Other Cultures

Aims, Methods and Achievements in Social Anthropology

John H.M. Beattie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134949090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Other Cultures provides a lucid introduction to social anthropology. The author devotes the first part of the book to a consideration of what social anthropology is and seeks to do, what areas it covers, and the methods of investigation employed by social anthropologists. The second part discusses the major categories of research through which social anthropologies have advanced our knowledge of other cultures. These include marriage, kinship, political organization, law, economic and property relations, magic, religion, and social change. The final chapter surveys some of the contributions social anthropology has made to the understanding of other cultures. A short reading list follows each chapter.

PART ONE

1

Introduction and Background

IT IS ONLY QUITE RECENTLY in human history that it has come to be fairly widely—though by no means universally-accepted that all human beings are fundamentally alike; that they share the same basic interests, and so have certain common obligations to one another simply as people. This belief is either explicit or implicit in most of the great world religions, but it is by no means acceptable today to many people even in ‘advanced’ societies, and it would make no sense at all in many of the less developed cultures. Among some of the indigenous tribes of Australia, a stranger who cannot prove that he is kin to the group, far from being welcomed hospitably as a fellow human, is regarded as a dangerous outsider and may be speared without compunction. Members of the Lugbara tribe of north-western Uganda used to think that all foreigners are witches, dangerous and scarcely human creatures who walk about upside-down and kill people by magic. The ancient Greeks believed that all non-Hellenic peoples were barbarians, uncivilized savages whom it would be quite inappropriate to treat as real people. And many of the citizens of highly advanced modern states today think of people of other races, nations or cultures in ways which are not very different from these, especially if their skin is differently pigmented, or if they hold other religious or political faiths.

At earlier periods in human history, and in the conditions of those small-scale, pre-industrial societies which have survived up to the present day in relative isolation from Western influence, the existence of these universally derogatory stereotypes did not matter very much. Even between neighbouring peoples communications were generally restricted, and between those separated by continents or oceans there was virtually no contact at all. So actual social situations in which ideas about foreigners could be translated into behaviour towards them did not arise very often. Today things are obviously very different. Not only has the world’s population ‘exploded’ in the last century or so, but also communications have developed and are still developing at a fantastic pace. There are now few important centres of human population between which messages cannot be conveyed in a few minutes, people and goods in a few hours. Where once foreigners were a rarity they are now so usual as to be taken as a matter of course, and in any large city a man may encounter people from all five continents in the course of a casual stroll. The platitude that all men are members of a single community is valid today in a real and urgent sense, even though this community is evidently neither harmonious nor well-ordered. What is crucial is that in our time the aims, attitudes and activities of millions of people of other cultures and in other countries than our own (whichever our own may be) are practically important for every one of us as never before.

This is an excellent reason for knowing as much as we can about these other peoples and their cultures, for situations can be dealt with more effectively and fairly when they are understood than when they are not, or worse still, when they are misunderstood. And part of the current interest in that branch of human knowledge which for want of a better term is called social anthropology is due to the fact that it does seem to make some contribution to this kind of under standing. For the past half-century or so social anthropologists have been investigating at first hand the social lives and cultural backgrounds of other peoples, especially though by no means only those peoples who still lack, or lacked until very recently, written literatures and histories and advanced technologies. If such peoples are to be studied at all, they must be studied in the living context of their own societies. For their social and cultural institutions are not, like those of Western civilizations, enshrined in mountains of documents, which would enable us to study them at a distance, as an American scholar can study Russia, say, without ever visiting that country.

Such peoples, whose social systems are usually small in scale and whose technologies are simple, have often been referred to as ‘primitive’. Though this term is still commonly used, it is not really very appropriate, for in the temporal sense no existing society can be said to be more primitive than any other. Nor, as we shall see later, can we suppose that present-day ‘primitive’ societies represent, in Sir James Frazer’s words, ‘the rudimentary phases, the infancy and childhood, of human society’, so that, if they were left alone, African bushmen or Australian aborigines would eventually grow up into fully-fledged Europeans or something like them. It is more plausible to speak of such societies as ‘simple’, and in many valid senses of the term, technologically and economically for example, their organization obviously is simpler than that of modern industrial societies. Of course this is not to say that the members of such societies are in any sense ‘simple’; it is certain that they are not. And often their social and cultural institutions are exceedingly complex. In many contexts it is safer to employ such terms as ‘pre-literate’ or ‘pre-industrial’, which are likely both to be more accurate and to sound less condescending.

In any event such societies are usually small-scale ones, and it has been for the most part in the laboratory which they provide that social anthropology has grown up as a distinct branch of social science. We shall see, however, that the hypotheses and techniques which social anthropology uses have a very much wider range of application than just to these simple, small-scale communities in the study of which they were developed.

