The Nature of Culture by A. L. Kroeber (review)

114 BOOK REVIEWS The Nature of Culture. By A. L. KROEBER, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 195~. Pp. 447 with index. $6.50. The scope of this monograph can best be understood from the author's own words in the Preface (p. VII) : " This book is an effort to put into one volume those papers and selected parts of my professional writings that might be of most general interest. . . . I have selected here only passages that bear on culture . . . those possessing some novel element of method or approach.... [The whole is my] theory about the kind of thing culture is: about its properties and typical manifestations, its relation to other kinds of things, and how it is most fruitfully viewed and investigated." This collection of writings represents the quintessence of the lifework of the dean of American anthropologists; it covers the last fifty years and consequently the development of modern anthropology in this country. These " fifty separate papers obviously cannot possess the continuity and overall organization of a systematically planned work executed at one time." (p. VIII) The essays are only loosely tied together by introductions and comments ; some of them have not been published previously. But, nonetheless, from the whole series emerges a cmisistent theory of culture which provides a genuine norm for the interpretation of social and historical data. For all that, the task of a reviewer is not eiisy; he can only hope to point out the leading principles and the main facts from which they were derived. The essays are grouped in five sections, the largest of which deals with the " Theory of Culture " in eighteen articles. In each of the five parts the order of selection is chronological beginning with the year 1901. As is well-known, the author has dedicated his life to the study of the main problems of cultural anthropology, with preference given to the culture and languages of the Indians of California. Since this is the case, it is but natural that the manifold economical institutions, the development and grouping of the various types of culture complexes and cultural life, especially the social organizations and phenomena of these and other illiterate peoples have provided him with abundant material for his construction of the concepts of culture and culture life, of social structures and kin systems. He presents himself to the reader in the Preface of his book as a person who is " by nature a worker with concrete data." (p. VII) That means, among other things, that he has relied upon the evidence of the facts, without the a priori tenets of crass evolutionism which acted as a spell upon the majority of scientists some decades ago. As everybody kllows, this now obsolescent theory supposes the necessary and unilinear development from lower to higher forms, from the most simple to the more perfect, et cetera. Dr. Kroeber himself in his Anthropology (New York, 1948; p. 6) describes that so-called " scientific " method as follows: " It became common practice BOOK REVIEWS 115 in the older anthropology to ' explain ' any part of human civilization by arranging its several forms in an evolutionary sequence from lowest to highest and allowing each successive stage to flow spontaneously, without specific cause, from the preceding one. At bottom, this logical procedure was astonishingly naive. In these schemes we of our land stood at the summit of the ascent. Whatever seemed most different from our customs was therefore reckoned as earliest, and other phenomena were disposed wherever they would best contribute to the srtaight evenness of the climb upward. The relative occurrence of phenomena in time and space was disregarded in favor of their logical fitting into a plan." Then he presents some " fair samples ofthe conclusions or assumptions of the classic evolutionistic school of anthropology of, say 1860 to 1890, which still believed that primal origins or ultimate causes could be determined, and that they could be discovered by speculative reasoning. The roster of this evolutionistic-specuIative school was graced by some illustrious names.... Today [such methods of reasoning] are long since threadbare; they have descended to the level of newspaper sciences or have become matter for idle amateur guessing. They are evidence of a tendency toward...