In the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Moreover
THE ECUMENE AS A CIVILIZATIONAL MULTIPLIER SYSTEM Gordon W. Hewes Kroeber's The Ancient Oikoumene as a Historic Culture Aggregate, delivered as the Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1947(Kroeber l946)I is probably one of his most important papers, yet it failed to elicit much scholarly response (but cf. Caldwell, 1958:60). World War II had just ended, and many anthropologists and other scholars were still readjusting themselves to peacetime pursuits, or were involved in urgent practical projects. Few people would run across the paper in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Moreover, intellectual Interest in such problems was soon absorbed in criticism of Toynbee's monumental work, A Study of History of which an excellent and widely read abridgment by Somervell appeared in 1947. Even Toynbee, who refers to Kroeber's works no less than forty-two times in volume 12 of A Study of History (1961), omits this obvi- ously relevant paper of Kroeber's. Such references as he makes to Kroeber's notion of the ecumene are to Style and Civilizations (1957) (Toynbee, 1961:360, 472). Kroeber uses the old Greek word oikoumene-- literally "the inhabited"--in an enriched sense to refer to the essential continuity of civilizations in the Old 'World zone stretching from Gibraltar to Japan. The adjectival form, ecu- menical, has been used to mean "universal" or "worldwide"; thus Toynbee des- cribes the Han historian, Ssui-ma Ch'ien, as China's first "oecumenical histori- an" (1961:187). I shall spell the word ecumene, For Kroeber, the Ecumene "of the Greeks, which stretched from Gibraltar to India and dimly known China, was the region where people lived in civil- ized states, plowed their fields and raised cattle, worked iron, and knew letters" (1948:423).
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