Folklore as an Historical Science Part 16

ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONDITIONS

In dealing with the folklore of any country, it is important to note the general bearing of anthropological conditions. The earliest inhabitants, to whom part of the folklore belonged, and the later peoples, to whom part belonged, have both arrived at their ultimate point of settlement in the country where we discover their folklore after being in touch with many points of the world's surface. They are both world-people as well as national people--they belonged to anthropology before they came under the dominion of history. This important fact is often or nearly always neglected. We are apt to treat of Greek and Roman and Briton, of Cretan, Scandinavian, and Russian, as bounded by the few thousands of years of life which have fixed them with their territorial names, and to ignore all that lies behind this historic period. There is, as a matter of fact, an immense period behind it, reckoned according to geological time in millions of years, and this period, longer in duration, more strenuous in its influences upon character and mind, containing more representatives in peoples, societies, and races than the later period, has affected the later period to a far greater extent than is generally conceded or understood. We cannot understand the later period without knowing something of the earlier period.

There is more than this; for the dominating political races occupying European countries to-day were, in most cases, preceded by a non-political people. Thus, if we turn to Britain for ill.u.s.tration, we find evidence of a people physically allied with a race which cannot be identified with Celt or Teuton,[284] philologically allied with a people which spoke a non-Aryan language,[285] archaeologically allied with the prehistoric stone-circle and monolith builders,[286] and we find custom, belief, and myth in Britain retaining traces of a culture which is not Celtic and not Teutonic, and which contains survivals of the primitive system of totemism.[287] These four independent cla.s.ses of evidence have to be combined if we would ascertain the true position they occupy in the history of Britain, and it is perfectly clear that, apart from general considerations, a direct appeal to anthropology is necessary to help out the deficiencies of both history and folklore. The questions involved in totemism alone compel us to this course. It is questionable whether there is any existing savage or barbaric people who are non-totemic in the sense of either not possessing the rudimentary beginnings of totemism, or not having once possessed a full system of totemism. Totemism, at one stage or another of its development, is, in fact, one of the universal elements of man's life, and all consideration of its traces in civilised countries must begin with some conception of its origin. Its origin must refer back to conditions of human life which are also universal. Special circ.u.mstances, special peoples, special areas could not have produced totemism unless we proceed to the somewhat violent conclusion that beginning in one area it has spread therefrom to all areas. I know of no authority who advocates such a theory and no evidence in its favour. We are left therefore with the proposition that the origin of totemism must be sought for in some universal condition of human life at one of its very early stages, which would have produced a state of things from which would inevitably arise the beliefs, customs, and social organisations which are included under the term totemism.

There is therefore ample ground for a consideration of anthropological conditions as part of the necessary equipment of the study of folklore as an historical science. Unfortunately, authorities are now greatly divided on several important questions in anthropology, and it is not possible to speak with even a reasonable degree of certainty on many things. This compels further research than the mere statement of the present position, and I find myself obliged even for my present limited purpose to suggest many new points beyond the stage reached by present research. There is one advantage in this. It allows of a hypothesis by which to present the subject to the student, and a working hypothesis is always a great advantage where research is not founded entirely on actual observation by trained experts in the field. Where, therefore, I depart from the guidance of conclusions already arrived at by scholars in this department of research, it will be in order to subst.i.tute an opinion of my own which I think it is necessary to consider, and the whole study of the anthropological problems in their relation to folklore will a.s.sume the shape of a restatement of the entire case.

I am aware that a subject of this magnitude is too weighty and far-reaching to be properly considered in a chapter of a book not devoted to the single purpose, but it is necessary to attempt a rough statement of the evidence, though it will take us somewhat beyond the ordinary domain of folklore; but, while dealing with the anthropological position at sufficient length to make a complicated subject clear, if I can do so, I shall limit both my arguments and the evidence in support of them to the narrowest limits.

I

Mr. Wallace, I think, supplies the dominant note of the anthropological position when he suggests, though in a strangely unsatisfactory terminology, that it is the conscious use by man of his experience which causes his superior mental endowments, and his superior range of development.[288] We must lay stress upon the important qualification "conscious." It is conscious use of experience which is the great factor in man's progress. It is the greatest possession of man in his beginning, and has remained his greatest possession ever since. His experience did not always lead him to the best paths of progress, but it has led him to progress.

