In dealing with race and culture we undoubtedly confront two of the most inevitable but at the same time most unsatisfactory concepts involved in the broad-scale consideration of man and society. There is the general presumption and feeling that they have some quite vital and relevant connection, but as to the nature of this or even as to the scientific meaning of the individual concepts there is the greatest diversity of scientific opinion and theory. An analytic study of their highly variable meanings, confining this even to the more or less strictly scientific versions, would constitute two important and highly desirable treatises. But what we are here attempting is something quite more immediate and practical from the point of view of the use of these terms in the social sciences, and quite capable perhaps, if the analysis be successful, of settling some of these complexly controversial differences as to meaning by a process of elimination, namely an examination into their supposed relationship one to the other. For it seems that in the erroneous assumption of fixed relationships between the two, most of the serious difficulties and confusions lie. It will be our contention that far from being constants, these important aspects of human society are variables, and in the majority of instances not even paired variables, and that though they have at all times significant and definite relationships, they nevertheless are in no determinate way organically or causally connected. And if this should be so, whole masses of elaborately constructed social theory and cultural philosophizing fall with the destruction of a common basic assumption, that has been taken as a common foundation for otherwise highly divergent and even antagonistic theorizing. This position, differing from that of the school of interpretation which denies all significant connection between racial and cultural factors,1 does not deny that race stands for significant social characters and culture-traits or represents in given historical contexts characteristic differentiations of culture-type. However, it does insist against the assumption of any such constancy, historical or intrinsic, as would make it possible to posit an organic connection between them and to argue on such grounds the determination of one by the other.
But the unwarranted assumption of race as a determinant of culture is still very current, and contemporary discussion, especially in ethnology, is still primarily concerned with the destructive criticism of this inveterate and chronic notion. We would by no means minimize the success and scientific service of such criticism as that of Boas in the field of anthropology and “race psychology,” of Flinders-Petrie in archeology, of Finot, Babington, Hertz, and von Zollschan in social and political theory, and of Lowie and Wissler in ethnology,2 in saying that as yet, however, we seem to be only at a transitional stage in the scientific consideration of the relationship of race to culture. In some revised and reconstructed form, we may anticipate the continued even if restricted use of these terms as more or less necessary and basic concepts that cannot be eliminated altogether, but that must nevertheless be so safe-guarded in this continued use as not to give further currency to the invalidated assumptions concerning them. It is too early to assume that there is no significant connection between race and culture because of the manifestly false and arbitrary linkage which has previously been asserted.
In the interval between these two stages of the discussion, as one might normally expect, there is considerable tendency to continue the corollaries of the older view even where the main position and hypothesis has been abandoned. Goldenweiser3 is therefore quite justified in his insistence upon linking up these corollaries with the position of classical social evolutionism which gave them such vogue and standing, and disestablishing both by the same line of argument. For although this notion of race as a prime determining factor in culture was historically established by the theory and influence of de Gobineau,4 its scientific justification has been associated with the doctrines of the strictly evolutionary interpretation of culture, especially with the influence of the social evolutionism of Spencer. The primary scientific use of this fixed linkage between race and culture was to justify the classical evolutionary scheme of a series of stepped stages in an historical progression of cultural development. In this connection it has been the analogue in the theory of society of the heredity factor in the biological field, and its stock notions of race capacity and racial heredity have had approximately the same phases of acceptance, repudiation, and revision. In their “classical” form they are now equally discredited by several lines of detailed evidence where the historical succession of stages does not coincide with those posited as the ground basis of the supposedly universal process of development,5 and by the more intensive and objective study of primitive cultures which has shown how insidiously their consideration in the light of such evolutionary schemes has distorted their concrete facts and values. There is considerable warrant therefore for the position that wishes to exclude all further misinterpretation by a complete disassociation of the concept of race from the concept of culture.
