THE COMPETITION BETWEEN ETHNIC TYPES The factors in the human struggle for existence having been stated, a final task must be to note briefly the manner of their joint working. Whatever the future may have in store, man has not hitherto faced his environment as a single community, united alike racially and culturally so far as interbreeding and mutual understanding can bring it about. If this were possible, such elimination of the unfit as would still be necessary might be applied directly to the individual by a stern system of eugenics or in such other ways as the wisdom of the age might devise ; though whether with success it is impossible to say. Man's actual history reveals as yet no approach to such a consummation.
In the early race-making period, indeed, organization and culture in general presumably counted for less, and we may imagine that a succession of good seasons would send out swarm after swarm of semi-bestial folk hardly differing in their habits any more than so many different flocks of sheep, until inbreeding in conjunction with a fresh habitat produced a new strain in the stock. Nean derthal man, for instance, is held in the light of the latest research to have experienced two glaciations in Europe, together with a long intervening period when it may have been warmer than it is at present. Also, if we may connect with him the Talgai speci men from Australia and the Rhodesian specimen from Africa, he spread from some unknown centre—possibly indicated most nearly by the Galilee specimen—over a large part of the globe. There is no reason to suppose that culture rather than race was yet the decisive factor in the struggle for existence, so little do his cultural habits seem to vary at whatever time or place we take them. Thus he had fire, no doubt, to protect him against an oncoming glaciation ; but we may guess that the natural fur on his back grew a good deal shaggier.
Times.—Yet possibly one is apt to underrate the value of culture, even in its first known begin nings. After all, the Talgai man must have used a boat and thereby improved his chance of life, since once in Australia he was pretty safe among the blameless marsupials. Or again, the pygmy is physically not much of a man, but, as we find him now, is usually given to ingenious devices, using the bow, poisoning his arrows and so on. His present distribution in Africa and at the foundered south-eastern corner of Asia—not to speak of his pos sible relationship to the Grimaldi specimens from Mentone suggests a very early origin for a racial type which from the first must have had to contend with a physical handicap, and thus may well have had to rely on its culture as soon as ever a stouter breed of human beings crossed its path. Not to multiply exam ples, as the primitive peoples, prehistoric or modern, rise in the scale of historic importance and of the power to last, their self identity seems more and more to consist in a highly individualized culture, while their race, on the contrary, is ever more mixed and harder to differentiate from that of their less successful neigh bours.
Habitat, too, comes to count for less. The racial cradle-land or cradle-lands of man— and there may well have been several, seeing that what might be almost called a warm fauna and a cold fauna can be recognized among existing human stocks—must be thought of as some area of intenser struggle and hence of intenser activity which, as it were, set its mark once for all on the kind of man produced there, in respect to his heredity. If he went forth to conquer, the chances were that, reaching some less stimulating environment, he would degenerate. A cultural cradle-ground, on the other hand, would be a fallacious notion. True, culture is sometimes diffused from the same centre, wave after wave, because a people has developed a high and lasting individuality, out of all comparison with that of its neighbours; and the latter consequently live on its charity, nay, may be so utterly pauperized as to lose such initi ative as they previously possessed. History provides abundant instances of a contrary process by which the borrower of culture trades on the capital thus acquired to outmatch in the end the fortune of the willing or unwilling lender. Culturally it is always possible for one nation to beat another at its own game. The con dition of success in such a case is not so much natural talent— which represents the racial element—as taking pains to learn in telligently, that is, not by rote but by making the thing taught one's own. Modern Japan has shown how a radical change in culture can by intelligent self-adaptation be effected within a single generation. The case is all the more instructive because the ethnic type remains as individual as before, or perhaps more truly might be said to have become enriched in quality, while almost certainly increasing its. survival-value.
Not to labour the point further, the prepotency of the cultural factor is so well marked a feature of the later phases of human evolution that it might even be doubted whether the modern tendency is not to exalt it unduly at the expense of the race-factor. Culture depends on education, and educability is at least partly a matter of heredi tary ability. If the average individual is to survive by participat ing in some ethnic type of superior survival-value, he cannot afford to extend such participation to the born fool ; or at least he can prevent him from being born. Such matters lie somewhat outside the province of the anthropologist, who as a man of science and a historian merely unfolds and interprets the record of the past.