Even Mr. Wallace did not appreciate the full significance of this principle. The conscious adoption of a natural fact, of an observation from nature, or an a.s.sumed observation from nature, for social purposes, is an altogether different thing from the unconscious knowledge which man might have been possessed of, but which he never put to any use in his social development. Anthropologists must note not the natural facts known to later man or known to science, but the facts, or a.s.sumed facts, which early man consciously adopted for his purpose during the long period of his development from savage to civilised forms of life. The unconscious acts of mankind are of no use, or of very little use. It is only the conscious acts that will lead us along the lines of man's development. Man did not begin to build up his social system with the scientific fact of blood kins.h.i.+p through father and mother, but he evolved a theory of social relations.h.i.+p which served his purpose until the fact of blood kins.h.i.+p supplied a better basis. At almost the first point of origin in savage society we see man acting consciously, and it is amongst his conscious acts that we must place those traces of a sort of primitive legislation which have been found.[289]

Now this being the basis of anthropological observation, we have to apply it to the question of man's earliest progress. It is at its base an economic question. Primitive economics dominated the movements and condition of early man in a far more thorough manner than modern economics affect civilisation, and between the two systems lies the whole history of man. It reveals man adapting the social unit to the productive powers of its food supply, and developing towards the adaptation of the productive powers of food supply to the social unit.

In the various stages that accompany this great change, there is no defined separation of peoples according to stages of culture, savage, barbaric, or civilised. There is nothing to suggest that all peoples do not come from one centre of human life. On the contrary, the evidence is strong that the primal stages in human evolution are traceable in all the culture stages, and, therefore, that they fit in with the general conclusions of anthropologists and naturalists as to man's origin in one definite centre, and his gradual spreading out from that centre.

I will take the chief conclusions arrived at in respect of this condition of birth at one centre and subsequent spreading out. Darwin has summarised the problem between the monogenists and polygenists in a manner which still ranks as a sufficient statement of the case, and his conclusion that "all the races of man are descended from a single primitive stock"[290] is accepted by the most prominent naturalists,[291] and confirmed by recent discoveries, which go to prove that this primitive stock began in miocene or pliocene times in the Indo-Malaysian intertropical lands.[292]

Anthropologists, who have been deeply interested in the controversy ranging round the origin of man, have in a remarkable manner neglected to take into full account the most significant phenomenon of spreading out.[293] They either neglect it altogether, or they relegate it to so small a place in their argument as to become a practical neglect. They treat of man as if he were always in a stationary condition, and exclude the important condition of movement as an element in his development. Mr. Spencer's general dictum that geological changes and meteorological changes, as well as the consequent changes of flora and fauna, must have been causing over all parts of the earth perpetual emigrations and immigrations,[294] does not help much, because it refers to special and cataclysmic events. Lord Avebury, though stating the true case, unfortunately contents himself at the end of his book on prehistoric man with a short summary of the evidence as to the equipment of primitive man in mental and social qualities when he began the great movement, and gives only a few lines to his conclusion that "there can be no doubt that he originally crept over the earth's surface little by little, year by year, just, for instance, as the weeds of Europe are now gradually but surely creeping over the surface of Australia."[295]

Mr. Keane is the first authority who thinks it appropriate to commence his treatise on man with an examination of the facts which show that "the world was peopled by migration from one centre by pleistocene man ... who moved about like other migrating faunas, unconsciously, everywhere following the lines of least resistance, advancing or receding, and acting generally on blind impulse rather than of set purpose;"[296] and it still remains with Dr. Latham to have formulated some fixed principles of the migratory movement in his admirable though, of course, wholly inadequate summary of man and his migrations. I will quote the pa.s.sage in full: "So long as any continental extremities of the earth's surface remained unoccupied--the stream (or rather the enlarging circle of migration) not having yet reached them--the _primary_ migration is going on; and when all have got their complement, the primary migration is over.

