Page:The American Indian.djvu/250

 CHAPTER XIV

THE CLASSIFICATION OF SOCIAL GROUPS ACCORDING TO THEIR CULTURES

have now passed in review the traits that are usually taken as constituting culture. The anthropological conception of the term is that it is the trait-complex manifested by a separate social unit of mankind. Some anthropologists take the position that the only correct view of the data of our subject is that which regards the social unit solely and that all such discussions as we have so far made are wrong in principle, because each trait has a peculiar relation to the complex practised by the group. This belief seems to arise in a kind of functional view in which the only problem of importance is to describe the manner in which a given social unit works out its culture. But it is now clear that no social group in the New World can be reckoned guilty of entire cultural independence, and that certain traits have spread over very large parts of both continents, whence the problem of a single social unit becomes of relatively little importance, because until we take in the whole sweep of the phenomenon no true account of it can be given.

As we have stated before this, the number of social groups in the New World is so large that no one can hope to hold in mind more than a small portion of them. Hence, even if we accept the extreme view that our subject should be limited to observing the separate functioning of these social units, some mode of classifying these many groups would still be imperative; for only in this way could the number of groups be reduced to the level of human comprehension. In the preceding chapters we saw that the natives of the New World could be grouped according to single culture traits, giving us food areas, textile areas, ceramic areas, etc. If, however, we take all traits into simultaneous consideration and shift our