A. L. Kroeber

An anthropologist looks at history

THE WRITING OF HISTORY is perhaps the oldest of scholarly pursuits. Moreover it has persisted with minimal alteration for more than two thousand years, and across change of language, ever since Herodotus and Thucydides and the even earlier days of the Chinese. History therefore contains much that is art: the narration of significant events in literary prose. This is evident further in the fact that the great historians are also, in the main, great writers. They write the language of total and dignified communication of their day, without technical terms or jargon, less even than philosophers employ. And they operate with a nontechnical psychology, a psychology of generic experience and common understanding. And similarly they operate with an untechnical common mans causality, intelligible on its face; and a similar common morality. Basically, this still holds true as it did two and more millennia ago. Anthropology is not wholly a historical science, but large areas of it are historical in interest and intent. Prehistory is an allied pursuit of knowledge in the classification of disciplines customary in Europe and an outright part of anthropology in American usage. And prehistoric archaeology is of course, in its aim at least, merely history pushed back of writing and documents, whether in Sumeria, Japan, Morocco, South Africa, the Pueblo Indian Southwest, or Peru. Names and identifiable individuals are of necessity missing when the record is of preliterate times; specific events are determinable only now and then; but the residue of possible findings is a sort of condensed social history. We learn of buildings, artifacts, arts, about bones of animals hunted for daily living and of animals reared domesticated. Human bones give us not only some glimpses of the prevalent physique, but methods of burial, and sometimes clear indications of classes and economic differences. If carv-

Sub-Human Culture Beginnings

A S ONE of the social sciences, Anthropology deals with that relatively closed system of phenomena called culture. This system is closed in the sense that life is a closed system. The biologist does not repudiate the results of physics and chemistry; but his task is with phenomena and problems on the specific level of life. He expects that his findings will ultimately be convertible into findings in terms of the inorganic sciences, yet he realizes that his approach must be in terms of his own. Just so the social scientist does not assert that human social activities are controlled by a metaphysical something unrelated to organic forces. But he does believe that the first explanation of cultural phenomena must be in cultural terms. He sees every cultural phenomenon preceded by other phenomena and related to them; and this relation, on a cultural or social or supraorganic level, he feels must first be clarified and intellectually organized. Only then can the approach from the organic or physiologic level, and still later that from the chemical one, lead to fruitful results. Anything else leads to short-circuiting of understanding.

Nature of the Land-holding Group

The proposition is herewith submitted that more often than not in native North America the land-owning and sovereign political society was not what we usually call the tribe, but smaller units.

DECORATIVE SYMBOLISM OF THE ARAPAHO1

The Arapaho, a tribe of Plains Indians belonging to the Al. gonquian stock, practise a form of art very similar in material, technique, and appearance to that of the other Plains tribes, of whom the Sioux are the best known. This art is in appearance almost altogether unrealistic, unpictorial, purely decorative. For the greater part it consists now of beadwork, which has nearly supplanted the older style of embroidery in porcupine quills, plant fibers, and perhaps beads of aboriginal manufacture. The other products of this art are objects of skin or hide which are painted with geometrical designs. On the whole the decorative, geometric character of Arapaho art is very marked. Almost all the lines are straight. The figures in embroidery are lines, bands, rectangles, rhombi, isosceles and rectangular triangles, figures composed of combinations of these, and circles. The designs painted on hide are composed of triangles and rectangles in different forms and combinations. On questioning the Indians it is found that many of these decorative figures have a meaning. An equilateral triangle with the point downward may represent a heart; with its point upward, a mountain. A figure consisting of five squares or rectangles in quincunx, the four outer ones touching the central one at the corners, is a representation of a turtle. A long stripe crossed by two short ones is a dragon-fly. A row of small squares at intervals represents tracks. Crosses and diamonds often signify stars. All this is in beadwork. In painted designs a flat isosceles triangle

