Our Primitive Contemporaries

OUR PRIMITIVE CONTEMPORARIES BY GEORGE PETER MURDOCK, PH. D. PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY YALE UNIVERSITY THEMACMILLAN COMPANY-NEWYORK A POLAR ESKIMO BELLE. Photograph by Donald B. MacMillan. Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History TO THE TRAVELERS, MISSIONARIES, GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS, AND ANTHROPOLOGISTS, BUT FOR WHOSE PAINSTAKING RESEARCHES AND PENETRATING OBSERVA TIONS THIS BOOK COULD NOT HAVE BEEN WRITTEN INTRODUCTION How does the savage actually live The general reader who is curious on this point can turn to scores of books about primitive man with selections on religion, marriage, and other institutions culled from hundreds of diverse peoples. Or he can read one of the systematic ethnographies which attempt to cover the whole world by devoting a few lines to each of some thousands of tribes. Or he may pick up a work on some particular region and acquire a general idea of the distribution of culture traits in that area. But in none of these books, however excellent, can he gain any adequate conception of the actual mode of life of a primitive people. For this he must turn to the original descriptive monographs themselves. Many of these, be cause they are rare, out of print, or buried away in obscure scientific journals, will be unavailable to him. The others, if they are really authoritative, he will find so freighted with masses of detail, of interest only to the professional an thropologist, that he will turn from them in discouragement, if not in boredom. The present work springs from an appreciation of this gap in the literature, and seeks to remedy it. There are here gathered together, within the compass of a single volume, brief descriptions of eighteen differentprimitive peoples representative of all the great regions and races of the world and of all the major types and levels of culture. Each ac count, though short, aims to cover with reasonable ade quacy every important aspect of economic, political, and social life, with some reference also to the racial, geographic, and historical background. An insight into the drama of life, as it actually unfolds among a number of diverse peoples, should yield, the author strongly feels, a truer vii Vlll INTRODUCTION picture of aboriginal civilizations than any generalized account of primitive man The tribes selected are not always either primitive or contemporary in a literal sense. The Aztecs and Incas, for instance, are primitive only in the sense that they are usually studied by the anthropologist rather than by the historian and the sociologist. The descriptions, though usually couched in the present tense for greater vividness in presentation, depict the culture of each tribe, in so far as possible, as of the time of its first contact with western civilization. The cultures are contemporary, therefore, only in the broad historical or evolutionary perspective, which regards a century as but a moment in the immense span of human history. The book is frankly addressed to the general reader and the college student. It therefore abjures footnotes and the other badges of scholarship. It includes, however, a bib liography at the end of each chapter to guide the reader who may wish to learn more about a given culture. Aster isks indicate the most reliable comprehensive works highly technical or specialized contributions, however excellent, are not thus marked. Primitive culture is intrinsically interesting, as the author knows from years of teaching ex perience with classes in anthropology and sociology. The facts of ethnography need no sugar-coating. Only facts, therefore, will appear in the text not broad generalizations, or speculative reconstructions, or romantic idealizations, but the specific customs by which a number of primitive peoples actually order their lives. The intelligent lay reader of this volume will, of himself, doubtless arrive at certain general conclusions which most specialists accept as axiomatic...