Mirror for Man

The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life

Clyde Kluckhohn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351606158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

While the world has undoubtedly been shrinking, at the same time it has grown more complex. The likelihood of culture clashes leading to outright conflict is high, perhaps higher than ever. As Andrea L. Smith convincingly argues in her new introduction to this classic work, certain questions are as valid today as in 1949, when Mirror for Man was first published. Can anthropology break down prejudices that exist between peoples and nations? Can knowledge of past human behavior help solve the world's modern problems? What effect will American attitudes likely have on the future of the world?

In Mirror for Man, Clyde Kluckhohn scrutinizes anthropology, showing how the discipline can contribute to the reconciliation of conflicting cultures. He questions age-old race theories, shows how people came to be as they are, and examines limitations in how human beings can be molded. Taking up one of the most vital questions in the post-World War II world, whether international order can be achieved by domination, Kluckhohn demonstrates that cultural clashes drive much of the world's conflict, and shows how we can help resolve it if only we are willing to work for joint understanding.

By interpreting human behavior, Kluckhohn reveals that anthropology can make a practical contribution through its predictive power in the realm of politics, social attitudes, and group psychology. Andrea L. Smith's new introduction provides convincing evidence for the continuing importance of one of the earliest "public intellectuals."

1
Queer Customs, Potsherds, and Skulls

ANTHROPOLOGY PROVIDES a scientific basis for dealing with the crucial dilemma of the world today: how can peoples of different appearance, mutually unintelligible languages, and dissimilar ways of life get along peaceably together? Of course, no branch of knowledge constitutes a cure-all for the ills of mankind. If any statement in this book seems to support such messianic pretensions, put this absurd claim down as a slip of an enthusiast who really knows better. Anthropology is, however, an overlapping study with bridges into the physical, biological, and social sciences and into the humanities.

Because of its breadth, the variety of its methods, and its mediating position, anthropology is sure to play a central role in the integration of the human sciences. A comprehensive science of man, however, must encompass additional skills, interests, and knowledge. Certain aspects of psychology, medicine and human biology, economics, sociology, and human geography must be fused with anthropology in a general science which must likewise embrace the tools of historical and statistical methods and draw data from history and the other humanities.

Present-day anthropology, then, cannot pretend to be the whole study of man, though perhaps it comes closer than any other branch of science. Some of the discoveries that will here be spoken of as anthropological have been made possible only by collaboration with workers in other fields. Yet even the traditional anthropology has a special right to be heard by those who are deeply concerned with the problem of achieving one world. This is because it has been anthropology that has explored the gamut of human variability and can best answer the questions: what common ground is there between human beings of all tribes and nations? What differences exist? what is their source? how deep-going are they?

By the beginning of the twentieth century the scholars who interested themselves in the unusual, dramatic, and puzzling aspects of man’s history were known as anthropologists. They were the men who were searching for man’s most remote ancestors; for Homer’s Troy; for the original home of the American Indian; for the relationship between bright sunlight and skin color; for the origin of the wheel, safety pins, and pottery. They wanted to know “how modern man got this way”: why some people are ruled by a king, some by old men, others by warriors, and none by women; why some peoples pass on property in the male line, others in the female, still others equally to heirs of both sexes; why some people fall sick and die when they think they are bewitched, and others laugh at the idea. They sought for the universals in human biology and in human conduct. They proved that men of different continents and regions were physically much more alike than they were different. They discovered many parallels in human customs, some of which could be explained by historical contact. In other words, anthropology had become the science of human similarities and differences.

In one sense anthropology is an old study. The Greek historian, Herodotus, sometimes called the “father of anthropology” as well as the “father of history,” described at length the physique and customs of the Scythians, Egyptians, and other “barbarians.” Chinese scholars of the Han dynasty wrote monographs upon the Hiung-Nu, a light-eyed tribe wandering near China’s northwestern frontier. The Roman historian, Tacitus, produced his famous study of the Germans. Long before Herodotus, even, the Babylonians of the time of Hammurabi collected in museums objects made by the Sumerians, their predecessors in Mesopotamia.