During this primary migration, the relations of man, thus placed in movement and in the full, early and guiltless exercise of his high function of subduing the earth, are in conflict with physical obstacles and with the resistance of the lower animals only. Unless, like Lot's wife, he turn back upon the peopled parts behind him, he has no relations with his fellow-men--at least none arising out of the claim of previous occupancy. In other words, during the primary migration, the world that lay before our progenitors was either brute or inanimate. But before many generations have pa.s.sed away, all becomes full to overflowing, so that men must enlarge their boundaries at the expense of their fellows. The migrations that now take place are _secondary_. They differ from the primary in many respects. They are slower, because the resistance is that of humanity to humanity, and they are violent, because dispossession is the object. They are partial, abortive, followed by the fusion of different populations, or followed by their extermination as the case may be."[297] This pa.s.sage, written so long ago as 1841, is still applicable to the facts of modern science, and there is only to add to it that the migration of man from a common centre, where life was easy, to all parts of the world, where life has been difficult, must have been undertaken in order to meet some great necessity, and must have become possible by reason of some great force which man alone possessed. The necessity was economic; the force was social development. If the movement has not been geographically ever forward, it has been ethnographically constant.[298] Movement always; sometimes the pressure has come from one direction, sometimes from another; sometimes it has caused compression and at other times expansion; sometimes it has sent humanity to inhabit regions that required generations of victims before it could hold its own. At all times the essential condition of life has been that of constant movement in face of antagonistic forces.[299] In whatever form the movement has come about, movement of a very definite character has taken place over an immense period of time, and sufficient to cover practically the whole earth with descendants from the original human stock. This conclusion is enormously strengthened by the acc.u.mulating evidence for the world-wide area covered by the remains of man's earliest weapon, the worked stone implement. It is everywhere. It is practically co-extensive with man's wanderings, and the greatness of the territory it covers marks it off as another of the universal relics of man's primitive life. Of no other weapon or instrument or a.s.sociated object can this be said. The bow and arrow are unknown to the Australians and other peoples; pottery is unknown to the Bushmen and other peoples; the use of fire in cookery is not found among the South Sea Islanders, and is not claimed for other peoples.[300] We can get behind the development of these and other arts and come upon the ruder people who had not arrived at the stage they represent. But we cannot get behind the worked flint. It must have been the chief material cause of man's success in the migratory movement, and with the social development accompanying it must have made migration not only possible, but the only true method of meeting the earliest economic difficulties. It also provides us with the elements of a chronological basis. Behind palaeolithic times there is an immensity of time when man struggled with his economic difficulties and spread out slowly and painfully.

During palaeolithic times the movement was more rapid and more general.

Obstacles were overcome by palaeolithic man becoming superior to his enemies by the use of weapons, and use of weapons caused, or at all events aided, the development of social inst.i.tutions capable of bearing the new force of movement.

These two factors of economic necessity and social development are of equal importance in man's history, and they interlace at all points.

They lead straight to the necessity for always taking count of the fact that man is primarily a migratory being, and that he has spread over the earth. Everywhere we find man. There is no habitable part of the world where he has not found a home. But we do not find him under equal conditions everywhere, and the different conditions afford evidence of the main lines of development. Roughly speaking, it may be put in this way. In the savage world the people appear as aborigines, that is to say, the first and only occupiers of the territory where they are located. In the barbaric world the condition of aboriginal settlement is tinged with the result of conquest, namely, the pus.h.i.+ng out or absorption of the aboriginal folk in favour of a more powerful and conquering folk. In the political world, and in the political world only, there is not only the element of conquest, but the definite aim of conquest, which is to retain the aboriginal or conquered people as part of the political fabric necessary to the settlement of the conqueror, and at the same time to keep intact the superior position of the conqueror. In the savage world, society and religion are based upon locality; in the barbaric world there is the first sign of the element of kins.h.i.+p consciously used in the effort of conquest, which dies away gradually as successful settlement, by which conqueror and conquered become merged in one people, follows conquest; in the political world, and in the political world only, kins.h.i.+p is elevated into a necessary inst.i.tution, is made sacred to the minds of tribesmen, and becomes an essential part of the religion of the tribe in order to keep the organisation of the tribal conquerors intact and free from the perils of dissolution when conquerors and conquered become members of one political unit. The savage and barbaric worlds are the homes of the backward peoples, the non-advanced or fossilised types of early humanity. The political world is the domain for the most part of the Aryan-speaking people, and of the Semitic people, and of those people who in Egypt within the Mediterranean area, and in China in the eastern Asian area, have built up civilisations which have only recently come under scientific observation.