I do not here discuss in any detail the historical development of social anthropology; fuller accounts are available elsewhere. But it will be easier to see why contemporary social anthropology is the kind of subject it is if we have some idea of what has led up to it. As a branch of empirical, observational science it grew up in the context of the world-wide human interaction which, as I have just noted, has vastly increased in the past century or so. What is most familiar often tends to be taken for granted, and the idea that the study of living human communities was a legitimate scientific interest in its own right only really caught on when detailed information began to become available about hitherto remote and unfamiliar human societies. These had been speculated about since time immemorial, but they could not be scientifically investigated until new, easier and quicker ways of getting about the world made it possible for scholars to visit and observe them.

Thus it was the reports of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century missionaries and travellers in Africa, North America, the Pacific and elsewhere that provided the raw material upon which the first great anthropological works, written in the second half of the last century, were based. Before then, of course, there had been plenty of conjecturing about human institutions and their origins; to say nothing of earlier times, in the eighteenth century Hume, Adam Smith and Ferguson in Britain, and Montesquieu, Condorcet and others on the Continent, had written about primitive institutions. But although their speculations were often brilliant, these thinkers were not empirical scientists; their conclusions were not based on any kind of evidence which could be tested; rather, they were deductively argued from principles which were for the most part implicit in their own cultures. They were really philosophers and historians of Europe, not anthropologists. But they did regard human societies as legitimate objects for study, and some of them thought that universal and necessary laws of society might be discovered, analogous to those which were at that time being so successfully formulated in the natural sciences. So in an important sense they were the forerunners of modern social anthropologists.

These earlier thinkers about human culture and institutions were characteristically concerned with social evolution and progress. To them it seemed plain that some societies were more ‘advanced’ than others, and there was historical evidence that many of them, in particular the countries of Western Europe, had in recent times developed from a relatively backward condition to a more advanced or civilized one, however ‘civilization’ might be defined. So it seemed to them to be plausible to suppose that all human societies every where had to develop, if they developed at all, through the same or similar series of developmental stages. This way of thinking reflected the evolutionary spirit of the age. In France Boucher de Perthes, on the basis of flint tools discovered at Abbéville, had in the first half of the nineteenth century established a time scale which gave man a vastly greater antiquity than had hitherto been dreamed of. And in Britain the dramatic advance of evolutionary theory in zoology, associated particularly with Charles Darwin, lent support to the idea that the same evolutionary approach could be applied to the history of human society.

These evolutionary hypotheses fitted well with the increased emphasis, also characteristic of the times, on the idea of progress, the notion that on the whole the world was becoming better and better. A number of Victorian scholars, impressed by the striking success of evolutionary theory in the biological sciences where the fossil record was providing increasingly full and convincing evidence, attempted to reconstruct on the same pattern the earlier and by definition the ‘lower’ stages of human society. Writers like Bachofen in Europe, Maine and McLennan in Britain, and Morgan in America, exercised considerable ingenuity in reconstructing in ample detail what they supposed to have been the earliest stages in social evolution. Thus, for example, Lewis Morgan discussed the three main stages through which ‘the lines of human progress’ must pass, called savagery, barbarism and civilization. Man had moved from savagery to barbarism when he invented pottery, and to civilization with the invention of writing. And, in Britain, McLennan tried to show that the institutions of marriage and the family as we know them in Western society must have developed from a condition of ‘primitive promiscuity’ through a number of distinct stages, which included matriliny, when descent was traced through women only, polyandry, when several husbands shared one wife, and finally patriliny, when descent was traced through men only.¹

Some people still think that all human societies do move through such stages, and that these can be identified. Thus orthodox Marxists support their particular brand of evolutionary theory by reference to Morgan’s ideas, which were taken over by Engels. But most modern social anthropologists regard such conjectural reconstructions as at best crude over-simplifications of events which can never be known in detail, at worst fanciful and sometimes absurd inventions. But they seemed a good deal less absurd when they were written than they do now. We must remember that for these writers anthropology was essentially a historical enquiry. Its aim was to discover the origins of human society and of social institutions. So it was natural that as ethnographic information about ‘primitive’ peoples became increasingly available, anthropologists should use it to illustrate historical, or pseudo-historical, hypotheses which they had already formulated on other grounds. It had not yet occurred to most of them that the unfamiliar, ‘primitive’ cultures from which they drew their illustrations might be worth investigating in their own right. The common view was that civilized men could have nothing profitable to learn from studying the way of life of a lot of savages. It is reported that even at the end of the nineteenth century the celebrated Sir James Frazer, when asked if he had ever seen one of the primitive people about whose customs he had written so many volumes, tersely replied, ‘God forbid!’

Since the conjectures of these writers were about the remote past and not about the present, in the nature of the case their hypotheses could not be either proved or disproved by evidence about contemporary societies, however ‘primitive’. In fact, as later became obvious, there is no evidence at all upon which detailed cultural sequences can be established for the earliest stages of human society, nor is it likely that there ever will be any. The argument from ‘survivals’, which assumed that many existing customs and beliefs are, as it were, fossilized relics of earlier stages in social history, so that the prior existence of earlier stages associated with them might legitimately be inferred, was shown itself to imply unwarranted historical conjecture. Also, and most important, it began to become plain that few societies, if any, have developed in total isolation; always there have been some contacts with other human cultures. So far as we know, no society has ever developed anywhere quite free from outside influence.

So, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the naïve evolutionary approach to the understanding of the origins of human institutions gradually became discredited, and the rival school of the diffusionists began to become influential. Their approach was no less historical and often hardly less conjectural than the evolutionists’. Correctly observing that it was extremely unlikely that all societies everywhere had evolved or were in process of evolving independently through the same or similar series of stages, they said that cultural change and progress were mainly due to borrowing. They based their reconstructions on the undoubted fact that items of culture could be and very often were transmitted from one society to another. But as far as the remote past was concerned there was hardly more evidence for their conjectures than there had been for those of the evolutionists. So when, early in the present century, Elliot Smith and Perry, who believed with the evolutionists that humanity was progressing from savagery to civilization, claimed that all civilizations everywhere had diffused from an original source in ancient Egypt, their school too became discredited among professional anthropologists.¹

The trouble with both of these approaches was, of course, that their advocates went far beyond the evidence, as they were bound to do so long as their interest was directed to the remote past, and to the very first beginnings of human institutions and beliefs. For such prehistoric times the only possible evidence must be archaeological, and where such evidence exists the information which it can give us, though highly important, is strictly limited. Thus archaeology can tells us what early men looked like, what they made, and, within very narrow limits, what they did. But it cannot tell us what they thought or believed, or (except in the most general way) the kind of social world they inhabited. Arguments from man’s present to his past condition which are unsupported by good historical or archaeological evidence can never be other than merely speculative.

But modern social anthropology owes much to these nineteenth-century scholars, in spite of their errors. Although they were mainly preoccupied with the reconstruction of a past which was lost for ever, they were, like their successors, interested in social institutions and the interrelations between them. Like all social scientists, they were concerned with discovering and recording regularities in human behaviour. Their approach was comparative; they were interested in pointing out similarities between the cultural and social institutions of different societies. And considering the limited ethnographic knowledge then available, it would be unreasonable to expect them to have understood the real social significance of the institutions and customs they compared. In later chapters we shall see that although, for the most part, we no longer ask the same kind of questions as they did (many of them were in fact unanswerable), none the less some of their ideas and insights have importance for social anthropology today.

By the end of the nineteenth century a considerable amount of miscellaneous ethnographic information had been assembled from all over the world. The most celebrated collection is Sir James Frazer’s great compilation of religious beliefs and practices, published in several editions around the turn of the century as The Golden Bough. In this great work Frazer, starting with the idea, found in ancient Roman myth, that the priest-ruler, as representative of a god, should be slain and replaced by another before his powers waned, collected a vast body of information about ‘primitive’ religious and magical practices throughout the world. Like his predecessors, Frazer was mainly interested in origins, but he did claim that social anthropology (he was one of the first to apply the adjective ‘social’ to the discipline) should seek regularities or general laws. The laws he had in mind, however, were those exemplified in the earlier stages of human society, which were represented, so he believed with the evolutionists, in existing ‘primitive’ societies. Also, like most of his contemporaries, he was still concerned with isolated ‘customs’, reported from various parts of the world mostly by people with little or no scientific training, and so inevitably considered apart from the living social contexts which alone could give them real meaning. Frazer’s approach is very different from that of modern social anthropologists, but even so the literary skill and imaginative sweep of his work caught the imagination of both scholars and the general reader, and although he is not much read today, the magic is still there.

As the quantity of ethnographic information increased, and its quality gradually improved, it began to dawn on some scholars that this material was too important to be used merely to illustrate preconceived ideas about primitive peoples or about presumed earlier stages of human society. More and more this extensive ethnography was seen to demand some sort of comparative analysis in its own right. And practical concerns stimulated this interest. Colonial administrators and missionaries began increasingly to see that their work would benefit by an understanding of the social and cultural institutions of the populations they dealt with. Some of the best of the earlier monographs on the simpler societies were written by serving missionaries and administrative officers.

So at the beginning of the present century there began to develop a scientific concern with the systematic undertaking of first-hand field studies of human communities which had hitherto been known to scholars only through the piecemeal observations of non-professional observers. Individual field studies, a few of them of very high quality, had been made earlier. Franz Boas’s research among the Eskimos in the 1880’s was a notable example, and so was Morgan’s work among the Iroquois Indians, undertaken more than a generation before.¹ But it was really only in the early 1900’s that the systematic collection of information in the field, covering a wide segment of the social and cultural life of particular peoples, came to be generally regarded as an essential part of the social anthropologist’s task. An important stimulus in British anthropology was the Torres Straits expedition in 1898, in which a team of anthropologists led by A.C.Haddon undertook a comprehensive field survey of a part of Melanesia. Later, Radcliffe-Brown’s study of the Andaman Islanders, undertaken before the first World War, and especially Malinowski’s work in the Trobriand Islands of the Western Pacific, undertaken during it, became particularly important influences in modern social anthropology.²

It was really with this change of inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword to the Dutch Edition (1975)
• Part One
• Part Two
• Index