With an applied anthro pology, as it is sometimes termed, the present article is not con cerned. The study of human development can, indeed, help the statesman in many ways. Nay, even if anthropology be taken in the all too narrow sense of the study of primitive man, there is much that the administrator and the missionary can learn from it that will be of practical help to them in their work. Anthro pology as a pure science aims at the same goal as all the rest of the pure sciences, namely, the enlargement of the mind through knowledge. Have we the courage to seek to know ourselves as truly we have been and now are—whatever else we may aspire to become? If so, then anthropology may go forward.
See A. C. Haddon and A. H. Quiggin, Bibliography.-I. HISTORY. See A. C. Haddon and A. H. Quiggin, The History of Anthropology (1910) ; E. E. Sikes, The Anthropology of the Greeks (1914).
See R. R. Marett, Anthropology (1923) ; A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology (5922) ; A. A. Goldenweiser, Early Civilisation (1923).
3. PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY. See A. C. Haddon, The Races of Man (1924) ; R. L. Dixon, The Racial History of Mankind (1923) ; H. Wilder, The Human Pedigree (1926) ; A. M. Carr-Saunders, The Popu lation Problem (1922) ; G. Elliot Smith, The Evolution of Man (1924) ; A. Keith, The Antiquity of Man (1925). See also articles ANTHROPOM ETRY; MAN, EVOLUTION OF; RACES OF MANKIND.
4. SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY. See R. H. Lowrie, Primitive Society (1921) ; W. H. R. Rivers, Social Organisation (1924) and Kinship and Social Organisation (1914) ; B. Malinowski, Sex and Repression (192 7) and Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926) ; E. S. Hartland, Primitive Paternity (191o) ; E. Westermarck, History of Human Mar riage (1925-26) ; L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906) ; J. G. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (Iqmo) ; R. R. Marett, The Making of Man (1927) ; E. Briffault, The Mothers (1927). See also articles: AGE GRADES ; COUSIN MARRIAGE ; DUAL ORGANIZATION ; KINSHIP ; MARRIAGE ; MARRIAGE CLASSES ; POLYANDRY ; POLYGYNY ; RELATION SHIP SYSTEMS ; TOTEMISM, etc.
See Max Schmidt, The Primitive Races of Mankind (Eng. trans. London, 1926) . See also article ETHNOLOGY, and the bibliographies to the general articles dealing with the ethnology of EUROPE, ASIA, INDIA, AFRICA, OCEANIA, and AMERICA, under those headings. For separate tribes in each area see Index.
6. RELIGION. See R. H. Lowrie, Primitive Religion (1925) ; J. G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament (1918) ; essay by B. Malinowski in Science, Religion and Reality, edited by J. Needham (London, 1925) ; W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Early Semites (1883) edited by Stanley A. Cook (1927) ; E. Durkheim, Les Formes Elemen taires de la Vie Religieuse (191I) ; R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion (1914) . See also, articles: ANCESTOR WORSHIP ; ANIMATISM ; ANIMISM ; MAGIC ; MANA ; MYTHS ; METEMPSYCHOSIS ; PRAYER ; RIT UAL ; SACRIFICE; SERPENT CULTS; SPELL ; TREE CULTS ; TABU. See further, articles on Greek, Roman and Babylonian religions, and special ethnological articles.
7. TECHNOLOGY. . See British Museum Handbook to the Ethno graphical Collections (2nd ed., 1925). See also, article MATERIAL CULTURE, and the series dealing with AGRICULTURE; ANGLING; BASKET ; ANIMALS, DOMESTICATION OF ; HUNTING; ECONOMICS, PRIMITIVE; EXCHANGE ; CURRENCY ; GIFT; LABOUR ; TRADE, etc.
See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. (1910-15) ; A. M. Hocart, Kingship (192 7) ; E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1903) ; H. S. Maine, Ancient Law (London, 19o3), Early Law and Custom (London, 1883) ; W. H. R. Rivers, Ethnology and Psychology (1926), Medicine, Magic and Religion (1926) ; F. Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (191I) ; L. Levy Briihl, Les Fonc tions mentales dans les Societes Inferieures (Iqio). See also articles: APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY ; CULTURE CONTACT ; FOLKLORE ; HEAD HUNT ING ; HUMAN GEOGRAPHY ; LAW, PRIMITIVE; LYCANTHROPY ; MIGRA TIONS ; MEDICINE, HISTORY Or: Ancient Medicine; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
(R. R. M.)