This is the position of Lowie6 who concludes after a brilliant and rigorous examination as to the inter-connection between culture and race that not only are cultural changes “manifestly independent of the racial factor,” but that no race has permanent or even uniform alignment with reference to culture-type or cultural stages. His position, though one of the closest reasoned of any, is the most iconoclastic with respect to the assumption of any significant relation between race and culture, as may be estimated from the following passage: “With great confidence we can say that since the same race at different times or in different subdivisions at the same time represents vastly different cultural stages, there is obviously no direct proportional between culture and race and if great changes of culture can occur without any change of race whatsoever, we are justified in considering it probable that a relatively minute change of hereditary ability might produce enormous differences.”
But the extreme cultural relativism of Lowie leaves an open question as to the association of certain ethnic groups with definite culture-traits and culture types under circumstances where there is evidently a greater persistence of certain strains and characteristics in their culture than of other factors. The stability of such factors and their resistance to direct historical modification marks out the province of that aspect of the problem of race which is distinctly ethnological and which the revised notion of ethnic race must cover. It seems quite clear that no adequate explanation can be expected from the factors and principles of anthropological race distinctions. In the light of the most recent and accepted investigations any attempt to explain one in terms of the other must be regarded as pseudo-scientific. Nevertheless though there is lacking for the present any demonstrable explanation, there are certain ethnic traits the peculiarly stable and stock character of which must be interpreted as ethnically characteristic. They are in no sense absolutely permanent, the best psychological evidence as yet gives us no reason for construing them as inherent, yet they are factors not without an integral relationship one to the other not satisfactorily explained as mere historical combinations. Indeed it seems difficult and in some cases impossible to discover common historical factors to account for their relative constancy. Few challenge the specific factuality of these peculiarly resistant combinations of group traits.
As Sapir7 aptly says, “Here, as so often, the precise knowledge of the scientist lags somewhat behind the more naive but more powerful insights of non-professional experience and impression. To deny to the genius of a people an ultimate psychological significance and to refer it to the specific historical development of that people is not, after all is said and done, to analyze it out of existence. It remains true that large groups of people everywhere tend to think and to act in accordance with established and all but instinctive forms, which are in a large measure peculiar to it.” The point that seems to be important to note and stress is that we do not need to deny the existence of these characteristic racial molds in denying that they are rooted in “inherent hereditary traits either of a biological or a psychological nature.”
If, instead of the anthropological, the ethnic characters had been more in the focus of scientific attention, there probably would have resulted a much more scientific and tenable doctrine of the relationship of race to culture. Race would have been regarded as primarily a matter of social heredity, and its distinctions due to the selective psychological “set” of established cultural reactions. There is a social determination involved in this which quite more rationally interprets and explains the relative stability or so-called permanency that the old theorists were trying to account for on the basis of fixed anthropological characters and factors. To quote again from Sapir:8 “The current assumption that the so-called ‘genius’ of a people is ultimately reducible to certain inherent heredity traits of a biological and psychological nature does not, for the most part, bear very serious examination. Frequently enough, what is assumed to be an innate racial characteristic turns out on closer study to be the resultant of purely historical causes. A mode of thinking, a distinctive type of reaction, gets itself established in the course of a complex historical development as typical, as normal; it serves then as a model for the working over of new elements of civilization.”
The best consensus of opinion then seems to be that race is a fact in the social or ethnic sense, that it has been very erroneously associated with race in the physical sense and is therefore not scientifically commensurate with factors or conditions which explain or have produced physical race characters and differentiation, that it has a vital and significant relation to social culture, and that it must be explained in terms of social and historical causes such as have caused similar differentiations of culture-type as pertain in lesser degree between nations, tribes, classes, and even family strains. Most authorities are now reconciled to two things,—first, the necessity of a thorough-going redefinition of the nature of race, and second, the independent definition of race in the ethnic or social sense together with the independent investigation of its differences and their causes apart from the investigation of the factors and differentiae of physical race. Of course eventually there may be some interesting correlation possible at the conclusion of these two lines of investigation, but up to the present they seem only to have needlessly handicapped and complicated one another and to have brought comparative ethnology and comparative anthropology both to a deadlock of confusion because of their incompatible points of view and incommensurable values. It is undoubtedly this necessity of a new start that Wissler9 has in mind when he says, “So it is obvious that the relation between culture and race is a subject of more than passing interest, and though as yet not seriously investigated, the time is near at hand when its solution must be sought, if life is to be understood rationally and socially.” Similarly we find Flinders-Petrie10 in his address before the British Association saying “The definition of the nature of race is the most requisite element for any clear ideas about man,” and then veering over to the strictly social definition of race by adding, “The only meaning a race can have is a group of persons whose type has become unified by their rate of assimilation and affection by their conditions exceeding the rate of change produced by foreign elements.” Evidently the thought here is that blood intermixture is only one of the conducive conditions to cultural assimilation and absorption and that therefore culture-type or social race is the important fact and concept. Race in the vital and basic sense is simply and primarily the culture-heredity, and that in its blendings and differentiations is properly analyzed on the basis of conformity to or variance from culture-type.
