Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

9. The Problem of Savagery

CHAPTER IX The Problem of Savagery "We need not goe to cull out miracles and strange difficulties: me seemeth, that amongst those things we ordinarily see there are such incomparable rarities as they exceed all difficulties of miracles."-MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE. BUT WHY THIS INORDINATE EXPENDITURE of energy in eliciting cultural correspondences? The deists, the theists, the atheists, and the infidels, so called by their orthodox brethren, were tireless in their efforts to undermine confidence in many of these too easy-going and uncritical likenesses, but at the same time they proposed some of their own. Why the persistent effort to clothe savagery with documentary significance? Why, indeed, the emphasis upon savagery? With all the problems regarded as subject to solution by the employment of similarities supposedly solved, it still remains far from clear why identifications of contemporary savagery with classical antiquity, or with old phases of other historical cultures, should ever have been made at all. So much is certain: it was not because of the validity of the correspondences cited. The earmarks of faulty reasoning are on the surface for all to see. In the first place, to mention only a few difficulties, the number of plausible likenesses elicited between the civil 354 The Problem of Savagery 355 societies of Greece, Rome, or the other old nations and the uncivil agglomerations of tribal Black Mrica and the Red Man's America, were at best relatively few and usually trivial. In the second place, they were offset, and the conclusions derived from them were neutralized, by an overwhelming body of divergences which were seldom mentioned, much less assembled for comparison of relative proportions. The fact, if it was a fact, that the myths, or the marriage rites, or the gods of the Americans and Greeks were similar, was interesting no doubt, but what of it? What meaning was to be inferred? The likeness of a few items could prove nothing concerning the likeness of the totality of traits in any savage culture to the totality in any civilized culture. As between any two cultures, anywhere at any time, likeness in one trait might be accompanied by unlikeness in ninety-nine others. Surely, before conclusions were drawn upon the basis of one pair of similarities, or twenty pairs, or a hundred, the presence of differences should have been acknowledged, and their weight as contrary evidence evaluated. In the third place, when the terms "savage" and "antique" were applied to large categories of culture under examination for the detection of correspondences, it could by no means be assumed that those elicited for one pair of peoples were true for all members of each category. Though all the cultures in the category of the "antique" may have been in some sense historically ancient, as shown by dates, it fails to follow that all were culturally identical, Greek with Roman, Roman with Egyptian, Egyptian with Persian or Babylonian. Obviously Roman life diverged radically from that of the Greeks, and Greek life from that of all the other ancient civilizations. To place all of them in one classification was by no means to confer identity. And the same divergencies obtained within the category of "savagery"; the Hottentots in Africa differed from 356 Early Anthropology in the 16th and 17th Centuries the people of Benin, and both of these from the Iroquois and Seminoles of America. Owing to radical differences among members of categories, no one member of the category of "savagery," and no one member of the category of the "antique," could safely be taken as representative of the whole category. Thus an argument from the assumed uniformity of cultures within each category, based upon a handful of likenesses from two peoples or twenty peoples, was fantastically unsound. Though the argument from similarities is still in use, no scholar has produced evidence of taxonomic agreement within either savage cultures or ancient civilized cultures. In the fourth place, the endowment of specific elements from contemporary savage cultures with documentary significance implies the persistence of savage culture in its presently observable condition at least from the times of the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and other ancient peoples with whom they were compared. But who is ready to offer reliable evidence that any existing savage culture has remained fixed or unchanged throughout this long historical interval? Savage cultures are typically history-less cultures, in the sense that little or no documentation is available for the reconstruction...