Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/389

 BOOK REVIEWS

METHODS AND PRINCIPLES

Primitive Society. ROBERT H. LOWIE. Boni and Liveright: New York,

1920. 463 pp.

Anthropology still has the repute of being one of the newer sciences. But when one reflects that between Morgan's Ancient Society and Lowie's Primitive Society there elapsed nearly half a century without the publica- tion of a single authoritative work in the attempt to pierce the origins of the human social fabric as a whole, one is led to the reflection that anthropology is also a slowly moving science. The occasion seems good therefore to take stock of progress.

It goes without saying that Lowie's book is in every sense modern. It may also be described as thoroughly American and pragmatic. Its method is one to which the ethnologists of France have been somewhat strangely indifferent; those of England with some recent exceptions distinctly averse; those of Germany addicted with fair consistency but often without enthusiasm; whereas only in this country have ethnologists without notable exception subscribed either tacitly or avowedly to its plan. This method is the ethnographic one. That is, it is descriptive instead of primarily interpretative. It is historical in the sense that it insists on first depicting things as they are and then inferring generaliza- tions secondarily if at all, instead of plunging at once into a search for principles. It may not seem historical in the literal conventional sense because the ethnologist's data are not presented to him chronologically. He is therefore compelled to establish his time sequences. This he does by comparisons, especially by taking the fullest possible cognizance of all space factors, geography, diffusions, distributions. As soon, how- ever, as he has reconstructed his time sequences as well as he may, he follows the methods of the orthodox historian. He describes, giving his product depth through consideration of environmental and especially of psychological factors; but he describes only. It is each unique event that holds his interest, not the common likeness that may seem to run through events but which he finds, as he remains objective, to dilute thinner in proportion as he scrutinizes more accurately, and finally to melt into intangibilities. On the theoretic side this method has been most rigorously and imaginatively worked out in this country by Boas,

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