Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/206

202 was developed by the construction of a ritual. So far as can be seen, knowledge that works, even among primitive men, is always arrived at by experimentation. Though it is likely that in this particular case the Blackfoot Indians learned the whole process from strangers, it is certain that each step in the process was originally worked out in some definite locality and the working out of these methods, while in a large measure due to the experience of many, quite likely received its final formalization at the hands of a single individual. This individual was the teacher.

Assuming that this is the condition leading to the formalization of the tobacco-planting procedure, and that it is fundamentally based upon material experiment, how can we account for the seemingly useless ceremonial accompaniments? In the case of culture traits like the tobacco planting of the Blackfoot Indians the problem is always complicated by already existing patterns, or method concepts. Thus it may come to be regarded as axiomatic that to succeed any process must be carried out in a ceremonial manner, or that mere social usage demands that it be so. If either or both of these conceptions prevail, it is clear that the original formalizer of the tobacco planting process would give it a ceremonial dress by introducing into it the more or less conventionalized ceremonial units prevailing in his group. If it was the custom of his people to give some weight to peculiar personal dreams, then also some of his dream experiences might be incorporated. The total construct then resulting would be a tobacco-planting ritual of which the Blackfoot example is typical. Yet this complication need not obscure the essential factor in the case, for, eliminating this "following of existing patterns," we have revealed the backbone of the ritual, the concrete demonstration of processes empirically determined.

Perhaps if we compare the conditions among primitive groups with those under which we ourselves live the case may be clearer. If tobacco planting as a new agricultural trait should be introduced to us, its demonstrator would reduce the necessary directions to writing or cast his oral directions in a form easily reduced to writing. Such writings would then be credited by some authority to furnish the sanctions for the procedure, take certain conventional forms as books, periodicals and lectures, and conform to a certain standards of literary style. Thus we should construct what may be considered a text-book, which, whether written or not, would take the same essential form.

Now, among primitive groups the machinery for perpetuating and standardizing knowledge of this kind is the ritual. The objective method of written records not having been developed, we find in its place a memorized formula whose seriousness and sanction seems to be found in its ceremonial setting. We may safely conclude then that one of the chief functions of a planting or hunting ritual is the perpetuation of the method involved and that whatever may have been the conditions underlying its inception, it grew naturally out of the perpetuation of the