Although ancients here and there showed that they thought types and manners of men worth talking about, it was the voyages and explorations from the fifteenth century onward that stimulated the study of human variability. The observed contrasts with the tight little medieval world made anthropology necessary. Useful though the writings of this period are (for example, the travelogues of Peter Martyr) they cannot be ranked as scientific documents. Often fanciful, they were written to amuse or for narrowly practical purposes. Careful accounts of firsthand observation were mixed up with embellished and frequently secondhand anecdotes. Neither authors nor observers had any special training for recording or interpreting what they saw. They looked at other peoples and their habits through crude and distorting lenses manufactured of all the prejudices and preconceptions of Christian Europeans.

It was not until the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that scientific anthropology began to develop. The discovery of the relationship between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and the Germanic languages gave a great impetus to the comparative point of view. The first systematic anthropologists were gifted amateurs—physicians, natural historians, lawyers, businessmen to whom anthropology was a hobby. They applied common sense, the habits they had learned in their professions, and the fashionable scientific doctrines of their day to growing knowledge about “primitive” peoples.

What did they study? They devoted themselves to oddities, to matters which appeared to be so trivial or so specialized that the fields of study which had been established earlier failed to bother with them. The forms of human hair, the variations in skull formation, shades of skin color did not seem very important to anatomists or to practicing physicians. The physical remains of cultures other than the Greco-Roman were beneath the notice of classical scholars. Languages unrelated to Greek and Sanskrit had no interest for the comparative linguists of the nineteenth century. Primitive rites interested only a few of the curious until the elegant prose and respectable classical scholarship of Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough won a wide audience. Not without justification has anthropology been termed “the science of leftovers.”

It would be going too far to call the nineteenth-century anthropology “the investigation of oddments by the eccentric.” The English Tylor, the American Morgan, the German Bastian, and other leading figures were respected citizens. Nevertheless, we shall understand the growth of the subject better if we admit that many of the first anthropologists were, from the point of view of their contemporaries, eccentrics. They were interested in bizarre things with which the average person had no serious concern and even the ordinary intellectual felt to be inconsequential.

If one does not confuse the results of intellectual activities with the motives leading to these activities, it is useful to ask what sort of people would be curious about these questions. Archaeology and museum anthropology provide an obvious happy hunting ground for those who are driven by that passion for finding and arranging which is common to collectors of everything from stamps to suits of armor. Anthropology has also always had with it the romantics, those who have taken it up because the lure of distant places and exotic people was strong upon them. The lure of the strange and far has a peculiar appeal for those who are dissatisfied with themselves or who do not feel at home in their own society. Consciously or unconsciously, they seek other ways of life where their characteristics are understood and accepted or at any rate, not criticized. Like many historians, the historical anthropologist has an urge to escape from the present by crawling back into the womb of the cultural past. Because the study had something of the romantic aroma about it and because it was not an easy way to make a living, it drew an unusual number of students who had independent means.

The beginnings do not sound very promising, either from the point of view of the students who were attracted to the subject or of what they were drawn to study. Nevertheless these very liabilities provided what are the greatest advantages of anthropology as compared with other approaches to the study of human life. Because nineteenth-century anthropologists studied the things they did out of pure interest and not either to earn a living or to reform the world, a tradition of relative objectivity grew up. The philosophers were shackled by the weighty history of their subject and by the vested interests of their profession. Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology, was a philosopher, but he tried to model sociology after the natural sciences. However, many of his followers, who were only slightly disguised philosophers of history, had a bias in favor of reasoning as opposed to observation. Many of the first American sociologists were Christian ministers, more eager to improve the world than to study it with detachment. The field of political science was also tinged with the philosophic point of view and with reformist zeal. The psychologists became so absorbed in brass instruments and the laboratory that they found little time to study man as one really wants to know him—not in the laboratory but in his daily life. Because anthropology was the science of leftovers and because leftovers were many and varied, it avoided the preoccupation with only one aspect of life that stamped, for instance, economics.

The eagerness and energy of the amateurs gradually won a place for their subject as an independent science. A museum of ethnology was established in Hamburg in 1850; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard was founded in 1866; the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1873; the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879. Tylor was made Reader in Anthropology at Oxford in 1884. The first American professor was appointed in 1886. But in the nineteenth century there were not a hundred anthropologists in the whole world.

The total number of anthropological Ph.D.’s granted in the United States prior to 1920 was only 53. Before 1930 only four American universities gave the doctorate in anthropology. Even today there are a bare dozen. Nor has anthropology become in any sense a staple of the undergraduate curriculum. In only two or three secondary schools is instruction regularly given.

