ABSTRACT

It has been said,

A nation's culture, includes the points of view every one has about individual conduct and social relations; his attitude toward government and toward other peoples; his habit of mind about the family, the duty of parents to children and children to parents; his standards of taste and of morals, his store of accepted wisdom which he expresses in proverbs and aphorisms; his venerations and loyalties, his prejudices and biases, his canons of conventionality; the whole group of ideas held in common by most of the people. This body of culture comes to every individual mainly through well-recognized channels, through parents and elders who hand it down by oral tradition, through religion, through schools, and through reading, both of books and of newspapers and periodicals. 1

This description refers to non-material culture; culture, however, includes material as well as non-material things, and may be defined as the artificial objects, institutions, and modes of life or of thought which are not peculiarly individual but which characterize a group; it is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” 2 Culture, therefore, is supra-individual. The individual is a carrier and transmitter of it and may modify it, but no individual creates a major portion of the culture in which he participates. A tribe, usually the smallest unit investigated by the ethnographer, is a culture unit, but it has not created all of its culture. Its traits resemble those of neighbors, or of some neighbors, in so many respects that the resemblances cannot be attributed to independent origins, but imply a common source. A culture area, therefore, may include several tribes. Thus the culture traits of the Plains Indians have such marked similarities that the tribes collectively constitute a culture area. The culture of the Eskimo extends over a long narrow strip of the arctic New World and a small portion of the Old World, including many localities which have no direct contacts with one another. Indeed, practically the whole of the known aboriginal New World can be divided into culture areas. An attempt has been made to describe the culture areas of Negro Africa, though not with the same success as in the case of North America, owing, partly perhaps, to the more rapid diffusion of culture traits through much of the African continent, and partly to the nature of the ethnographical data, which are not as adequate for Africa as for North America. There are distinct culture areas in Oceania, notably Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, and certain culture areas in the Philippines have been identified. Although much of the aboriginal world can be divided into culture areas, there is little information with regard to some large ethnographical areas. Enough is known about aboriginal cultures, however, to justify the following conclusions:

A culture is unique. This is true not merely of the larger culture area which includes tribes, but also of each component tribal culture. The culture of the Plains area, for example, is nowhere duplicated. Moreover, no two tribes within the Plains area have identical cultures. Many culture traits of the Omaha are shared by neighbors, but there is no exact counterpart to Omaha culture. The Osage resemble the Ponca and the Kansa in many traits, but each tribal culture has individuality and uniqueness. Throughout the known ethnographical world the respective cultures are unique.

A culture does not travel in toto into other culture areas, though the peoples who carry it may extend their territory and so enlarge the geographical boundaries of their culture. Moreover, when people travel to new territory, usually their culture is modified; it does not remain identical with its old self, though of course it may preserve many old traits. Thus the culture of the Old World was not transplanted entire to the New; but only certain traits crossed the Atlantic. No culture area of the New World, therefore, is an exact duplicate of one in the Old World.

Despite the uniqueness of tribal culture, no tribe is culturally a self-complete unit. Each is a borrower from others, i.e., the culture is affected by adjacent cultures. The Dakota, for example, were influenced by the art, mythology, and ceremonial organizations of neighbors, and by the Iatter's use of the horse. Invariably a culture is influenced by the cultures with which it comes into contact. So considerable is this influence that from a knowledge of contiguous cultures one can usually, but not always, correctly predict the general characteristics of a given culture.

Though a culture does not travel as a unit, i.e., intact, many culture traits travel. So strong is the tendency for a culture trait to travel beyond the boundaries of the group in which it originated that it is difficult to find examples of culture traits which do not show this disposition. Thus ceramics, art designs, ceremonial organizations, methods of disposing of the dead, birth-rites, naming-customs, styles of dress and of personal adornment, initiation ceremonies, stories and plots, proverbs, omens, portents, animistic interpretations, and a thousand other traits spread from tribe to tribe, and sometimes permeate large culture areas. As a rule, therefore, a culture does not supplant another, but various traits seep into neighboring soil where they take root and sometimes flourish more luxuriantly than in the place of origin—as happened when the messianic religion was introduced from the Paiute into the Plains area, when Christianity was introduced from the Near East into Western Europe, and when maize was introduced into the Plains area by the whites.

A culture is a functioning dynamic unit and the various traits which compose it are interdependent. A culture trait does not function in isolation nor independently of other traits of the culture, but each is influenced by a change in any phase of the culture. Thus the Manitoba Dakota recount the order in which the animals and the “elements”— soil, stone, water—were created and this order reflects the hierarchy of the supernatural power of these animals and substances. The folklore and mythology fit into this framework of cosmogony and theology. Fighting, hunting, magic, religion, and ceremonialism are interrelated activities which interdigitate with the Dakota theory of evolution and the philosophy of wakan. 1 A similar statement holds for every culture. When, for example, Margaret Mead studied Samoan individuals she found that “a knowledge of the entire culture was essential for the accurate evaluation of any particular individual's behavior.” 2 Similarly, Malinowski says of the matrilineal system among the Trobriand Islanders: “the whole system is based on mythology, on the native theory of procreation, on certain of their magico-religious beliefs and it pervades all the institutions and customs of the tribe.” 1 There are conflicts and maladjustments, 2 but even these imply interdependences and at least a partial unification of tribal life. “A native tribe bound by a code of disconnected inorganic customs would fall to pieces under our very eyes,” 3 as would any culture group.

Since the traits which comprise a culture are interrelated, an innovation affects the entire culture. The ethnologist is familiar with many instances in which this has been disastrous. The introduction of the horse doubtless modified many phases of Plains area culture. Later the extinction of the buffalo and the confinement of the Indians to reservations destroyed tribal morale and shattered the culture. When the white man's stove became a part of the culture equipment of the Chilkat of Alaska, the voices of ancestors who had spoken through the crackling of the wood in the open fire no longer came to cheer or to warn descendants, and an important influence in the morale of the tribe disappeared. Degeneration in ethical standards followed and the culture deteriorated. Normally, however, when culture changes are gradual rather than abrupt, there is continuous accommodation to the new trait.

Individuals do not participate in the culture to the same degree or in the same way. One individual may be more efficient in art, another in industrial technique, another may be more deeply steeped in tribal lore. Perhaps, “savages are more like one another than are civilized men,” 4 for, as compared with civilized men, the individuals in a primitive group conform more closely to a pattern. If, however, allowance is made for the more limited range of tribal culture, the individualities of men in primitive life are perhaps as marked as those of civilized men. 5