Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture (Classic Reprint): A Study in Method

Excerpt from Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science. Its data can not be understood, either in themselves or in their relation to one another, except as the end-points of specific sequences of events reaching back into the remote past. Some of us may be' more interested in the psychological laws of human development that we believe ourselves capable of extracting from the raw material of eth nology and archaeology, than in the establishment of definite historical facts and relationships that would tend to make this material intelligible, but it is not at all clear that the formulation of such laws is any more the business of the anthropologist than of the historian in the customarily narrow sense of the word. If the anthropologist, more often than the historian, has argued from descriptive data to folk psychology, we must hold responsible for this two factors. First, we must take account of the fre quent, indeed typical, lack of direct chronological guides in the study of the culture of primitive peoples, whereby he is led to neglect or undervalue the importance of chronological insight and to seek, as a substitute, the unravelling of general laws oper ating regardless of specific time. In the second place, the cul tures dealt with by the anthropologist exhibit, on the whole, less complexity than those made known to us by documentary evidence, whereby he is led to think of the former as less em cumbered by secondary or untypical developments and better fit to serve as matter for psychological generalization. Some thing may also be credited to the fact that the data of the an thropologist give him a View of a greater diversity of cultures than the historian is accustomed to take in at one glance, whereby the former is provided with a truer perspective, or thinks he is.