Primitive Man as Philosopher by Paul Radin, Ph. D. Research Fellow
of Yale University and sometime Lecturer in Ethnology in Cambridge
University editor of Crashing Thunder, the Autobiography of an
American Indian with a foreword by John Dewcy Professor of
Philosophy in Columbia University New York and London D, Appleton
and Company 1927 COPYRIGHT, 1927, D. APPLETON AND COMPANY PRINTED
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO MY WIFE PREFACE When a modern
historian desires to study the civilization of any people, he
regards it as a necessary preliminary that he divest himself, so
far as possible, of all prejudice and bias. He realizes that
differences between cultures exist, but he does not feel that it is
necessarily a sign of inferiority that a people differs in customs
from his own. There seems, how ever, to be a limit to what an
historian treats as legitimate difference, a limit not always easy
to determine. On the whole it may be said that he very naturally
passes the same judgments that the majority of his fellow
countrymen do. Hence, if some of the differences between admittedly
civil ized peoples often call forth unfavorable judgments or even
provoke outbursts of horror, how much more must we expect this to
be the case where the differences are of so funda mental a nature
as those separating us from people whom we have been accustomed to
call uncivilized. The term uncivilized is a very vague one, and it
is spread over a vast medley of peoples, some of whom have
comparatively simple customs and others extremely com plex ones.
Indeed, there can be said to be but two charac teristics possessed
in common by all these peoples, the absence of a written language
and the fact of originalposses sion of the soil when the various
civilized European and Asiatic nations came into contact with them.
But among all aboriginal races appeared a number of customs which
undoubtedly seemed exceedingly strange to their European and
Asiatic conquerors. Some of these customs they had never heard of
others they recognized as similar to observ vli viii PREFACE ances
and beliefs existing among the more backward mem bers of their own
communities. Yet the judgments civilized peoples have passed on the
aborigines, we may be sure, were not initially based on any calm
evaluation of facts. If the aborigines were regarded as innately
inferior, this was due in part to the tremendous gulf in custom and
belief separating them from the con querors, in part to the
apparent simplicity of their ways, and in no small degree to the
fact that they were unable to offer any effective resistance.
Romance soon threw its distorting screen over the whole primitive
picture. Within one hundred years of the dis covery of America it
had already become an ineradicably established tradition that all
the aborigines encountered by Europeans were simple, untutored
savages from whom little more could be expected than from
uncontrolled children, individuals who were at all times the slaves
of their passions, of which the dominant one was hatred. Much of
this tradi tion, in various forms, disguised and otherwise, has
persisted to the present day. The evolutionary theory, during its
heyday in the iSyos and Sos, still further complicated and
misrepresented the situation, and from the great classic that
created modern ethnology Tylors Primitive Culture, published in
1870 future ethnologists were to imbibe the cardinal andfunda
mentally misleading doctrine that primitive peoples represent an
early stage in the history of the evolution of culture. What was,
perhaps, even more dangerous was the strange and uncritical manner
in which all primitive peoples were lumped together in ethnological
discussion simple Fuegians with the highly advanced Aztecs and
Mayans, Bushmen with the peoples of the Nigerian coast, Australians
with Poly nesians, and so on. PREFACE ix For a number of years
scholars were apparently content with the picture drawn by Tylor
and his successors...
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