Anthropology and America

Abstract

WESTERN with and our the CIVILIZATION frightening primitive. He impulses. HAS represents LONG He HAD both represents A LOVE-HATE our suppressed both RELATIONSHIP our fear desires of with the primitive. He represents both our suppressed desires and our frightening impuls s. He represents both our f ar of want and our freedom from wanting. He represents for us both the crudities and hardships of an uncivilized world and an escape from civilization and its discontents. The word "savage" used naked means cruel, harsh, unrelenting and unlettered; the same word clad in the adjective "noble," has reference to the finest qualities of mankind. Our annual Thanksgiving rite expresses appreciation for the generosity of the very savage with whom we fought bitter wars and from whom we wrested our land. The great, largely unsung anthropologist, George C. Engerrand, who taught for nearly four decades at the University of Texas, used to speak of the pendulum motion from good to bad in the history of our view of primitive man. Such a pulsation inevitably derives from a deep-seated ambivalence. The matter is intellectually and philosophically important because the character of the primitive has been seen as a window to the nature of man. If primitive man, Naturmensch , as the German language so aptly puts it, can tell us what we really arewhether we are Homo economicus or Rousseau's noble savage-then the understanding of primitive behavior becomes a central and necessary element in the formulation of the metaphysical system that will underlie our moral philosophy. As we have been in search of such a system since the Enlightenment, having progressively discarded theological explanations, the issue is incandescent and perduring. Anthropology inevitably is at the center of this issue. In the public mind, anthropology is the study of primitive peoples, dead or alive. While this is not the case (and never has been), it is true that anthropology (1) is the only discipline regularly to study unlettered peoples, and (2) derives its basic insights and orientations from the study of tribal and peasant communities. The anthropologist cannot, therefore, escape the emotional dilemma created by the Western ambivalence toward the savage. The fundamental mandate of anthropology is the study of human nature. Most anthropologists would not agree. Anthropology conscientiously destroyed the old, ethnocentric notions of human nature and turned to situational factorsculture and societyas explanatory elements, leaving the impression, at least, that the infant is a tabula rasa on which anything could be imprinted. Important as these situa-