The astonishing thing, considering the trifling number of anthropologists and the minute fraction of the population that has been exposed to formal instruction in the subject is that during the last decade or so the word “anthropology” and some of its terms have come out of hiding in recondite literature to appear with increasing frequency in The New Yorker, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, detective stories, and even in moving pictures. It is also symptomatic of a trend that many colleges and universities and some secondary schools have indicated their intention of introducing anthropology in their revised courses of study. Although anthropologists—like psychiatrists and psychologists—are still regarded with a bit of suspicion, present-day society is beginning to feel they have something useful as well as diverting to offer.

In the American Southwest one of the signs of summer is the arrival of many “-ologists” who disrupt the quiet of the countryside. They dig up ruins with all the enthusiasm of small boys hunting for “Indian curios” or of delayed adolescents seeking buried treasure. They pry into the business of peaceful Indians and make a nuisance of themselves generally with a lot of queer-looking gadgets. The kind who dig into ruins are technically called “archaeologists,” those who dig into the minds of Indians, “ethnologists” or “social anthropologists,” those who measure heads, “physical anthropologists,” but all are varieties of the more inclusive breed term “anthropologists.”

Now what are they really up to? Is it just sheer curiosity about “ye beastly devices of ye heathen” or do the diggings, questionings, and measurings really have something to do with the world today? Do anthropologists merely produce exotic and amusing facts which have nothing to do with the problems of here and now?

Anthropology is something more than brooding over skulls or hunting for “the missing link,” and it has a greater usefulness than providing means to tell one’s friends from the apes. Seen from the outside, anthropological activities look, at best, harmlessly amusing, at worst, pretty idiotic. No wonder many a Southwesterner quips, “The Indians are going to start putting a bounty on you fellows.” The lay reaction is well summed up by the remark of an army officer. We had met socially and were getting along very well until he asked me how I made my living. When I told him I was an anthropologist he drew away and said, “Well, you don’t have to be crazy to be an anthropologist, but I guess it helps.”

An anthropologist is a person who is crazy enough to study his fellow man. The scientific study of ourselves is relatively new. In England in 1936 there were over 600 persons who earned their living as students of one specialized branch (biochemistry) of the science of things, but fewer than 10 were employed as anthropologists. There are less than a dozen jobs for physical anthropologists in the United States today.

Yet nothing is more certain than that men ought to see whether the scientific methods which have given such stupendous results in unlocking the secrets of the physical universe might not help them understand themselves and their neighbors in this rapidly shrinking world. Men build machines that are truly wonderful, only to find themselves next to helpless when it comes to treating the social disorders that often follow the introduction of these machines.

Ways of making a living have changed with such bewildering rapidity that we are all a bit confused most of the time. Our ways of life have altered too—but not symmetrically. Our economic, political, and social institutions have not caught up with our technology. Our religious beliefs and practices and our other idea systems have much in them that is not appropriate to our present way of life and to our scientific knowledge of the physical and biological world. Part of us lives in the “modern” age—another part in medieval or even Greek times.

In the realm of treating social ills we are still living in the age of magic. We often act as if revolutionary and disturbing ideas could be exorcised by a verbal rite—like evil spirits. We hunt for witches to blame for our troubles: Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin. We resist changing our inner selves even when altered conditions make this clearly necessary. We are aggrieved if other peoples misunderstand us or our motives; but if we try to understand them at all, we insist on doing so only in terms of our own assumptions about life which we take to be infallibly correct. We are still looking for the philosopher’s stone—some magic formula (perhaps a mechanical scheme for international organization) that will make the world orderly and peaceful without other than external adaptions on our part.

We don’t know ourselves very well. We talk about a rather vague thing called “human nature.” We vehemently assert that it is “human nature” to do this and not to do that. Yet anybody who has lived in the American Southwest, to cite but one instance, knows from ordinary experience that the laws of this mysterious “human nature” do not seem to work out exactly the same way for the Spanish-speaking people of New Mexico, for the English-speaking population, and for the various Indian tribes. This is where the anthropologists come in. It is their task to record the variations and the similarities in human physique, in the things people make, in ways of life. Only when we find out just how men who have had different upbringing, who come from different physical stocks, who speak different languages, who live under different physical conditions, meet their problems, can we be sure as to what all human beings have in common. Only then can we claim scientific knowledge of raw human nature.