These distinctions are not made by anthropologists as a rule, yet I cannot but think they are in the main the true distinctions which must be made if we are to arrive at any general conception of the progress of man from savagery to civilisation. The distinctions which seem to hold the field against those I have suggested, are those of hunter, pastoral, and agricultural. I say seem to hold the field, because they have never been scientifically worked out. They are stated in textbooks and research work almost as an axiom of anthropology, but their claim to this position is singularly weak and unsatisfactory, and has never been scientifically established. They are only economical distinctions, not social, and they do not properly express related stages. Hunting, cattle keeping, and agriculture are found in almost all stages of social evolution, and I, for one, deny that in the order they are generally given, they express anything approaching to accurate indication of the line of human progress. The distinctions I have suggested do not, of course, contain everything indicative of human progress. They are the first broad outlines to be filled up by the details of special peoples, special areas, and special ages. They involve many sub-stages which need to be properly worked out, and for which a satisfactory terminology is required. In the meantime, as measuring-posts of man's line of progress, they express the most important fact about man, namely, that his present enforced stationary condition has followed upon an enormous period of enforced movement. That movement has finally resulted in the presence of man everywhere on the earth's surface. This has been followed by the continued moving of savage man within the limited areas to which he has been finally pushed; by the movement of barbaric man from one place of settlement to another place of settlement, again within limited areas; and by the movement of political man through countries and continents of vast extent, and the final overlords.h.i.+p of political man over savage and barbaric man whom he has subjected and used for his purpose of final settlement in the civilised form of settlement.

It will be apparent from the terms I have used to express the three chief stages in man's progress, that I give a special significance to the use of blood kins.h.i.+p as a social force, and in the sequel I think this special significance will be justified.[301]

No one can properly estimate the tremendous amount of movement which preceded these later limitations to movement. Savage and barbaric races are now hemmed in by the forces of modern civilisation. This was not the case even a few hundred years ago, and though we cannot say when constant movement all over the world was stayed, we can form some idea of the comparatively late period when this took place by a contemplation of the very recent growth of the political civilisations known to history. At the most, this can only be reckoned at some ten thousand years. At the back of this short stretch of time, or of the successive periods at which the new civilisations have arisen, there are recollections of great movements and great migrations. Egypt, Babylonia, India, Persia, Greece, and Rome have preserved these recollections by tradition, and tradition has been largely confirmed by archaeology. Celts and Teutons have preserved parallel traditions which are confirmed by history observed from without. These traditions and memorials of the migration period have not been scientifically examined in each case, but where scholars have touched upon them, great and unexpected results have been produced.[302]

There was time enough, before these late and special movements which led to civilisation, for man, in the course of peopling the earth, to be brought at various stages to a standstill, and such a change in his life-history would have its own special results. One of the most momentous of these results is the fossilisation of social and mental conditions. Man stationary, or movable by custom within restricted areas, would live under conditions which must have produced forms of culture different from those under which man lived when he was always able to penetrate, not by custom but by the force of circ.u.mstances, into the unknown domain of unoccupied territory; and the fossilisation of his culture at various stages of development, in accord with the various periods of his being brought to a standstill, would be the most important result.[303] Whenever man was compelled to move onward the social forces which were demanded of him, as he proceeded from point to point, must have been quite different from those which he could have adopted if he had been allowed to stay in areas which suited him, if he could have selected his settlement grounds and awaited events. The calmness of the latter methods would perhaps have led to the unconscious development of social forms; the roughness of the actual method of constant movement led to the conscious adoption of social forms which has altered man's history. These considerations bring us to the conclusion that it is during the period of migratory movement that man has developed the social and religious elements with which the anthropologist finds him endowed, when at last in modern days he has been brought within the ken of scientific observation, and that therefore it is as a migratory not a stationary organism that the evolution of human society has to be studied, aided by the fact that enforced stationary conditions have produced in the savage world examples of perhaps the most remote as well as the more recent types of primitive humanity.

This last possibility, however, is not admitted by the best authorities. They endeavour to use biological methods in order to get behind existing savagery for the earliest period of human savagery.

Darwin is not satisfied with the evidence as to promiscuity, strong as it appeared to him to be, and he p.r.o.nounced it to be "extremely improbable" in a state of nature, and falls back upon the evidence of the rudimentary stages of human existence, there being, as among the gorillas, but one adult male in the band, and "when the young male grows up, a contest takes place for the mastery, and the strongest, by killing and driving out the others, establishes himself as the head of the community."[304] Mr. McLennan nowhere states the evidence for his first stage of human society--the primitive horde without any ideas of kins.h.i.+p, and based upon a fellows.h.i.+p of common interests and dangers[305]--but arrives at it by argument deduced from the conditions of later stages of development, and from the necessary suppositions as to the pre-existing stage which must have led to the later. Mr. Westermarck leads us straight to the evidence of the lower animals, from which he arrives at the small groups of humans headed by the male, and provides us with the theory of a human pairing season.[306] Mr. Morgan claims that no exemplification of mankind in his a.s.sumed lower status of savagery remained to the historical period,[307] presumably meaning the anthropo-historical period. And finally, Mr. Lang definitely claims that conjecture, and conjecture alone, remains as the means of getting back to the earliest human origins.[308]

