ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT XXIX expressed by conduct; and he finds that just classification of the activities of peoples removes the need for other classifications of men, at least in so far as civil conditions are concerned. With the concentration of study on the human activities, they gradually came to be recognized as at once the expressions and the products of human intelligence. Considerable thought has been given to the mode of development of the activital products and of the activities themselves; and the researches in this direction are yielding results worthy of record. 1. The esthetic instinct is strongly developed among the American aborigines, especially in childhood and early adolescence; and even in maturity and old age it is abundantly manifested in ceremonial dances, in oral and instrumental music, in symbolic decoration, in divinatory games, and in other ways. Now, the researches indicate (1) that play springs spontaneously in the individual as the expression of hereditary function, normally strengthened by exercise in each generation so as to pass on in increasing potency as the generations run; (2) that the play of the individual normally epitomizes the serious as well as the lighter ancestral activities, and presages both the serious and the lighter activities of the individual in later life and of his descendants in later generations; (3) that through this inherent relation the spontaneous activities are gradually directed, during the life of the individual and during the succession of generations, to more serious ends; (4) that, in this way, industries spring perpetually from pleasures; and (5) that the pleasures constantly spread from individual to individual and from group to group through mimicry and other manifestations of the social instinct. Accordingly, while the esthetic activities tend to increase and multiply through individual initiative, they are extended and perpetuated only through interchange and heritage; so that, despite a minor differential tendency, the general trend of esthetic development is toward combination and integration. Pleasure and industry are concomitant and connate. Both motives appear not only in the human race, but even among the lower animals.. Pleasure and life are ends which men seek and have sought from primordial time, but pleasure is the cradle in which industry is rocked, for the earliest pleasures of mankind are mimetic industries. 2. Although less perfect than in higher culture, the industrial instinct of the American aborigines is developed to a suggestive degree. Observably springing from the desire for sustenance and the need for protection from unfriendly environment, the industries of the tribesmen, as the researches among them indicate, are developed through the regulation or control of spontaneous activities. The impulse toward regulation arises in various ways. Doubtless the initial impulse is physiologic, and hence pertains to the individual rather than the group; but the observably effective impulses are predominantly mimetic and subordinately rational, and in either case are essentially collective. Throughout primitive industry, mimicry plays a leading rôle; the activities of food-getting are learned by example, not merely the example of human food-getters but that of beasts deified in recognition of their strength and swiftness and ferocity. Teeth, claws, horns, spines, and shells are chosen as implements by reason of a mythic magnification of their efficiency in offense and defense, and wholly artificial implements and weapons are fabricated in imitation of the animal `structures, in the faith that they are thereby endowed with superphysical potency. As the amicable workers multiply their devices are interchanged, with the effect that the more efficient are retained and the less efficient abandoned. Even when the workers are inimical some interchange goes on under the process of acculturation, for the leading motive of strife in savagery and barbarism is the conquest of deities symbolized by the devices of warfare. With the growth of faculty example is integrated and experience coordinated and mysticism measurably eliminated, so that industrial activity is regulated by rational arrangement of realities and thus invention begins; but invention arises with exceeding slowness among lower men, and remains dominated by primitive imitation until the higher culture-stages are attained. The factors involved in regulating spontaneous impulses and directing them toward individual and collective welfare appear to be (1) heritage, (2) environmental interaction, (3) imitation, ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT XXXI (4) coordination of experience of self and others, and (5) invention. It would be difficult to evaluate these several factors fairly; but when they are so grouped as to oppose the individual and the collective, or more properly (a) the independent and (b) the imitative, it is not difficult to judge their relative importance; for, especially in that lower culture in which invention is subordinate, the imitative element is so largely predominant that the independent element is commonly relegated to the limbo of paradox-as when curiosity-seekers puzzle over activital coincidences or interpret them as evidences of former contact between unrelated peoples. In general terms, it would seem that, while the industrial activities tend to increase and multiply through individual initiative (though in much less degree than the esthetic activities), they are extended and perpetuated partly through heritage but chiefly through imitative interchange; so that the essential trend of industrial development is toward integration and coordination. 