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Dơnload To Watch You Bleed 1st Edition Jordon Greene Full Chapter
Dơnload To Watch You Bleed 1st Edition Jordon Greene Full Chapter
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from the flight or actions of birds. Both systems were learned from
them by the Romans, according to Roman tradition itself.
With the spread of Christianity, hepatoscopy and haruspicy died
out in the west. But meanwhile they had been carried in the opposite
direction from their Babylonian source of origin, and became
established in eastern Asia and finally, in somewhat modified form,
among remote uncivilized peoples. The pagan priests of Borneo and
the Philippines even to-day are foretelling the future by observing the
flight of birds and examining the gall bladder—an organ intimately
associated with the liver—of sacrificial animals. If these primitive
Malaysian peoples had always remained uninfluenced by higher
cultures, their divinatory customs might be imputed to independent
invention. They live, however, at no great distance from the Asiatic
mainland, and are known to have been subjected to heavy cultural
influences from China, Arabia, and especially India. Four centuries
ago, to cite only a few specific instances, the Philippine chieftains
went under the title of rajah, the Hindu word for king. In the southern
Philippine islands there are “sultans” to-day. In all parts of the
Philippines as well as Borneo, even among the rude tribes of the
interior mountains, Chinese jars imported centuries ago are
treasured as precious heirlooms. With these streams of higher
culture flowing into the Malaysian islands, the only reasonable
conclusion is that the arts of liver and bird divination were also
imported. In fact, it seems probable that the broader custom of
sacrificing animals to the gods and spirits, a custom to which the
pagan Malaysians still adhere, is a part of the same wave of
influence from the Orient which has so deeply stamped the Homeric
poems and the Old Testament. Although theoretically it is not
surprising that hepatoscopy and haruspicy still flourish among some
backward and marginally situated peoples, yet, in the concrete and
at first blush, it is striking to find that an institution which was active
in Babylonia three or four thousand years ago should still maintain
an unbroken life in Borneo. Evidently the diffusion principle reaches
far and long.
Another method of foretelling, which has spread equally far,
although its flow has been mainly from the east westward, is
scapulimancy, divination from the cracks that develop in scorched
shoulder blades. This seems to have originated in ancient China with
the heating of tortoise shells; had spread by the third century after
Christ to Japan, where deer shoulder blades were employed; and is
found to-day among the Koryak and Chukchi of northeasternmost
Siberia, who utilize the same bones from seals and reindeer
respectively. Elsewhere domestic animals, above all the sheep,
furnish the proper shoulder blade. All the central Asiatic nations as
far south as the Tibetans and Lolos are addicted to the custom,
which had official status with the Mongol rulers in the thirteenth
century, but must have been older, since it was in vogue among the
Byzantine Greeks two hundred years earlier. The practice spread
over practically all Europe, where it flourished in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries and still lingers among belated rural populations;
to Morocco and perhaps other parts of north Africa; and in Asia to
South Arabia, Afghanistan, and westernmost India. Scapulimancy
was not known to the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews,
Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans; it seems not to have penetrated far
into India and not at all into the countries and islands to the east of
India, which are sheepless regions; and it did not obtain a foothold in
North America, where sheep and other tame animals were also not
kept. It appears therefore that the custom, after a period of
somewhat wavering formation in eastern Asia, crystallized into an
association with the domesticated sheep, forming a true culture
“complex,” and was then diffused almost as far as this animal.
98. Tobacco
The speed with which inventions sometimes diffuse over large
areas is in marked contrast to the slowness with which they travel on
other occasions. The art or habit of smoking originated in tropical
America where the tobacco plant is indigenous. From this middle
region the custom spread, like agriculture, pottery, and weaving, in
both directions over most of north and south America. Originally, it
would seem, a tobacco leaf was either rolled on itself to form a rude
cigar, or was stuffed, cigarette fashion, into a reed or piece of cane.
Columbus found the West Indians puffing at cigars. In the
Southwestern United States, the natives smoked from hollow reeds.
Farther into the United States, both to the east and west, the reed
had become a manufactured tube of wood or stone or pottery. This
tubular pipe, something like a magnified cigarette holder, has the
bowl enlarged at one end to receive the tobacco. It has to be held
more or less vertically. This form has survived to the present day
among the California Indians. As the tubular pipe spread into the
central and eastern United States, it was elaborated. The bowl was
made to rise from the top of the pipe, instead of merely forming its
end. This proved a convenience, for the pipe had now no longer to
be pointed skyward to be smoked. Here then was a pipe with a
definite bowl; but its derivation from the straight tubular pipe is
shown by the fact that the bowl was most frequently set not at the
end of the stem, as we “automatically” think a pipe should be, but
near its middle. The bowl evidently represented a secondary addition
which there seemed no more reason to place at the end than in the
middle of the pipe; and the latter happened to become the fashion.