Gault,11 discussing Stevenson’s study, Socio-Anthropometry: An Inter-racial Critique and several studies of Indian cross-breeds, all of which draw conclusions that differences are due to blood-race factors. says: “There is always the possibility that the Indian of mixed blood owes a degree of his superiority (we should say ‘difference’) to the social stimuli of one or the other parent from earliest infancy: stimuli that from the beginning have induced a level of reactions that otherwise would have been lacking, and have built up personality complexes that are next to original nature as respects substantiality.” Thus even in instances where physical assimilation is the condition responsible for cultural assimilation, the latter takes place in terms of social factors. Divorced then by every line of objectively considered evidence from the anthropological notion and criteria of race with which its distinctions rarely if ever coincide, ethnic race or what Gault calls “sociologic type” becomes the most scientifically tenable and useful concept.
Instead therefore of regarding culture as expressive of race, race by this interpretation is regarded as itself a culture product. Goldenweiser12 puts the matter this way; he says: “Enough has been said to show that the view generally held of the relation between race and culture may well be reversed. According to the prevailing view, man is many and civilization one, meaning by this that the races differ significantly in potential ability and that only one, the white race, could have and has achieved civilization. The reverse view, forced upon the ethnologist and the historian by a more critical and open-minded survey of the facts, reads thus: man is one, civilizations are many, meaning by this that the races do not differ significantly in psychological endowment, that the variety of possible civilizations is great and of actual ones, considerable, and that many civilizations other than ours have achieved things of genuine and unique worth.” Perhaps the revolutionary significance of this can only be realized when we see it applied to specific descriptive analysis as in the case of Rivers’13 use of the term race solely in a sense which means the people who had such and such culture-traits, whose customs dominated this or that period and set the pattern upon which a certain culture-type was developed.
Nothing seems more likely than that there will gradually develop out of this new and more objective analysis of culture a series of relatively divergent and basic culture-types, for each of which perhaps some more or less organic principle of development or evolution can be worked out, so that we may eventually get a standard of value for relative culture grading. Meanwhile we must grant the logic of the position of Lowie which is that the most objective study at present gives no warrant for the relative scientific grading of cultures. Meanwhile each culture must be treated as specific and as highly composite, and each ethnic group as the peculiar resultant of its own social history. This is what we mean then by this reversal of emphasis, that instead of the race explaining the cultural condition, the cultural conditions must explain the race traits, and that instead of artificially extracted units representing race types, the newer scientific approach demands that we deal with concrete culture-types which as often as not are composite racially speaking, and have only an artificial ethnic unity of historical derivation and manufacture.
Confident that this is the correct scientific conception of culture and its most warrantable scientific basis of approach and study, we return to the consideration of whether or not by such interpretation the concept of race is not entirely relegated from serious consideration in connection with it. So considerable is the shift of emphasis and meaning that at times it does seem that the best procedure would be to substitute for the term race the term culture-group. But what has become absolutely disqualified for the explanation of culture groups taken as totalities becomes in a much more scientific and verifiable way a main factor of explanation of its various cultural components. Race accounts for a great many of the specific elements of the cultural heredity, and the sense of race may itself be regarded as one of the operative factors in culture since it determines the stressed values which become the conscious symbols and tradition of the culture. Such stressed values are themselves factors in the process of culture making, and account primarily for the persistence and resistance of culture-traits. For these determine what is the dominant pattern in any given culture, and it is toward these dominants as social norms that social conformation converges and according to which it eventually establishes the type. It is with respect to such principles of determination that the newer psychology of race must be worked out instead of with reference to assumed innate traits and capacities. The type itself may have been established by accident or fortuitous combinations of historical circumstances, but re-enforced by the sense of race as perhaps the most intense of the feelings of commonality, it becomes an accepted, preferred and highly resistant culture complex that seems to be and often is self-perpetuating.
