Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/721

 652 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899

system, itself the offspring of a democentric system, which sprang from an earlier ethnocentric system born of the primeval ego- centric cosmos of inchoate thinking. In higher culture the recognized cosmos lies in the background of thought, at least among the great majority ; but in primitive culture the egocentric and ethnocentric views are ever-present and always-dominant factors of both mentation and action. Their prominence is exemplified by kinship organization, the universal basis of primi- tive society; and this organization cannot better be illustrated than by analogy with the planetary assemblage : Each individual rotates independently, may be attended by satellites, and revolves first about the head of the family and later about the patriarch of the group, yet each exerts a definite attractional influence (albeit proportional to individuality rather than mass) on all his associates ; and the relative social positions are expressed and kept in mind by habitual conduct and form of speech. The primitive man cannot speak to or of a companion without reference to the currently-accepted view of his circumscribed cosmos — he cannot say "brother," but must say my "elder brother," or use some other term implying relative position of several individuals to himself, and among each other as reckoned through himself. Naturally the ever-present view of a self-centered cosmos finds expression throughout language and faith, and in arts and industries, as well as in social organization : Primitive language is essentially associative, abounding in num- bers and genders, persons and cases, tenses and moods, in a peculiarly complex structure reflecting the egocentric habit of thought, so that primitive grammar is chaotically elaborate ; and in primitive belief the individual long retains his personal tute- lary or fetish, endowing it with characters revealing his own sub- jectivity, and only slowly rises first to the recognition of family fetishes and clan totehns, and much later to that recognition of alien tutelaries which ends in pantheism. Concordantly, primi- tive art is conspicuously egoistic, beginning typically with the

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