There is great danger in relying too closely upon conjecture. We shall be repeating in anthropology what the a.n.a.lytical jurists accomplished in law and jurisprudence, and it will then soon become necessary to do for anthropology what Sir Henry Maine did for comparative jurisprudence, namely, demonstrate that the a.n.a.lytical method does not take us back to human origins, but to highly developed systems of society. Law, in the hands of the a.n.a.lytical jurists, is merely one part of the machinery of modern government. Social beginnings in the hands of conjectural anthropologists are merely abstractions with the whole history of man put on one side. Mr. Lang in leading the way towards the a.n.a.lytical method in anthropology has avoided many of its pitfalls, but his disciples are not so successful. Thus, when Mr.

Thomas declares that "custom which has among them [primitive peoples]

far more power than law among us, determines whether a man is of kin to his mother and her relatives alone, or to his father and father's relatives, or whether both sets of relatives are alike of kin to them,"[309] he is neglecting the whole significance and range of custom. His statement is true a.n.a.lytically, but it is not true anthropologically until we have ascertained what this custom to which he refers really is, whence it is derived, how it has obtained its force, what is its range of action, how it operates in differentiating among the various groups of mankind--in a word, what is the human history a.s.sociated with this custom.

We must, however, at certain points in anthropological inquiry have recourse to the conjectural method. Its value lies in the fact that it states, and states clearly, the issue which is before us, and it is always possible to take up the conjectural position and endeavour to ascertain whether the neglected facts of human history which it expresses can be recovered. Its danger lies in the neglect of certain anthropological principles which can only be noted from definite examples, and the significance of which can only be discovered by the handling of definite examples. I will refer to one or two of the principles which I have in mind. Thus, it is necessary to distinguish between what is a practice and what is a rule. A practice precedes a rule. A practice incidental to one stage of society must not be confused with a rule, similar to the practice, obtaining in a different stage of society. Again, it must be borne in mind that ident.i.ty of practice is no certain evidence of parallel stages of culture, and already it has been pointed out that identical practices do not always come from the same causes. Thirdly, it has to be borne in mind that primitive peoples specialise in certain directions to an extreme extent, and correspondingly cause neglect in other directions.

The normal, therefore, has to give way to the special, and it is the degree of specialisation and the degree of neglect which are measuring factors of progress; in other words, it is the conscious adoption of certain rules of life with which we alone have to do.

These principles are apt to be wholly neglected, and, indeed, the last-mentioned element in the evolution of human society does not enter into the calculations of a.n.a.lytical anthropologists. They provide for the normal according to scientific ideas of what the normal is. They either neglect or openly reject what cannot be called abnormal, because it appears everywhere, but which they are inclined to treat as abnormal because it does not fit into their accepted lines of development. That which I have ventured to term specialisation and neglect is a great and important feature in anthropology. It obtains everywhere in more or less degree, and accounts for some of the apparently unaccountable facts in savage society, where we are frequently encountered by a comparatively high degree of culture a.s.sociated with a cruel and debasing system of rites and practices which belong to the lowest savagery. Dr. Haddon has usefully suggested the term "differential evolution" for this phenomenon in the culture history of man,[310] and as I find myself in entire agreement with this distinguished anthropologist as to the facts[311] which call for a special terminology, I gladly adopt his valuable suggestion.

It is advisable to explain this phenomenon by reference to examples, and I will take the point of specialisation first. Even where industrial arts have advanced far beyond the primitive stage we are considering, we have the case of the Ahts, with whom "though living only a few miles apart, the tribes practise different arts and have apparently distinct tribal characteristics. One tribe is skilful in shaping canoes, another in painting boards for ornamental work, or making ornaments for the person, or instruments for hunting and fis.h.i.+ng. Individuals as a rule keep to the arts for which their tribe has some repute, and do not care to acquire those arts in which other tribes excel. There seems to be among all the tribes in the island a sort of recognised tribal monopoly in certain articles produced, or that have been long manufactured in their own district. For instance, a tribe that does not grow potatoes, or make a particular kind of mat, will go a long way year after year to barter for those articles, which if they liked they themselves could easily produce or manufacture."[312] The remarkable case of the Todas specialising in cattle rearing and dairy farming is another example.