Race operates as tradition, as preferred traits and values, and when these things change culturally speaking ethnic remoulding is taking place. Race then, so far as the ethnologist is concerned, seems to lie in that peculiar selective preference for certain culture-traits and resistance to certain others which is characteristic of all types and levels of social organization. And instead of decreasing as a result of contacts this sense and its accumulative results seems on the whole to increase, so that we get accumulative effect. It intensifies therefore with contacts and increases with the increasing complexity of the culture elements in any particular area. A diversity of cultural types temporarily at least accentuates the racial stresses involved, so that even when a fusion eventuates it takes place under the conditions determined by the resistance developed and the relative strength of the several cultural components.
Indeed, the evidence shows most cultures to be highly composite. Sometimes there seems to be a race relatively pure physically with a considerably mixed culture, sometimes, perhaps more frequently, a highly mixed race with a relatively fused culture. But in the large majority of cases the culture is only to be explained as the resultant of the meeting and reciprocal influence of several culture strains, several ethnic contributions. Such facts nullify two of the most prevalent popular and scientific fallacies, the ascription of a total culture to any one ethnic strain, and the interpretation of culture in terms of the intrinsic rather than the fusion values of its various constituent elements. Especially does this newer view insist upon the disassociation of the claims of political dominance and cultural productivity, and combat the traditional view that all or even the best elements of a culture are the contribution of the ethnic group which in a mixed culture has political dominance and is in dynastic control. Already a number of such politically proprietary claims have been disallowed and disestablished by the more intensive and objectively comparative study of culture-traits. Such procedure promises to redeem the fields of discussion which till recently have been so vitiated by racial and national bias that some ethnologists have been led to conclude the impossibility of the scientific evaluation of cultures. After all, the failure to maintain objective standards, relevant values, and parity of values ought not be taken as evidence that this is not possible. So great is the tendency to lapse back into the former positions of bias, that the rigid maintenance of objective description as the sole aim of the ethnologist may, however, be fully warranted for the time being.
But races may, and must eventually be compared with respect to their relative and characteristic abilities and tendencies with respect to cultural origins, cultural assimilation, cultural survival, and their concrete institutional contributions. But in every case absolute objective parity of condition and values must be maintained. An instance in point is Lowie’s14 own illustration in a discussion of the relative rating of cultures on the basis of cultural originality and assimilation. He says: “If the Japanese deserve no credit for having appropriated our culture, we must also carefully eliminate from that culture all elements not demonstrably due to the creative genius of our race before laying claim to the residue as our distinctive product.” This seems simple enough to be axiomatic, yet as a principle of comparison one can find in treatise after treatise a score of breaches for every single observance of what ought to be a fundamental procedure. Irrelevant evaluation and invidious comparisons that do not even make the pretense of establishing either parity or equivalence of values abound, yet it is not to be corrected by excluding values, but rather through insistence upon the only properly scientific criteria—intrinsic values for the interpretation of any culture, and strictly commensurate or equivalent values as a basis of comparisons between them.
