The Primitive World and Its Transformations 0801490286, 9780801490286

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Redfield* Robert The pr5.mitive world and its transformations

GREAT SEAL BOOKS lili [A Division

of Cornell University Press

The Primitiue World and Its Transformations Ty Kobert Kedfield

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from The Arcadia Fund

https://archive.org/details/primitiveworldit00redf_1

The Primitive World and Its Transformations

The Primitive World and Its Transformations

By

ROBERT REDFIELD ///

GREAT SEAL BOOKS A Division of Cornell University Press ITHACA, NEW YORK

Copyright 1953 by Cornell University CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 1953 Reissued 1957 as a Great Seal Book Second printing 1958 Third printing 1959

/67

CWp. f

LIBRARY 739435 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Acknowledgments

I THANK the Committee on University Lectures at Cornell University for the opportunity to give the lectures which became this book and for permission to repeat certain parts of them at the University of Paris; Claude Tardits and Eric de Dampierre for suggestions as to the thought given in the course of translating those parts into French; Robert J. Rraidwood and Linda S. Braidwood for reading the manu¬ script and offering excellent advice; my daughter, Lisa Peattie, for ideas and facts provided in the course of de¬ veloping Chapters IV and VI; Charles Leslie for much care¬ ful help in finding sources in the library and making good use of them; and Zelda Leslie for patient and intelligent work in preparing the manuscript for the publisher. Part of the substance of Chapter IV has been published in “The Primitive World View,” Proceedings of the Amer¬ ican Philosophical Society, XCVI (February, 1952).

v

Contents

Introduction I II

ix

Human Society before the Urban Revolution

1

Later Histories of the Folk Societies

26

III

Civilization and the Moral Order

54

IV

Primitive World View and Civilization

84

V VI

“Man Makes Himself”

111

The Transformation of Ethical Judgment

139

Notes

166

Index

181

“The new mentality is more important even than the new science and the new technology.” —A. N.

Whitehead

Introduction

IN THESE pages I consider certain of the changes that were brought about in mankind by the advent of civiliza¬ tion. After the rise of cities men became something different from what they had been before. History is here conceived as the story of a single career, that of the human race. The emphasized event in that career, the turning point in the changes which mankind has undergone, is the passage from precivilized to civilized life. In the wide view here to be taken, the several thousands of years during which the first cities rose in half a dozen places become a single happening, the coming of civilization. I seek to understand something of what this change meant generally, for all of us, for humanity as if humanity were one man slowly changing throughout many millenniums before civilization and then coming of age in a transition profoundly effective and relatively abrupt. In this search I have been guided by a choice of themes and the influence of certain writers. In several notable books, Professor V. Gordon Childe 1 has reviewed the com¬ ing of civilization, especially in the Old World, and has told us that there have been times when changes, especially in technology, have been relatively rapid and far-reaching in their results. Such changes he calls “revolutions.” I have IX

INTRODUCTION

adopted his use of that word, but with hesitation; I have substituted, in several contexts, the word “transformation.” For the abruptness of the changes in which Childe is in¬ terested is in some doubt, and the abruptness of the changes in which I am interested I do not even assert. Childe’s three great revolutions—the food-producing, the urban, and the industrial—are revolutions primarily or largely in technol¬ ogy. That cities rose rapidly in proportion to the time it took for man to reach the period of city building is clear. But not all archaeologists would recognize two marked accelerations in the upward curve of technological develop¬ ment in the Old World. Reviewing the archaeological rec¬ ord in Iraq, Robert Braidwood 2 sees but one important acceleration in the development of technology. He tells us that after the coming of agriculture and animal husbandry, the manner of life changed from that of roving collectors of wild foods to that of settled farmers, and that these farmers began to add the technological characteristics of civilization—town life, markets, organized religion, and so forth—a little at a time, so that the ancient Middle Eastern village dweller became a town dweller and then a city man in a course of development that showed its energy before cities were built and continued in a smooth acceleration into full civilization. For the interests expressed in these pages, it is not neces¬ sary to decide between a single or a double technological revolution in prehistoric times. I have turned to the pos¬ sibility that we might recognize in the changing human career important and far-reaching changes in the habits of men’s minds. Here I have been one of the many influenced by the writings of A. N. Whitehead; his treatment of some great historic changes in the ways men have come to use

x

INTRODUCTION

their minds has contributed to the organization of my thought its idealistic, rather than materialist, emphasis. The third theme or point of view that will soon become apparent is derived from my experience as a student of the primitive and peasant peoples. These pages recount some episodes in the story of civilization as it is told from the bottom up, so to speak. I shall begin with the primitive peoples and write about them as they became or are be¬ coming something else. The people with written histories are what the preliterate peoples have become. I look for¬ ward from precivilized life to civilization. The peoples who existed before the rise of the first cities can be conveniently referred to as the precivilized peoples. For the peoples that the ethnologist studies today, there is no term free from criticism. Even the neutral “preliterate” will not quite do, for there are some peoples who have had for a long time some use of reading and writing and yet show none of the consequences of literacy which we find in civilized societies. I shall use “primitive” and “preliterate” interchangeably. I shall also use the phrase “folk society.” I shall say that the societies that existed before the rise of cities “were folk societies,” and I shall say that the societies that are found today unaffected by the great civilizations “are folk societies.” 3 By this I shall simply mean that, as compared with civilized societies, the precivilized societies did, and the present-day primitive societies do, exhibit cer¬ tain characteristics—and the same characteristics—that dis¬ tinguish them from civilized societies. The characteristics will soon be named: isolation, homogeneity, and so forth. The distinctions are in degree, but they are important. The constructed type of a fictitious or ideal folk society which has been set forth in other writings4 is in these pages no xi

INTRODUCTION

more than a provider of suggestions for characterizing real societies seen by the ethnologist or encountered more re¬ motely by the archaeologist. In the first chapter I shall try to describe the conditions of human living that must have prevailed before civiliza¬ tion began. The second chapter will be a sketchy account of what happened to the precivilized and primitive societies after civilization had come into existence. The third chapter rests upon a distinction which I shall make in general terms in the first chapter, the distinction between the technical order and the moral order. In the third chapter something will be said about the disintegration of the local moral or¬ ders that takes place in civilization; I shall also refer to the rise, with civilization, of more inclusive moral orders. This seems to me a very important change in human affairs. With this great change I associate what could be distin¬ guished as a second transformation—the rise of ideas as forces in history, influencing the moral order directly. This theme belongs to the historians of ideas; I do not venture to discuss it. In the fourth chapter I shall be concerned with the transformation of a primitive world view wherein man comes at last to confront a universe empty of personality and indifferent to men. Here too I shall contribute little from my own stock of knowledge, but state, perhaps in an enlarged context, something which scholars have studied in detail. The fifth chapter will take up the appearance and development of man’s assumed competence to con¬ struct himself and society by deliberate design. We might here speak of the transformation in self-management. The last chapter deals with one aspect of this change whereby man comes to assume responsibility for fashioning his world; it will be concerned with the effect of civilization in altering the standards by which man judges that human xii

INTRODUCTION

conduct is good or bad. The last chapter strays a little from the course laid down by the others, for while the first five take for their facts what anthropologists (and others) have told me of what other people did or do, the materials which allow me in the last chapter to discuss the transformation of ethical judgment are the things that anthropologists do, as anthropologists.

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