All this evolution took place at least a thousand years ago,
probably much longer. Elaborate stone pipes have been discovered
in the earthworks left by the Mound Builders of the Ohio Valley, a
people whose very existence had been forgotten when the whites
first came. Californian stone pipes occur well down toward the
bottom of shell mounds estimated to have required three or four
thousand years to accumulate.
Here and there this slow diffusion suffered checks. In the Andean
region of South America tobacco came into competition with coca, a
plant whose leaf was chewed. The effect of the contained alkaloid is
to prevent fatigue and hunger. Of the two, coca triumphed over
tobacco, possibly because its action is more drug-like. In North
America, on the other hand, tribes that had not adopted maize and
bean agriculture, sometimes tilled tobacco patches. With them,
tobacco cultivation had outstripped the spread of so important an
institution as food agriculture. In the extreme parts of North America,
climatic factors checked the growth of tobacco, either wild or
cultivated. Where the supply was scarce, it was either diluted with
pulverized tree bark, as by many tribes of the central United States,
or it was eaten, as by a number of groups on the Pacific coast. To
these latter, tobacco seemed too precious to set fire to and lightly
puff away. They mixed it with lime from burnt shells and swallowed it.
Taken in this form, a small quantity produces a powerful effect. In the
farthest north of the continent, even this device had not obtained a
foothold. The development of intertribal trade was too slender and
intermittent for anything but valuables, let alone an article of daily
consumption, to be transported over long distances. The result was
that the Eskimo, when first discovered, knew nothing of tobacco or
pipes.
The use of tobacco was quickly carried to the Old World by the
Spaniards, and before long all Europe was smoking. Throughout that
continent, irrespective of language, the plant is known by
modifications of the Spanish name tabaco, which in turn seems
based on a native American name for cigar. By the Spaniards and
Portuguese, and later also by the Arabs, the habit of smoking was
carried to various points on the shores of Africa, Asia, and the East
Indies. Thence it spread inland. Native African tribes, and others in
New Guinea, who had never seen a white man, have been found not
only growing and smoking tobacco, but firmly believing that their
ancestors from time immemorial had done so. This is a characteristic
illustration of the short-livedness of group memory and the
unreliability of oral tradition.
In northeastern Siberia, where the Russians introduced tobacco, a
special form of pipe came into use. It has a narrow bowl flaring at the
top. Seen from above, this bowl looks like a disk with a rather small
hole in the center. In profile it is almost like a capital T. It is set on the
end of the pipe-stem. This stem may be straight or flattened and
curved. This form of pipe, along with tobacco as a trade article,
crossed Behring Strait and was taken up by the Alaska Eskimo. That
this pipe is not of Eskimo origin is shown by its close resemblance to
the Chukchi pipe of Siberia. The fact that it is impossible for the
Eskimo to grow tobacco corroborates the late introduction, as does
the Alaska Eskimo name: tawak. In short, smoking reached the
Eskimo only after having made the round of the globe. Originating in
Middle America, the custom spread very anciently to its farthest
native limits without being able to penetrate to the Eskimo. As soon
as the Spaniards appeared on the scene, the custom started on a
fresh career of travel and rolled rapidly eastward about the globe
until it reëntered America in the hitherto non-smoking region of
Alaska.
A second invasion of America by a non-American form of pipe
occurred in the eastern United States. The old pipe of this region, as
already stated, had its bowl set well back from the end of the stem.
The whole object thus had nearly the shape of an inverted capital T,
whereas the European pipe might be compared to an L laid on its
back. After the English settlers had become established on the
Atlantic coast, a tomahawk pipe was introduced by them for trade
purposes. This was a metal hatchet with the butt of the blade
hollowed out into a bowl which connected with a bore running
through the handle. One end of the blade served to chop, the other
to smoke. The hatchet handle was also the pipe stem. The
combination implement could be used as a weapon in war and as a
symbol of peace in council. This doubleness of purpose caused it to
appeal to the Indian. The heads of these iron tomahawk pipes were
made in England for the Indian trade. They became so popular that
those natives who were out of reach of established traders, or who
were too poor to buy the metal hatchet-pipes, began to imitate them
in the stone which their forefathers had used. In the Missouri valley,
a generation ago, among tribes like the Sioux and the Blackfeet,
imitation tomahawk pipes, which would never have withstood usage
as hatchets, were being made of red catlinite together with the
standard, native, inverted-T pipes. One of the two coexisting forms
represented a form indigenous to the region since a thousand years
or more, the other an innovation developed in Europe as the result of
the discovery of America and then reintroduced among the
aborigines. Diffusion sometimes follows unexpectedly winding
routes.
99. Migrations
It may seem strange that with all the reference to diffusion in the
foregoing pages, there has been so little mention of migration. The
reason is that migrations of peoples are a special and not the normal
means of culture spread. They form the crass instances of the
process, easily conceived by a simple mind. That a custom travels
as a people travels with it, is something that a child can understand.