The chief source of error in the evaluation of cultures can be traced as the same source already described as responsible for the prevalent errors in the description of cultures. It is incumbent upon us to see clearly why the evolutionary formula has led in both these instances to such unsoundness of interpretation. It would seem that by putting all types and varieties into the same series, and this is the crux of the straight evolutionary point of view, the error of assuming basic common factors and commensurate values has almost irretrievably been made. Not that such factors may not exist, but that they are not to be discovered except from the point of view of a more objective and detailed comparison than has in most cases been attempted. Since the days of the Indo-Germanic myth, and its twin fancy the Aryan hypothesis, the desire and suppressed objective in many investigations has been to build a social pyramid of straight fine progressive stages, and subtle variations of this point of view have been introducing error upon error into the interpretation of cultures, especially primitive and alien cultures which have naturally borne the brunt of the scheme through having been distorted and pinched into alignment with the pre-conceived formula.15 We have a clear and succinct statement of the responsibility in this regard in the following passage:16 “The earlier anthropologists and sociologists, swayed by the biological theories of evolution, posited parallel development in every people, following upon innate psychological tendencies. Complete systems, with stages of development culminating in our own particular type of civilization, were posited by such early writers as Morgan, Spencer, Tylor and others. However, it has been found that the other cultural mechanism, that of diffusion, constituted a grave stumbling block to this a priori scheme of stage development, and it is now known that independent origins of inventions are infinitely more rare than was believed, and that they are conditioned not by innate psychological tendencies, but by the cultural milieu in which they occur.” Gradually it has become apparent that the procedure of using primitive cultures as the stock arguments and illustrations for societal evolution has disorganized the organic unity of these cultures, and merely used certain aspects of them as illustrating a comparative series which even if it were correct for the institution in question from which the accentuated culture-elements were taken, would not place correctly in scale as totalities the cultures respectively in question.
It follows then that the work of correction will have to begin at the very point where originally the errors and distortions have been introduced, namely, the more carefully objective study and organic interpretation of primitive cultures. This would be necessary from the purely corrective point of view, even if it were not also true as Wissler17 says that “our clearest insight into the mechanisms of culture is attained when we examine the more primitive marginal cultures of the world.” After the application of the reconstructed notion of race as social in manifestation and derivation, this would seem to be the most important and promising revision of idea and method in the entire field of our discussion. As a straight methodological question then we get the following as the only correct and acceptable procedure in the study of any given culture—first, its analytic and complete description in terms of its own culture-elements, second, its organic interpretation in terms of its own intrinsic values as a vital mode of living, combined if possible with an historical account of its development and derivation, and then finally and not till then its assignment to culture-type and interpretation as a stage of culture. Almost any culture so treated will be found to be radically different both in description and evaluation from that account which would have been given it if immediately submitted on first analysis to the general scale and to universal comparison. Let us call this the principle of organic interpretation and the other the principle of cultural relativity, and conclude that in combination with the dynamic and social interpretation of race, the three are the methodological foundation and platform of the newer science of social culture. Especially in connection with the concept of race are all of the biased and partisan points of view and scales of evaluation obviated by such procedure so that it becomes possible to continue the term scientifically and usefully in the context of discussion to which it is most relevant, but into which until recently it has introduced primarily serious errors both of fact and of value.
1. Lowie, R. H.—Culture and Ethnology, Chap. II, 1923.
2. Boas, Franz—The Mind of Primitive Man. 1911. Flinders-Petrie, W. M.—Race and Civilization, Proc. Brit. Assoc., 1895. Finot, Jean—Race Prejudice (Trans. 1907). Babington, W. D.—Fallacies of Race Theories. Hertz—Moderne Rassentheorien. von Zollschan, I.—Das Rassenproblem, Vienna, 1912.
3. Goldenweiser, A.—Early Civilization, Chap. I, pp. 14–15.
4. de Gobineau—Essai sur l’inegalite des races humains. Paris, 1854.
5. Goldenweiser—Ibid, pp. 21–27.
6. Lowie, R. H.—Culture and Ethnology, p. 41.
7. Sapir, E.—Culture, Geuine and Spurious, Amer. Journal of Sociology, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, p. 406.
8. Ibid. pp. 405–06.
9. Wissler—Man and Culture.
10. Flinders-Petrie—Race and Civilization, Proc. Brit. Assoc., 1895.
11. Gault—Social Psychology, p. 104.
12. Goldenweiser—Op. cit., p. 14.
13. Compare Rivers—Psychology and Ethnology.
14. Lowie—Op. cit., pp. 32–33.
15. Compare Goldenweiser—Chap. I and p. 125.
16. Herskovits and Willey—The Cultural Approach to Sociology. Amer. Jour. of Sociology, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, p. 195.
17. Wissler—Op. cit., p. 286.