Primitive Man As Philosopher, by Paul Radin

W j 64302 QSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Arression No. Call Na 1 28/R1 2P 2??7? Author liarlir, Paul Title Primitive man as philosophy last inarK, 4 This book shoulJ be returned on or bctou: the date Primitive Man as Philosopher Dr. Radin here essays to describe the role of thought among primitive peoples the attitude of the thinkers among them towards life and society, the theories held of the soul, the human personality, the nature of the external world, etc. Dr, Radin knows how to let the aboriginal speak for himself, but illuminated always by the proximity of the highly sophisticated mind, so that the primitive appears always warmer, nearer to our time, and more accessible to our understanding. The material offered holds great fascination and is derived largely from the author's own first-hand investigations of the life of the Winnebago Indians. Primitive Man as Philosopher by Paul Radin, Ph.D. Research Fellow of Yale University and sometime Lecturer in Ethnology in Cambridge University; editor of "Crashing Thunder, the Autobiography of an American Indian" with a foreword by John Dewcy Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University New York and London D, Appleton and Company 1927 COPYRIGHT, 1927, D. APPLETON AND COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO MY WIFE PREFACE When a modern historian desires to study the civilization of any people, he regards it as a necessary preliminary that he divest himself, so far as possible, of all prejudice and bias. He realizes that differences between cultures exist, but he does not feel that it is necessarily a sign of inferiority that a people differs in customs from his own. There seems, how- ever, to be a limit to what an historian treats as legitimate difference, a limit not always easy to determine. On the whole it may be said that he very naturally passes the same judgments that the majority of his fellow countrymen do. Hence, if some of the differences between admittedly civilized peoples often call forth unfavorable judgments or even provoke outbursts of horror, how much more must we expect this to be the case where the differences are of so funda- mental a nature as those separating us from people whom we have been accustomed to call uncivilized. The term "uncivilized" is a very vague one, and it is spread over a vast medley of peoples, some of whom have comparatively simple customs and others extremely com- plex ones. Indeed, there can be said to be but two charac- teristics possessed in common by all these peoples, the absence of a written language and the fact of original posses- sion of the soil when the various civilized European and Asiatic nations came into contact with them. But among all aboriginal races appeared a number of customs which undoubtedly seemed exceedingly strange to their European and Asiatic conquerors. Some of these customs they had never heard of; others they recognized as similar to observ- vli viii PREFACE ances and beliefs existing among the more backward mem- bers of their own communities. Yet the judgments civilized peoples have passed on the aborigines, we may be sure, were not initially based on any calm evaluation of facts. If the aborigines were regarded as innately inferior, this was due in part to the tremendous gulf in custom and belief separating them from the conquerors, in part to the apparent simplicity of their ways, and in no small degree to the fact that they were unable to offer any effective resistance. Romance soon threw its distorting screen over the whole primitive picture. Within one hundred years of the dis- covery of America it had already become an ineradicably established tradition that all the aborigines encountered by Europeans were simple, untutored savages from whom little more could be expected than from uncontrolled children, individuals who were at all times the slaves of their passions, of which the dominant one was hatred. Much of this tradition, in various forms, disguised and otherwise, has persisted to the present day. The evolutionary theory, during its heyday in the iSyo's and 'So's, still further complicated and misrepresented the situation, and from the great classic that created modern ethnology Tylor's Primitive Culture, published in 1870 future ethnologists were to imbibe the cardinal and funda- mentally misleading doctrine that primitive peoples represent an early stage in the history of the evolution of culture. What was, perhaps, even more dangerous was the strange and uncritical manner in which all primitive peoples were lumped together in ethnological discussion simple Fuegians with the highly advanced Aztecs and Mayans, Bushmen with the peoples of the Nigerian coast, Australians with Poly- nesians, and so on. PREFACE ix For a number of years scholars were apparently content with the picture drawn by Tylor and his successors. The rebellion against it came in large measure from the Ameri- can ethnologists, chiefly under the influence of Prof. Franz Boas. Through methods of work foreshadowed by some of Boas' immediate predecessors but more penetratingly and systematically developed by him, a large body of authentic information has been gathered on the American Indians. Add to this the great monographs produced by European ethnologists for other parts of the world, and we have, for the first time in the history of the science, a moderately favorable opportunity for examining anew the nature of primitive man's mentality. That it is important to the ethnologist, the historian, the sociologist, and the psychologist to understand the true nature of the mentality of primitive man is, of course, self-evi- dent. But practical questions of far more general import are also involved. In Asia, Africa, the islands of the Pacific, Mexico, and South America there exist to-day millions of so- called primitive peoples whose relation to their white and Mongolian conquerors is of vital importance both to the conquerors and to the conquered, or semi-conquered, aborigines. Up to the present all attempts that have been made to understand them, or to come to any reasonable adjust- ment with them, have met with signal failure, and this failure is in most instances due to the scientifically accredited theories of the innate inferiority of primitive man in mentality and capacity for civilization quite as much as to prejudice and bias. Some governments, notably those of Great Britain and France, have already begun to recognize this fact. But how can we expect public officials to take an unbiased view of primitive mentality when the dominant tradition among ethnologists, among those who ostensibly x PREFACE devote their lives to the subject, is still largely based on an unjustified, or at least undemonstrated, assumption? The most pressing need in ethnology, then, is to examine anew the older assumptions which, wittingly or unwittingly, ethnologists themselves have harbored for two generations and which threaten to become fixed traditions among psy- chologists, sociologists, and historians. Among the more important of these assumptions is the notion that there is a dead level of intelligence among primitive peoples, that the individual is completely swamped by and submerged in the group, that thinkers and philosophers as such do not exist in short, that there is nothing even remotely comparable to an intellectual class among them. These conceptions of primitive mentality the writer regards as wholly unjustified, and it is with the object of contraverting them that the following pages have been written. Since the contrary view still holds the field among most scholars, including not a few ethnologists, I have been at considerable pains to collect my material in as irreproachable a manner as possible. The first requisite of all proof is, of course, that data be accurate and subject to control. To meet this requirement I have, in almost all cases, used only data that have been obtained at first hand and have been published in the original with a translation that could be vouched for. This, perhaps, may appear unduly pedantic, and it may possibly entail the omission of valuable material; but it cannot be too strongly emphasized that if the ethnologist wishes to obtain credence among the more skeptically inclined public, he must be willing to adopt a method of presentation that commends itself to them as meeting every critical test. A good deal of the data presented in the following chap- ters were obtained by the author himself. Perhaps I should PREFACE xi ask indulgence for using my own published and unpublished material so extensively. This is not due to any over-evaluation of either its accuracy or its importance, but simply to the fact that I happened to be interested specifically in a question which other ethnologists had touched only in pass- ing. In the interests of greater accuracy, and in order to substantiate statements that unsupported might seem in- credible to the reader accustomed to obtaining his descrip- tions of primitive culture from secondary works, native sources have been voluminously quoted. If certain tribes have been stressed more than others, it is simply because we happen to have for them better specific data of the kind de- sired. Yet it is my firm conviction that the conclusions arrived at on the basis of the study of a necessarily limited number of tribes will hold for practically every tribe. Perhaps it is not necessary to emphasize the dangers beset- ting the path of anyone venturing to describe and character- ize the ideas and mental workings of others, particularly those of races so different ostensibly from ourselves as are primitive peoples. Added to the ordinary risk of misunder- standing, ethnologists often find it necessary to give what are simply their own impressions and interpretations.

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