The danger is in stopping thought there and invoking a national
migration for every important culture diffusion, whereas it is plain that
most culture changes have occurred through subtler and more
gradual operations. The Mongols overran vast areas of Asia and
Europe without seriously modifying the civilization of those tracts.
The accretions that most influenced them, such as writing and
Buddhism, came to them by the quieter and more pervasive process
of peaceful penetration, in which but few individuals were active. We
are all aware that printing and the steam engine, the doctrine of
evolution and the habit of riming verses, have spread through
western civilization without conquests or migrations, and that each
year’s fashions flow out from Paris in the same way. When however
it is a question of something remote, like the origin of Chinese
civilization, it is only necessary for it to be pointed out that the early
forms of Chinese culture bear certain resemblances to the early
culture of Mesopotamia, and we are sure to have some one
producing a theory that marches the Chinese out of the west with
their culture packed away in little bundles on their backs. That is far
more picturesque, of course, more appealing to the emotions, than
to conceive of a slow, gradual transfusion stretching over a thousand
years. In proportion as the known facts are few, imagination soars
unchecked. It is not because migrations of large bodies of men are
rare or wholly negligible in their influence on civilization that they
have been touched so lightly here, but because we all tend, through
the romantic and sensationalistic streak in us, to think more largely in
terms of them than the sober truth warrants. It is in culture-history as
in geology: the occasional eruptions, quakings, and other cataclysms
stir the mind, but the work of change is mainly accomplished by
quieter processes, going on unceasingly, and often almost
imperceptible until their results accumulate.
CHAPTER IX
PARALLELS
108. Bronze
A striking case of independent development is offered by the
history of bronze. Bronze is copper alloyed with five to twenty per
cent of tin. The metals form a compound with properties different
from those of the two constituents. Tin is a soft metal, yet bronze is
harder than copper, and therefore superior for tools. Also, it melts at
a lower temperature and expands in solidifying from the molten
condition, and thus is better material for castings.
In the eastern hemisphere bronze was discovered early and used
widely. For nearly two thousand years it was the metal par
excellence of the more advanced nations. A Bronze Age, beginning
about 4,000 B.C., more or less simultaneously with the first phonetic
writing, is recognized as one of the great divisions of cultural time (§
66, 225).
In the western hemisphere bronze was apparently invented later
than in the eastern and spread less extensively. It was discovered in
or near the Bolivian highland, which is rich in tin (§ 196). From there
its use diffused to the Peruvian highland, then to the coast, then
north to about Ecuador, and finally, perhaps by maritime contacts, to
Mexico, where local deposits of tin were probably made use of after
their value was realized.
Theoretically, it might be queried whether knowledge of bronze
had possibly been carried to the Andes from the eastern hemisphere
by some now forgotten migration or culture transmission. Against
such a supposition there stands out first of all the isolated and
restricted distribution of the South American bronze art. It is ten
thousand miles by land from the metal-working nations of Asia to the
middle Andes. A people or culture wave that had traveled so far
could not but have left traces of its course by the way. The utilitarian
superiority of bronze over stone tools is so great that no people that
had once learned the art would be likely to give it up. Even if here
and there a group of tribes had retrograded, it cannot be imagined
that all the nations between China and Peru could have slipped back
so decisively. Certainly peoples like the Mayas and Chibchas, expert
metallurgists, would never have abandoned bronze-making.
The theory of a Chinese junk swept out of its course and washed
on a South American shore might be invoked. But the original South
American bronze culture occupies an inland mountain area. Further,
while Asiatic ships have repeatedly been wrecked on the Pacific
coast of North America and probably at times also on that of South
America, there is everything to indicate that the civilizational effects
of such accidents were practically nil. The highest cultures of Mexico
and South America were evolved in interior mountain valleys or
plateaus. Not one of the great accomplishments of the American
race—architecture, sculpture, mathematics, metallurgy—shows any
specific localization on the shore of the Pacific.
Further, it is hard to understand how the arrival of a handful of
helpless strangers could initiate an enduring culture growth. It is
easy enough for us, looking backward through the vista of history, to
fancy the lonely Indians standing on the shore to welcome the
strangers from the west, and then going with docility to school to
learn their superior accomplishments. Actually, however, people
normally do not feel or act in this way. Nations are instinctively
imbued with a feeling of superiority. They look down upon the
foreigner. Even where they admit his skill in this matter or that, they
envy rather than admire him. Thus, there is historic record of Oriental
and European vessels being wrecked on the Pacific coast of North
America, during the last century and a half, among tribes that were
still almost wholly aboriginal. In no case did the natives make any
attempt to absorb the higher culture of the strangers. Generally
these were enslaved or killed, their property rifled; sometimes the
wreck was set on fire. The greed for immediate gain of the treasures
in sight proved stronger than any dim impulses toward self-
improvement by learning.
As one conservative author has put it, occasional visits of Asiatics
or Pacific islanders to the shores of America would be, from the point
of view of the growth of the vast mass of culture in that continent,