navaho, Pima, Mohave, Gabrielino; and also in the same placement
of ever more outward geographic situation.
Where written records fail, archæological remains sometimes take their
place. This is true of the Southwest, whose ancient pottery, stone
edifices and implements, and evidences of agriculture remain as records
of the past, telling a story only a little less complete and direct than
that of the Roman historians. One of the archæologists of the Southwest
has drawn up a pair of diagrams to outline the culture history of the
area as he has reconstructed it from comparison of the prehistoric
remains (Fig. 26).
[Illustration: FIG. 26. Diagrammatic representation by Nelson of the
geography and history of the culture of the Indians of the southwestern
United States: above, in space; below, in time, on _A-B_ diameter of
circle.]
In all this story, what has become of natural environment and heredity?
They have dropped from sight. We have been able to build up a reasonable
and probably reliable reconstruction of the course of development of
civilization in an area without reference to these two sets of factors.
The reconstruction is in terms of culture. Evidently environment and
heredity are in the main superfluous. They need not be brought in; are
likely to be confusing, to diminish the internal consistency of the
findings attained, if they are brought in. This is true in general, not
only of the instance chosen. By using environment or heredity, one can
often seem to explain certain selected features of a culture, but the
appearance is illusory, because one need only be impartial to realize
that one can never explain in this way the whole of any culture. When,
however, the explanation can be made in terms of culture—always of course
on the basis of a sufficient knowledge and digestion of facts—it applies
increasingly to the whole of a civilization, and each portion explained
helps to explain better all other portions. The cultural interpretation
of culture is therefore progressive, and ever more productive, whereas
the environmental and the biological-hereditary interpretation fail in
proportion as they are pushed farther; in fact can be kept going only by
ignoring larger and larger masses of fact to which they do not apply.
Historians, who may be described as anthropologists whose work is made
easy for them by the possession of written and dated records, have
tacitly recognized this situation. They may now and then attribute some
event or condition of civilization to an inherent quality of a race,
or to an influence of climate or soil or sea. But this is mostly in
their introductory chapters. When they really get to grips with their
subject, they explain in terms of human thought and action, in other
words, of culture. It is true that they dwell more on personalities
than anthropologists do. But that is because the materials left them by
former historians are full of personalities and anecdotes. And on the
other hand, anthropological data are usually unduly deficient in the
personal element; they consist of descriptions of customs, tools used by
long forgotten individuals, and the like. If anthropologists were able
to recover knowledge of the particular Pueblo woman who first painted a
third color or a glaze on a bowl, or of the priest who first instituted a
masked dance in order to make rain, we may be confident that they would
discuss these individuals. And such knowledge would throw more light on
the history of Southwestern pottery and religion and culture generally
than any amount of emphasis on the number of inches of rainfall per year,
or the pulse rate or similar hypothetical and remote causes.