Page:The American Indian.djvu/386

320

After these necessary digressions we may turn to our initial task, the classification of New World peoples according to somatic characters. In the first place, our previous discussions have revealed the primary somatic units to be the in-breeding local social groups. The resemblances of individuals within these are comparable to family resemblances among our own people. If, for example, we take the Navajo, Apache, Pawnee, Teton-Dakota, Patagonian, and Eskimo, there is often no difficulty in placing an individual by his portrait alone. On the other hand, to reduce the characters of identity to exact statement, is extremely difficult, just as is the case when one attempts to write a facial description of an acquaintance that would clearly identify him. Our problem, then, is quite the same as in the preceding chapters, viz., to find some empirical grouping for these small somatic groups.

Those who are reasonably familiar with anthropological literature can understand the sexual conditions that readily contribute to the leveling down of family differences to the group type. When we take up the question of group resemblances, we may, upon a priori grounds, assume that contiguous groups will often mix to an extent sufficient to bring them very near to each other. The data for tribal social practices give every justification for this assumption. Then when one plots out a series of anatomical measurements on a map he finds that high values often tend to cluster in one geographical area and low in another. Thus, in case of stature, we rarely find a single tall social group surrounded by groups of low stature. For example, the Cheyenne are rated as tall (1,748 cm.), near them were the Crow (1,732), Arapaho (1,728), and the Dakota (1,726). In fact, all the tribes of the bison area which cluster around the above group show high stature, but receding to the south, west, and north. This is comparable to what we find to be true of culture traits, viz., a tendency to radiate around a geographical center. Another good example is around the mouth of the Colorado River, where the Mohave are rated at 1,740, the Maricopa at 1,722, the Yuma at 1,700, and the Pima at 1,703, while surrounding them are groups of lower