Other people, both higher and lower in civilisation than the Todas, keep cattle and know the value of milk, but it is reserved for the Todas alone to have used this particular economic basis of their existence as the basis also of their social formation and their religious life.[313]

The result is that they neglect other forms of social existence. They are not totemists, though perhaps they have the undeveloped germs of totemistic beliefs.[314] Their cla.s.sificatory system of relations.h.i.+p makes their actual kins.h.i.+p scarcely recognisable; they "have very definite restrictions on the freedom of individuals to marry," and have a two-cla.s.s endogamous division, but their marriage rite is merely the selection of nominal fathers for their children.[315] Throughout the careful study which we now possess, thanks to Dr. Rivers, of this people, there is the dominant note of dairy economy superimposing itself upon all else, and even religion seems to be in a state of decadence.[316] I do not know that anywhere else could be found a stronger example of the results of extreme specialisation upon the social and mental condition of a people. As a rule such specialisation does not extend to a whole people, but rather to sections, as, for instance, among the Gold Coast tribes of Africa who "transmit the secret of their skill from father to son and keep the corporation to which they belong up to a due degree of closeness by avoiding intermarriage with any of the more unskilled labourers,"[317] and Dr. Bucher, who has worked out many of the earliest conditions of primitive economics, concludes that it may be safely claimed that every "tribe displays some favourite form of industrial activity in which its members surpa.s.s the other tribes."[318] This rule extends to the lowest type of man, as, for instance, among the Australians. Each tribe of the Narrinyeri, says Taplin, have been accustomed to make those articles which their tract of country enabled them to produce most easily; one tribe will make weapons, another mats, and a third nets, and then they barter them one with another.[319]

The evidence for industrial evolution is full of cases such as these, and they are extremely important to note, because it is not the mere existence of particular customs or particular beliefs among different peoples which is the factor to take into account, but the use or non-use, and the extent of the use or non-use, to which the particular customs or beliefs are put in each case.[320] Let me turn from the phenomenon of over-specialisation to that of neglect, and for this purpose I will take the simple fact of blood kins.h.i.+p. Existing obviously everywhere through the mother, and not obviously but admittedly through the father among most primitive peoples, there are examples where both maternal kins.h.i.+p and paternal kins.h.i.+p are neglected factors in the construction of the social group. The Nahals of Khandesh, for instance, neglect kins.h.i.+p altogether, and exist perfectly wild among the mountains, subsisting chiefly on roots, fruits, and berries, though the children during infancy accompany the mother in her unattached freedom from male control,[321] just as Herodotos describes the condition of the Auseans "before the h.e.l.lenes were settled near them."[322] Similarly, among many primitive peoples, kins.h.i.+p with the mother is recognised while kins.h.i.+p with the father is purposely neglected as a social factor. Thus, among the Khasia Hill people, the husband visits his wife occasionally in her own home, where "he seems merely entertained to continue the family to which his wife belongs."[323] This statement, so peculiarly appropriate to my purpose, is not merely an accident of language. With the people allied to the Khasis, namely, the Syntengs and the people of Maoshai, "the husband does not go and live in his mother-in-law's house; he only visits her there. In Jowai, the husband came to his mother-in-law's house only after dark," and the explanation of the latest authority is that among these people "the man is n.o.body ... if he be a husband he is looked upon merely as _u shong kha_, a begetter."[324]

The neglect of maternal and paternal kins.h.i.+p respectively in these two cases is obvious. They are recognised physically. But they are not used as part of the fabric of social inst.i.tutions. Physical motherhood or fatherhood is nothing to these people, and one must learn to understand that there is wide difference between the mere physical fact of having a mother and father, and the political fact of using this kins.h.i.+p for social organisation. Savages who have not learnt the political significance have but the scantiest appreciation of the physical fact. The Australians, for instance, have no term to express the relations.h.i.+p between mother and child. This is because the physical fact is of no significance, and not as Mr. Thomas thinks because of the meagreness of the language.[325] Our field anthropologists do not quite understand the savage in this respect. It is of no use preparing a genealogical tree on the basis of civilised knowledge of genealogy if such a doc.u.ment is beyond the ken of the people to whom it relates. The information for it may be correctly collected, but if the whole structure is not within the compa.s.s of savage thought it is a misleading anthropological doc.u.ment. It is of no use translating a native term as "father," if father did not mean to the savage what it means to us. It might mean something so very different. With us, fatherhood connotes a definite individual with all sorts of social, economical, and political a.s.sociations, but what does it mean to the savage? It may mean physical fatherhood and nothing more, and physical fatherhood may be a fact of the veriest insignificance. It may mean social fatherhood, where all men of a certain status are fathers to all children of the complementary status, and social fatherhood thus becomes much more than we can understand by the term father.