It will be a long job. But perhaps before it is too late we will come close to knowing what “human nature” really is—that is, what the reactions are that men inevitably have as human beings, regardless of their particular biological or social heritage. To discover human nature, the scientific adventurers of anthropology have been exploring the byways of time and of space. It is an absorbing task—so absorbing that anthropologists have tended to write only for each other or for scholars in other professions. Most of the literature of anthropology consists of articles in scientific journals and of forbidding monographs. The writing bristles with strange names and unfamiliar terms and is too detailed for the general reader. Some anthropologists may have had an obsession for detail as such. At any rate there are many whole monographs devoted to such subjects as “An Analysis of Three Hair-nets from the Pachacamac Area.” Even to other students of man the great mass of anthropological endeavor has appeared, as Robert Lynd says, “aloof and preoccupied.”

Though some research thus appears to leave the “anthropos” (man) off to one side, still the main trends of anthropological thought have been focused on a few questions of broad human interest, such as: what has been the course of human evolution, both biologically and culturally? Are there any general principles or “laws” governing this evolution? What necessary connections, if any, exist between the physical type, the speech, and the customs of the peoples of past and present? What generalizations can be made about human beings in groups? How plastic is man? How much can he be molded by training or by the necessity to adapt to environmental pressures? Why are certain personality types more characteristic of some societies than of others?

To most people, however, anthropology still means measuring skulls, treating little pieces of broken pottery with fantastic care, and reporting the outlandish customs of savage tribes. The anthropologist is the grave robber, the collector of Indian arrowheads, the queer fellow who lives with unwashed cannibals. As Sol Tax remarks, the anthropologist has had a function in society “something between that of an Einstein dealing with the mysterious and that of an entertainer.” His specimens, his pictures, or his tales may serve for an hour’s diversion but are pretty dull stuff compared to the world of grotesque monsters from distant ages which the paleontologist can recreate, the wonders of modern plant and animal life described by the biologist, the excitement of unimaginably far-off universes and cosmic processes roused by the astronomer. Surely anthropology seems the most useless and impractical of all the “-ologies.” In a world of rocket ships and international organizations, what can the study of the obscure and primitive offer to the solution of today’s problems?

“The longest way round is often the shortest way home.” The preoccupation with insignificant nonliterate peoples that is an outstanding feature of anthropological work is the key to its significance today. Anthropology grew out of experience with primitives and the tools of the trade are unusual because they were forged in this peculiar workshop.

Studying primitives enables us to see ourselves better. Ordinarily we are unaware of the special lens through which we look at life. It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water. Students who had not gone beyond the horizon of their own society could not be expected to perceive custom which was the stuff of their own thinking. The scientist of human affairs needs to know as much about the eye that sees as the object seen. Anthropology holds up a great mirror to man and lets him look at himself in his infinite variety. This, and not the satisfaction of idle curiosity nor romantic quest, is the meaning of the anthropologist’s work in nonliterate societies.

Picture the field worker in a remote island of the South Seas or among a tribe of the Amazon jungle. He is usually alone. But he is expected to bring back a report on both the physique and the total round of the people’s activities. He is forced to see human life as a whole. He must become a Jack-of-all-trades and acquire enough diverse knowledge to describe such varying things as head shape, health practices, motor habits, agriculture, animal husbandry, music, language, and the way baskets are made.

Since there are no published accounts of the tribe, or only spotty or inadequate ones, he depends more on his eyes and his ears than upon books. Compared with the average sociologist, he is almost illiterate. The time that the sociologist spends in the library, the anthropologist spends in the field. Moreover, his seeing and his listening take on a special character. The ways of life he observes are so unfamiliar that it is next to impossible to interpret them through his own values. He cannot analyze in terms of the things he had decided in advance were important, because everything is out of pattern. It is easier for him to view the scene with detachment and relative objectivity just because it is remote and unfamiliar, because he himself is not emotionally involved. Finally, since the language has to be learned or interpreters found, the anthropologist is compelled to pay more attention to deeds than to words. When he cannot understand what is being said, the only thing he can do is devote himself to the humble but very useful task of noting who lives with whom, who works with whom in what activities, who talks lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• A Mirror for Engaged Anthropology? Introduction to Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man
• 1 Queer Customs, Potsherds, and Skulls
• 2 Queer Customs
• 3 Potsherds
• 4 Skulls
• 5 Race: A Modern Myth
• 6 The Gift of Tongues
• 7 Anthropologists at Work
• 8 Personality in Culture
• 9 An Anthropologist Looks at the United States
• 10 An Anthropologist Looks at the World
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Index