3. The institutional activities of the American Indians have been found peculiarly instructive. The relationships which arise from the physical conditions of reproduction of children from parents is seized upon as an obvious method for organizing the groups of society in a hierarchy. The tribes that live in the lowest stage of culture (which we call savagery) recognize parents and children, but they practically give to the mother superior authority over the children. The next higher group is the clan; this is organized so as to include a peculiar set of persons. The mother and her brothers and sisters together with the grandmother with her brothers and sisters constitute the group, which may also include the great-grandmother and her brothers and sisters. The group is thus projected into antiquity, so that all persons who recognize kinship by an unbroken descent through mothers are included therein, and future generations have their clan organization fixed thereby. The chief or ruler of the group is always the elder man of the group; the chieftaincy is therefore avuncular. In the family, authority is in the elder, and if two or more generations constitute the same household, the authority is still in the elder, but the mother has authority over the father. In the clan the uncle or mother's brother has chief authority, and superior age always gives authority in savagery. This is the theory upon which the savage proceeds; but superior age is conventional age, and men may be advanced from number to number in age; a younger son may be advanced over an elder son, and when this occurs they exchange kinship names; a nephew may be promoted over his uncle, when they also exchange kinship names. In addition to the family and the clan a still higher group is organized. All persons who claim relationship by consanguinity are included in this group; this is the tribe. Marriage is forbidden within the clan; it is, therefore, an incest group; but men and women of different clans mate, and thus marriage is within the tribe. If a person not a member of the tribe wishes to marry a person within the tribe, he must be adopted into some clan other than that of his mate, and if a person wishes to marry within the clan, he must be adopted into some other clan; so that incest in this stage of society is prohibited marriage within a conventional group of persons, and is thus based on convention and not on degree of consanguinity. Again, while the mother's brothers and sisters belong to her clan, the children of the brothers belong to the clan in which they are married. The children of the sisters of the clan call one another brothers and sisters, but the children of the brothers call the children of the sisters by a term which may be rendered by the English term cousin. Tribes are also organized into confederacies. Such organizations seem always to result from war, but when peace is established a convention is made, and the contracting parties assume artificial relationship. They may be brothers, in which case they are elder brothers and younger brothers. They may, by convention, be fathers and sons, or even grandfathers and grandsons, or uncles and nephews, the conquering party taking the name which implies superior age. But several tribes may be organized into a confederacy; then kinship terms are parceled out among them in compliance with previously arranged conventional kinship. In all the American tribes of savagery we find that peculiar ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT XXXIII groups of persons are organized. We call these groups shamanistic societies; they are organized as religious bodies, but the term must be used with an extended meaning so as to include the ceremonies which savage men believe to be religious. Pleasure and pain, welfare and want, peace and warfare, health and disease, and all good and evil are believed by the savage men to be under the control of these shamanistic societies. Such religious bodies (if the term is permitted) play a very important part in savage society; they are known as brotherhoods, and the chief of the brotherhood is called their father, and the members of the brotherhood call one another brothers and sisters. Thus even their societies are planned on kinship ideas. Some of the tribes of America are organized on a somewhat different plan which may be set forth. When they are organized on this new plan we call them barbarians, and thus distinguish them from tribes that are organized on the clanship system. First, the father becomes the head of the family and authority is in the father rather than in the mother. Second, for the group which is called the clan in savagery there is substituted the gens in barbarism; this group embraces all of those persons who reckon kinship through fathers, so that the father and his brothers and sisters, together with the grandfather and his brothers and sisters, and all other consanguineal kindred back in past generations and forward in future generations are called a gens. Children of the same father only are called brothers and sisters, but the children of his brothers are designated by his children in terms which may be translated cousin; then cousins who are children of the father's brothers and sisters, and also those who are children of the mother's brothers and sisters, are called by terms which are often translated into English as coming under the designation cousin, though in barbarism a distinction is made, cousins through the father and cousins through the mother having different designations. Thus there are two terms which signify cousins; and these cousins are further classed by age relative to the person speaking. The gens appears in Greek and Roman history, where it is known as the agnatic kindred. The tribe remains a 17 ETH-III |