American Indian life

American Indian life

The old ethnology, like every science in its beginnings, was speculative. The new ethnology is inductive. Fifty or sixty years ago the attempt was first made to read the riddle of human origins and substantiate the answer by facts. One student after anotherSpencer, Tylor, Morgan, and othersthought out a formula that seemed a reasonable explanation of how some activity of human civilizationinstitutional, religious, or inventivebegan, developed, and reached its present condition; and then ransacked the accounts of travelers, missionaries, and residents among primitive tribes for each bit of evidence favorable to his theory. Thus the origin of marriage was plausibly traced back to the matriarchate and ultimate promiscuity, of society to totemic clans, of the historic religions to a belief in souls and ghosts, of pottery to clay-lined basketry. Twenty-five years ago this theory fabrication was in full swing; and in many non-scientific quarters it still enjoys vogue and prestige. It is plain that the method of these evolutionary explanations was deductive. One started with an intuition, a rationalization, a guess, then looked for corroborative facts. Inevitably, all contrary facts tended to be ignored or explained away. What was more, the evidence being adduced solely with reference to whether it fitted or failed to fit into the theory under examination, it was torn from its natural relations of time, space, and association. This was very much as if a selection of statements, made by an individual on a given topic, were strung together, without reference to the circumstances under which he uttered them and without the qualifications which he attached. By the use of this method of ignoring context, a pretty good case might be made out to show that the Kaiser was really a pacificist republican at heart, Huxley a devout if not quite regular Christian, and Anthony Comstock a tolerant personality. Roosevelt could be portrayed as either a daring radical or as a hide-bound reactionary. Just such contrary interpretations did6 emerge in the older ethnology. Totems, for instance, were held by one authority to have had their origin in magical rites concerned with food supply, by another in a sort of nicknames, by a third in a primitive, mystic adumbration of the concept of society itself. Gradually it began to be recognized by students that this method might be necessary in the law-courts, where each party advowedly contends for his own interests, but that in science it led to exciting wrangling rather more than to progress toward impartial truth. And so a new ethnology modestly grew up which held for its motto: All possible facts first, then such inferences as are warranted. All facts means not only all items but also these items in their natural order: the sequence in which they occur, their geographical relation, the degree to which they are associated. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 59968
Author: Parsons, Elsie Worthington Clews
Release Date: Jul 22, 2019
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Editor: Parsons, Elsie Worthington Clews, 1874-1941
Illustrator: La Farge, C. Grant (Christopher Grant), 1862-1938