Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/256

 THE CULTURAL AND SOMATIC CORRELATIONS OF UTO-AZTECAN

BY P. E. GODDARD

MODERN anthropology has one practically undisputed dogma. Culture being independent of biological inheri- tance is a thing separate from race or a particular biological strain. Culture, of course, includes language. In the middle of the nineteenth century the linguistic students in Europe used to speak of an Aryan race as well as Aryan languages. Toward the end of that century nothing could be more heretical than to speak with so little discrimination. This lesson of the separateness of language and race was exceedingly important in Europe and equally so in America.

Dr. Wissler 1 has recently reopened the subject by pointing out that actual conditions in North America do show a correlation between physical types, language, and other elements of culture. The Eskimo have skulls sufficiently peculiar to be easily distin- guished, a culture of their own, and a language shared in only by the Alieut. There are also the Caribou-hunting, Athapascan-speak- ing peoples of the Mackenzie drainage.

On a priori grounds there ought to be some correlation between physical type, language, and culture. It is true that the body itself is derived by a peculiar biological mechanism, and that this has little or no influence on language or the variety or type of culture. Language and culture however are normally derived largely from the parents and grandparents, the same individuals from whom physical peculiarities are inherited.

If we imagine a valley of ample extent, the walls of which con- stitute definite barriers, occupied by a single family, a hundred generations should produce a definite biological strain of consider-

��The American Indian, chap, xix, pp. 327-341.

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