The Culture-Area and Age-Area Concepts of Clark Wissler

The concepts of the culture-area and of the age-area (“age and area”) method as applicable to culture have been developed by Clark Wissler in three books: The American Indian (1917); Man and Culture (1923); The Relation of Nature to Man (1926).1 The two concepts have this in common, that they deal with the space distribution of culture phenomena. They differ in that the culture area refers to culture traits as they occur aggregated in nature, whereas the age-area method is applicable to separate traits or isolable clusters of elements. They differ further in that the culture area, as such, is not concerned with time factors, whereas the age-area concept is a device for inferring time sequences from space distributions. Both ideas have long been in use in the biological sciences. An areally characterized fauna or flora, such as the Neo-tropical or Indo-Malaysian, obviously corresponds to the culture aggregation within a culture area. The term age-area was coined in the field of natural history, and the method of inferring areas of origin from concentration of distribution, and antiquity of dispersal from marginal survivals, has long been in use in so-called systematic biology. Perhaps because the comparable method applied to culture developed independently, the term age area has not gained currency in that field. Anthropologists have not been wholly happy in their terminology. They speak consistently of culture areas, whereas it is the content of these areas, certain culture growths or aggre gations, that they are really concerned with, the areal limitation being only one aspect of such an aggregation.

On Typological Indices I: Ranking of Languages

0. Introduction: antecedents 1. Greenbergs basic tabulation 2. Rank orders of values found 3. High rank languages 3.1. Eskimo, Swahili, Yakut, Sanskrit 3.2. Other Indo-European languages 3.3. Annamese 3.4. Language classes provisionally validated and invalidated 3.6. Synthetic trend of Sanskrit 3.6. Check by index summation 4. Intra-Indo-European indices 4.1. Change with period 4.2. Contrary trend 4.3. Isolation and agglutination 5. The value of description by index 6. Possibilities 7. Works referred to

History of Anthropological Thought

Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Kroeber, at the time of writing was visiting Professor of Anthro? pology at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. He was 1945 Huxley Memorial Medalist, 1946 Viking Fund Medalist in General An? thropology, and Chairman of the Wenner-Gren Foundations 1952 Inter? national Symposium on Anthropology. His principal volumes are Configurations of Culture Growth, 1944; Anthropology, 1948; and The Nature of Culture, 1952.

A Karok Orpheus Myth

The story also has appeal in expressing certain sentiments characteristically pervading the Northwest California native culture: intense and minute attachment to familiar spots, regret and nostalgia, a desire for a small, compact, closed, and unchanging world. The climax of poignancy is probably reached when the long dead old woman asks the newcomers how it is at her birthplace, and whether they are still doing there as they used to. The definiteness of feeling tone has probably helped the story develop the degree of literary form which it shows.

Some Relations of Linguistics and Ethnology

The Algonkin Indian languages are spoken in three areas. The first stretches from Hudson Bay to Cape Hatteras; the second and third, much smaller, lie at the foot of the Rockies in Canada and in the United States respectively. The languages of this family classify into four fundamental groups or branches: Central-Eastern, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and Arapaho.2 These are so differentiated that their divergence must be old: perhaps a thousand, perhaps even two thousand or more years old. The four branches coincide with the three areas, except that Cheyenne has in the 19th century been spoken in the Arapaho area. The Cheyenne represent a recent drift from Minnesota westward into the habitat of the Arapaho branch in the later 18th century and the first decades of the 19th. Accordingly, history and comparative classification are in accord. Ethnologists, however, have tended to project the Cheyenne westward movement, from an eastern farming to a western nomadic life, to the Arapaho also.3 There is no shred of historic evidence for such a migration by the Arapaho in recent centuries, and the linguistic classification makes it improbable. Yet the erroneous inference dies hard, and persists in the literature. Why? Because it simplifies the picture. It is easier for speculating ethnologists to treat Algonkin as an undifferentiated unit colored green on the map, than to take cognizance of the historically significant classification worked out by comparative Algonkinists.

Comments on the Grays' Four Hundred Year Cycle in Human Ability

In the Journal of Cycle Research (7:43–48, April, 1958) S.W. and N.E. Gray published “Evidence for a 400-Year Cycle in Human Ability”, which might have been more accurately called “Human Achievement” since ability refers to potential, but the 25,000 lives they reviewed were finished and realized. They took the names of historic personages listed in the 1935 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia and classified them, without rating or ranking, each as an equivalent unit, according to their occurrence in time; or, more exactly, counting how many individuals, eminent enough to have won inclusion in this encyclopedia, were alive in each decade between 500 B.C. and A.D. 1800. The authors recognize that essentially their data do not cover “human history”, but “the western world and its Mediterranean fringes”.