Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/52

 4.0 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s. f 22, 1920

him, as they do to us, the very core of the struggle of life. Apart from song and dance, from prayer, incantation and sacred rite, from myth-telling and listening, from painting, carving and em- broidering, there goes on from day to day the serious and hard business of hunting and fishing, the building of traps and snares, of houses and canoes, the making of pots and the weaving of baskets, spinning and sewing, the making of weapons and the using of them ; all this serious and hard business, the descriptions of which fill large sections of our ethnological monographs, is carried on from day to day, by man and by woman, in complete oblivion of the super- natural and frequent disregard of the esthetic, with the senses pitched high, and the mind alert, observing, trying, improving, inventing, achieving expertness and success. While all this is done within the more or less narrow bounds of accepted use and wont, traditionally derived and socially imposed, it is the individual who does the work, who adjusts himself, who creates. Thus, whatever factors may be held responsible for the precipitation at certain times and places of individual detachment, self-assertion and originality, it is, after all, but a precipitation of certain qualities of the individual which have asserted themselves all along and have left their mark on the many types of civilization encompassed in the primitive world.

Note must be taken here of another conception which, together with the emergence of individuality, is emphasized in this section of the work; a conception which is not new, but appears, in the author's hands, in a somewhat novel illumination. The conception is that of an idea-system as characterizing a particular form of civilization, at a given place and time. The following passages may serve to elucidate the author's point:

If then, we come to compare, not man and brute, but the differing groups that go to make up the human population of the globe, the distinguishing feature of any group will be, not its language, implements, or institutions, but its particular idea-system, of which these other manifestations of activity are varying expres- sions. Without exception the products of human activity are expressions or aspects of the entire mental content of the group or individual. This mental content, moreover, is not to be conceived of as a mere assemblage of disparate units placed in juxtaposition, but as cohering in an idea-system. Ideas are not simply accumulated or heaped up; on the contrary, every "new" idea added

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