CHAPTER 55

SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS

Question of Importance of Amalgamation As a Factor in the Evolution of Culture-Light on the Question from History-Social Conditions Favorable to Cultural Advance

WHA

HAT can be said in favor of racial intermixture from the standpoint of sociology? Is it not a historical fact that the amalgamation of races has been the chief factor in the progress of civilization throughout the world?

It is certainly a fact that the history of the world is largely made up of race conquests and subjugations, and of racial interminglings and amalgamations; and I suppose that among the mass of thinking people there is a general conviction that, somehow or other, race interblending has been an essential factor in the progress of civilization. At any rate, all of the present-day advocates of amalgamation lay stress upon the part which race crossing has played in the evolution of culture.

In setting out to inquire into the soundness of this point of view, we must have in mind some definition of the term culture or civilization. For the purposes of this discussion we shall define culture roughly as follows: (a) The energy or urge to create, and (b) The expansion of sympathy through the development of common interests, group sentiments, and organizations, and the acquisition of habits, technique, patterns, or what the anthropologists call trait-complexes. Primarily culture is a subjective phenomenon; secondarily, it is objective, and recognizable by tools, machinery, buildings, and all material products and contrivances.

In view of the fact that the kind of culture which spreads itself over the world is vastly more vital than any other problem, there is urgent need that we know how culture is developed and diffused, and what the consequences are of the contact and intermixture of different cultures.

One of the most recent and important developments in anthropology is the study of cultural areas, cultural centers, and cultural diffusion.1 1Wissler, Man and Culture.

In a rough way the whole world has been divided into cultural areas, and the culture-traits in each area have been catalogued. In this study it has been found that culture-traits are everywhere more highly perfected at the center of the culture area than at the periphery.

Now we are just beginning to understand something about culture centers and the important part which they have played, and in the future will play, in the progress of civilization. Just as we have developed a consciousness of our individual and political responsibility and rights, so we are now awakening to a sense of our responsibility and rights as participants in a common culture. As it is essential that an individual control his personal development and that the State control its development, so is it essential that a people protect and control their culture.

"What we were fighting for in the late war," says Wissler, "was the right of Belgium and every other country to possess and cherish its own culture." 2 Wissler looks forward to a time "when all peoples shall have rights to their culture, based upon the facts and conditions of culture and not upon the conveniences of relatively few individuals. In the same sense that the world rose out of social gloom when it came to see the position of the individual, it is now ready to take one step more, the consciousness of itself as having and developing cultures, and in meeting the challenge of the future by the formulation of culture rights." 3

It seems to me that the first essential of cultural advance is a favorable environment, i. e., a stimulating climate, a meagerness of resources demanding strenuous effort, and a geographical situation affording contact of people over a wide area, and at the same time affording protection from disturbing invaders by natural barriers of water, mountains, deserts, or forests. If the climatic and geographic factors are favorable, the population within the area will, by intercommunication, come to have a common culture, i. e., more or less uniform habits, methods of exploitation, modes of intercourse, standards of behavior, etcetera. The prevalence of the same culture over a wide area is favorable to discoveries and inventions which make for cultural advance. For a concrete illustration, in the history of white colonization in America there was a more or less common culture among the inhabitants in every locality. The most common material culture product was the axe. Now, the fact of this instrument being used by so many indiIbid., p. 334.

8 Ibid., p. 335.

viduals over a wide area was highly favorable to innovations and improvements in it. The chances were great that some user of the axe would manifest his creative genius by giving it a new shape, or by changing its weight, or the curvature of its handle. And each innovation which proved by experience to be an improvement would be in great demand by the woodsmen, and would rapidly spread throughout the population; and, in the course of some generations, an axe would be produced which was perfectly adapted to its purpose. In fact, that is what has happened to the American axe. It has received innumerable contributions from expert axemen; it is now the most perfect and most beautiful of American tools, and is vastly superior to the axe in any other part of the world. It would have been impossible for a perfect or standardized axe to develop elsewhere than at the center of the axecomplex.

I think it was under conditions similar to those above named that the first steps in culture were made. In the prehistoric stage of evolution we notice the beginnings and advancement of culture indicated by progress in the invention and use of tools and weapons, and in the discovery and use of natural resources. There was an eolithic period, when man invented nothing, but merely displayed his genius by discovering natural products which answered to his needs. For tools he picked up sticks and rocks which chance threw in his way. Then there was a palæolithic period, when man learned to make tools of stone, but in a clumsy and rude fashion. A third period was the neolithic, when man learned to make a great variety of implements and weapons of stone in a very skilful and even artistic manner. Lastly there was a metal age, of copper, bronze, iron, etcetera, merging into the era of civilization.

