Abstract
II. IN considering the claims of anthropology as a practical means of understanding ourselves, our own thoughts and ways, we have to form an opinion how the ideas and arts of any people are to be accounted for as developed from preceding stages. To work out the lines along which the process of organisation has actually moved, is a task needing caution and reserve. A tribe may have some art which plainly shows progress from a ruder state of things, and yet it may be wrong to suppose this development to have taken place among themselves—it may be an item of higher culture that they have learnt from sight of a more advanced nation. Our own history shows to how small an extent we have been the developers of our own arts and sciences, how largely we have embodied the culture of other nations. It is essential in studying even savage and barbaric culture, to allow for borrowing, so as to clear the lines of real development. When the savage comes into contact with the civilised man, he does not see his way to copy all the high contrivances of this mysterious higher being, but where he thinks he can imitate, he is apt to try, and sometimes succeeds, though oftener fails. After a time of friendly intercourse, the wild man generally learns such substantial secrets of culture as he is in a position to assimilate. Ethnologists have been inclined to look on the wandering Esquimaux of the polar regions as “nature-men,” and perhaps no harm has arisen from reasoning on them as such, for they are in many ways fair representatives of the rude nomad hunter and fisher. But I suspect that in some respects they do not show the mere result of the primitive savage working out by slow degrees a somewhat higher culture. Looking at them not as they are now, Europeanised under missionary training, but as they were when Egede and Cranz went out to them from Denmark in the eighteenth century, it seems that their way of life even then had some incidents above the savage level. Their clothing was artistically contrived to resist the intense cold. Its material is sometimes strange to our notions; an,undershirt of birds'skins with tbe feathers inside requires an effort to realise even in our bleakest season. But a leather tunic with sleeves and a hood to pull over the head, a pair of sealskin breeches with leather stockings and boots, form a defence against the cold, at once like that familiar to Europeans, and unlike any unquestionable savage costume, such as the furs which in the Antarctic regions the shivering Fuegians throw over their shoulders. Moreover, all across the polar coast region of the Esquimaux their houses of earth or moulded snow, with compartments like ship-cabins, are warmed and lighted with blubber, burnt, in lamps shaped out of pot-stone with moss to serve as wick, and over these are hung the potstone kettles for their slight cookery. Now, the kettle carved out of potstone (lapis ollaris) is ancient in Scandinavia, and the plain open dish lamp occurs widely in Northern Europe (it lingered till lately in the Scotch crusie). But tlie lowest races know nothing of so cultured an invention as a lamp. It is of course within the wide bounds of possibility that under the stress of a climate so cold for loose-clad, half-naked men, and where the scanty supply of wood drifted to the shore was too precious for fuel, the Esquimaux, driven by the warlike American Indian tribes of Algon-quins and Athabascas, may have discovered how to improve their clothing, and to warm and feed themselves by the aid of lamps, so that they could hold their own against the rigour of polar nature. But if so, how curious that they should have done this by inventing just what the Norsemen could have taught them. Independent Greenland invention, if possible, is hardly probable, and I think a strong case may be made for an easier explanation. We know that the ancestors of the Esquimaux had been in contact with Scandinavians since before our Norman Conquest, when in 1004 the small, sallow, broad-cheeked Skrallings in their skin canoes slew Thorvald with their spears thrown with throwing-sticks, and he was buried with a cross at head and feet at Crossness, which may have been about where long afterwards the Puritan emigrants landed from the Mayflower. It seems clear that the Esquimaux had to go north from these delightful regions of New England, but they lived for ages within reach of the Norse settlers in Greenland, whose last survivors in the fourteenth century are thought even to have merged their race in some tribe of the despised Skrallings. Thus it is not surprising that the Scandinavians returning to Greenland after four hundred years more should have found the Esquimaux shaping their skins and furs into semi-European garb, and by the aid of these and the stone lamps and kettles maintaining a polar existence which, without these, would have been difficult indeed. Even that curious Scandinavian institution, the scurrilous iiith-songs with which the Norse champions drove one another wild with fury, so that they had to be prohibited by law under heavy penalties, had become a regular Esquimaux custom, and Rink calls them simply nid-mse, just as he would have called them among his own Danish forefathers. His first specimen is a Greenland song sung at festive winter gatherings, ma.de to ridicule one Kukouk, who was a poor hunter and fisher, but loved to make friends with the white men; it begins
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Anthropology 1 . Nature 28, 55–59 (1883). https://doi.org/10.1038/028055d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/028055d0