We cannot ignore the evidence which over-specialisation in one direction and neglect in other directions supply to anthropology. It shows us that human societies cannot always be measured in the scale of culture by the most apparent of the social elements contained in them. The cannibalism of the Fijians, the art products of the Maori, the totemism of the Australian blacks, do not express all that makes up the culture of these people, although it too often happens that they are made to do duty for the several estimates of culture progress. It follows that a survey of the different human societies might reveal examples of the possible lowest in the scale as well as various advances from the lowest; or in lieu of whole societies in the lowest scale, there might be revealed unexceptional examples of the possible lowest elements of culture within societies not wholly in the lowest scale. It will be seen how valuable an a.s.set this must be in anthropological research. It justifies those who a.s.sert that existing savagery or existing survival will supply evidence of man at the very earliest stages of existence. It is the root idea of Dr. Tylor's method of research, and it is an essential feature in the science of folklore.

Evidence of this nature, however, needs to be exhaustively collected, and to be subjected to the most careful examination, as otherwise it may be used for the merest _a priori_ argument of the most mischievous and inconclusive description. It involves consideration of whole human groups rather than of particular sections of each human group, of the whole corpus of social, religious, and economical elements residing in each human group rather than of the separated items. Each human group, having its specialised and dormant elements, must be treated as an organism and not as a bundle of separable items, each one of which the student may use or let alone as he desires. That which is anthropological evidence is the indivisible organism, and whenever, for convenience of treatment and considerations of s.p.a.ce, particular elements only are used in evidence, they must be qualified, and the use to which they are provisionally put for scientific purposes must be checked, by the a.s.sociated elements with which the particular elements are connected.

The human groups thus called upon to surrender their contributions to the history of man are of various formations, and consist of various kinds of social units. There is no one term which can properly be applied to all, and it will have been noted that I have carefully avoided giving the human groups. .h.i.therto dealt with any particular name, and only under protest have I admitted the terms used by the authorities I have quoted. I think the term "tribe" is not applicable to savage society, for it is used to denote peoples in all degrees of social evolution, and merely stands for the group which is known by a given name, or roams over a given district. But the use of this term is not so productive of harm as the use of the term "family," because of the universal application of this term to the smallest social unit of the civilised world, and because of the fundamental difference of structure of the units which roughly answer to the definition of family in various parts of the world. It is no use in scientific matters to use terms of inexact reference. As much as almost anything else it has led to false conclusions as to the evolution of the family, conclusions which seem to entangle even the best authorities in a ma.s.s of contradictions. I cannot think of a family group in savagery with father, mother, sons, and daughters, all delightfully known to each other, in terms which also belong to the civilised family, and still less can I think of these terms being used to take in the extended grouping of local kins.h.i.+ps. One of our greatest difficulties, indeed, is the indiscriminate use of kins.h.i.+p terms by our descriptive authorities. We are never quite sure whether the physical relations.h.i.+ps included in them convey anything whatever to the savage. If he knows of the physical fact, he does not use it politically, for blood kins.h.i.+p as a political force is late, not early, and the early tie was dependent upon quite other circ.u.mstances.

Over and over again it will be found stated by established authorities that the family was the primal unit, the grouped families forming the larger clan, the grouped clans forming the larger tribe. This is Sir Henry Maine's famous formula, and it is the basis of his investigation into early law and custom.[326] It is founded upon the false conception of the family in early history, and upon a too narrow interpretation of the stages of evolution. When we are dealing with savage society, the terms family and tribe do not connote the same inst.i.tution as when we are dealing with higher forms of civilisation.

There is something roughly corresponding to these groupings in both systems, but they do not actually equate. When we pa.s.s to the Semitic and the Aryan-speaking peoples, both the family and tribe have a.s.sumed a definite place in the polity of the races which is not to be found outside these peoples.