The data upon the movement of races during the prehistoric time consist of skeletal remains of man, of man's tools and implements, and the caves in which man dwelt; and these data diminish in number as we go back towards the eolithic period, where they are reduced to mere fragments of two skeletal remains, and a small collection of stones supposed to have been used by man. Nevertheless, on the basis of such data anthropologists have not hesitated to generalize the movement of races, and the distribution of culture throughout the prehistoric period, at least so far as Europe is concerned.

Henry Fairfield Osborn, in his Men of the Old Stone Age, says that the two races of the eolithic period, the Heidelberg and the Piltdown,

did not intermix and both became extinct without leaving descendants.* In the paleolithic period the two principal races which flourished in Europe were the Neanderthal and the Cro-Magnon. According to Osborn, the former race, like the Heidelberg and Piltdown races, disappeared without mixing with any other race, or leaving descendants." Referring to the Chellean phase of the palæolithic period, he says: "This culture marked a distinct and probably a very long epoch of time in which inventions and multiplications of form were gradually spread from tribe to tribe, exactly as modern inventions, usually originating at a single point and often in the mind of one ingenious individual, gradually spread over the world." And, speaking of the later phases of the same period, he does not find "any evidence of the crossing or mixing of the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthal." The evolution of art among the Cro-Magnons, he says, was autochthonous, and in no way related to race-intermixture.

T. Erie Peet, in his discussion of the endolithic period (a period covering the early use of metals in Italy) points out that its culture was continuous, due to trading and commerce, and not to immigration of alien races.9

Now, tentative as any generalization may be in reference to the peoples of prehistoric times, it is significant that the data have not suggested to any anthropologist the idea that progress in culture has been due to race fusions. Without any evidence of racial intermixture, we observe that the stone axe, flattened on one side, less smooth on the other, characteristic of the late phase of the paleolithic period, spread over a great area in Europe. And later, when the bow and arrow came into use, that they spread over the world among races which were very opposite in type, and which, far from having intermixed, had never come into contact.10

The bronze culture spread among the Egyptians, Babylonians, Syrians, Alpines, Nordics, and Mediterraneans in no conceivable rela'Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age, pp. 144, 491.

Ibid., pp. 256, 258. Hrdlicka believes that there are traces of the Neanderthal race in the physiognomy of some modern Europeans, but says nothing of race intermixture. Ibid., p. 257.

tionship to amalgamation. The same may be said of the dissemination of the use of iron or that of the domestication of the dog and horse.11 As the result of the acquisition of the bow and arrow, and of the bronze and iron weapons, there were exterminating wars, conquests, and more or less amalgamation; but there is no evidence that racial amalgamation preceded the spread of culture or was the cause of it.

Carr-Saunders is of the opinion that cultural advances among men have been mainly due to the accumulation and interchange of tradition, and very little to change in the character of the human stock. He says: "Though a stimulus may always be detected at work during periods of advance, it is by no means always possible to find evidence of favorable germinal change. There is frequently no evidence at all of germinal change at such periods. In the past no doubt contact often implied racial intermingling, and, though in the present state of biological knowledge we are justified in supposing that crosses between two races not too distant would usually have favorable results, there is no sufficient foundation for attributing favorable results to all such intermingling, as has been done by some authors-von Luschan, for in

The conclusion would seem to be that germinal change is never more than a contributary cause of advance, and that traditional change is the whole explanation of some of such periods." 12

Even the notion commonly found in histories that warfare and conquests have been essential or important means of disseminating culture is now called in question by anthropology. In reference to this notion, I quote as follows from Clark Wissler's Man and Culture: "Now it appeared in a previous discussion that culture uniformity and political unity do not correlate and that the pursuit of the problems thus presented had laid the foundations of the scientific investigation of culture. What, then, is the true relation of conquest to the spread of culture?

"Both the data of history and anthropology suggest that the rule is for conquest to follow diffusion. As to the fortunes of militarism, the facts are plain: time after time it triumphed even to the extent of welding all peoples of similar culture and sometimes succeeding in annexing a few of the nearest wilder peoples. First, it is the nucleus, or the central cluster of tribes that is subjected; then attention is given to the surrounding ring of tribes. But long before this stage is reached, diffusion began. So when the military complex comes upon the scene, Wissler, Man and Culture, p. III.

11