So strongly has the family impressed itself upon the thought of the age that students of man in his earliest ages are found stating that "the family is the most ancient and the most sacred of human inst.i.tutions."[327] This proposition, however, is not only denied by other authorities, as, for instance, Mr. Jevons, who affirms that "the family is a comparatively late inst.i.tution in the history of society,"[328] but it rests upon the merely a.n.a.lytical basis of research, separated entirely from those facts of man's history which are discoverable by the means just now suggested. One is, of course, quite prepared to find the family among civilisations older than the Indo-European, and yet to find that it is a comparatively late inst.i.tution among Indo-European peoples. As a matter of fact, this is the case; for the two kinds of family, the family as seen in savage society and the family as it appears among the antiquities of the Indo-European people, are totally distinct in origin, in compa.s.s, and in force; while welded between the two kinds of family is the whole inst.i.tution of the tribe. It is no use introducing the theory adopted by Grote, Niebuhr, Mommsen, Thirlwall, Maine, and other authorities who have studied the legal antiquities of cla.s.sical times, that the tribe is the aggregate of original family units. Later on I shall show that this cannot be the case. The larger kins.h.i.+p of the tribe is a primary unit of ancient society, which thrusts itself between the savage family and the civilised family, showing that the two types are separated by a long period of history during which the family did not exist.

It has taken me some time to explain these points in anthropological science, which appear to me not to have received proper consideration at the hands of the masters of the science, but which are essential factors in the history of man and are necessary to a due consideration of the position occupied by folklore. The chief results obtained are:--

(1) Migratory man would deposit his most rudimentary social type not at the point of starting his migration, but at the furthest point therefrom.

(2) Custom due to the migratory period would continue after real migratory movement had ceased, and from this body of custom would be derived all later forms of social custom.

(3) Non-kins.h.i.+p groups are more rudimentary than kins.h.i.+p groups, and are still observable in savage anthropology.

(4) Anthropological evidence must be based upon the whole of the characteristics of human groups, not upon special characteristics singled out for the purpose of research.

It is with these results we have to work. They will help us to see how far the facts of anthropology, which begin far behind the historical world, have to do with the problems presented by folklore as a science having to deal with the historical world.

II

We may now inquire where anthropology and folklore meet. It is significant in this connection that in order to reach back to the earliest ages of man, our first appeal seems to be to folklore. The appeal at present does not lead us far perhaps, but it certainly acts as a finger post in the inquiry, for Dr. Kollmann, rejecting the evidence of the Java _Pithecanthropus erectus_ as the earliest palaeontological evidence of man, advances the opinion that the direct antecedents of man should not be sought among the species of anthropoid apes of great height and with flat skulls, but much further back in the zoological scale, in the small monkeys with pointed skulls; from which, he believes, were developed the human pygmy races of prehistoric ages with pointed skulls, and from these pygmy races finally developed the human race of historic times. And he relies upon folklore for one part of his evidence, for it is this descent of man, he thinks, which explains the persistency with which mythology and folklore allude to the subject of pygmy people, as well as the relative frequency with which recently the fossils of small human beings belonging to prehistoric times have been discovered.[329] It must not be forgotten, too, that this remote period is found in another cla.s.s of tradition, namely, that to which Dr. Tylor refers as containing the memory of the huge animals of the quaternary period.[330]

It must be confessed that we do not get far with this evidence alone.

If it proves that the true starting point is to be found in folklore, it also proves that folklore alone is not capable of working through the problem. Anthropology must aid here, and I will suggest the lines on which it appears to me it does this.

Our first effort must be made by the evidence suggested by the conjectural method. This leads us to small human groups, each headed by a male who drives out all other males and himself remains with his females and his children. s.e.xual selection thus acts with primitive economics[331] in keeping the earliest groups small in numbers, and creating a spreading out from these groups of the males cast out. We have male supremacy in its crudest form accompanied by an enforced male celibacy, so far as the group in which the males are born is concerned, on the part of those who survive the struggle for supremacy and wander forth on their own account. Marking the stages from point to point, in order to arrive at a systematic method of stating the complex problem presented by the subject we are investigating, we can project from this earliest condition of man's life two important elements of social evolution, namely--

(a) Younger men are celibate within the natural groups of human society, or are driven out therefrom.

(b) Men thus driven out will seek mates on their own account, and will secure them partly from the original group as far as they are permitted or are successful in their attempts, and partly by capture from other local groups.

The first of these elements strongly emphasises the migratory character of the earliest human groups. The second shows how each group is relieved of the incubus of too great a number for the economic conditions by the double process of sending forth its young males, and of its younger females being captured by successful marauders.

Let us take a fuller note of what the conditions of such a life might be. There is no tie of kins.h.i.+p operating as a social force within the groups; there is the unquestioned condition of hostility surrounding each group, and there is the enforced practice of providing mates by capture. Of these three conditions the most significant is undoubtedly the absence of the kins.h.i.+p tie. If then we use this as the basis for grouping the earliest examples of social organisation, we proceed to inquire whether there are any examples of kinless society in anthropological evidence.