Primitive culture

Primitive culture, in the lexicon of early anthropologists, any of numerous societies characterized by features that may include lack of a written language, relative isolation, small population, relatively simple social institutions and technology, and a generally slow rate of sociocultural change. In some of these cultures history and beliefs are passed on through an oral tradition and may be the province of a person or group especially trained for the purpose.

Culture is discussed in a number of other articles. For an overview of the concept of human culture, see culture; urban culture. For a discussion of prehistoric societies, see Anatolia: Ancient Anatolia; Middle East, ancient; Pacific Islands, history of: Prehistoric times and the proliferation of culture; Stone Age; the history sections of various other regional articles. For a cross-cultural discussion of kinship systems, the basic means of social organization in most nonindustrial societies, use such keywords as family; kinship; and so on. For treatment of religious systems, institutions, and practices associated with nonliterate cultures worldwide, see nature worship; pantheism; polytheism; shamanism; totemism. For a discussion of nonindustrial technology, see agriculture, history of; technology, history of; hand tool. For an account of economic systems characteristic of nonliterate societies, see economic system: Historical development of economic systems.

So great are the variations in ways of life, past and present, that comparisons among them are difficult. Any simple classification of human societies and cultures can only be viewed as arbitrary. From a modern urban point of view, nevertheless, there is the obvious distinction between the primitive and the civilized: between simple and complex societies; between tiny and huge social agglomerations; between scattered and dense populations; and, above all, between prestate societies and societies that have developed states. In general, civilization involves the rise of legal institutions and the acquisition of a legal monopoly of force by a government. Those developments made possible the cities and empires of classical times and the growth of dense populations. Thus “civilized” is nearly synonymous with “urban.”

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The varieties of nonurban, or primitive, societies may be further classified. One way is by the methods they use to get food. Those who hunt and gather behave quite differently, as societies, from herdsmen and mounted predator-warriors, the pastoralists, who in turn live quite differently from the various kinds of agriculturalists. These distinctions are not sharp, for of course there are societies that combine foraging with some agriculture, others, some agriculture and some herding; and, in a few cases, a class of herders may live in the same society with a class or caste of agriculturalists. A continuum of societies may be constructed, ranging from tiny, simple bands of hunter-gatherers in poor environments to large, dense populations of irrigation agriculturalists—that is, from the entirely nomadic to the fully sedentary. The degree to which societies approach the sedentary deserves prominence in any classification since sedentary ways are accompanied by many other cultural traits and institutions.

Nomadic societies

Throughout 99 percent of the time that Homo sapiens has been on Earth, or until about 8,000 years ago, all peoples were foragers of wild food. There were great differences among them; some specialized in hunting big game, fishing, and shellfish gathering, while others were almost completely dependent on the gathering of wild plants. Broadly speaking, however, they probably shared many features of social and political organization, as well as of religions and other ideologies (in form though not in specific content). The hunting-gathering societies declined with the growth of agricultural societies, which either drove them from their territories or assimilated or converted them.

The later rise of the nation-states, especially after the Industrial Revolution in Europe, resulted in the near extermination of hunting-gathering societies. Today, the remaining ones are confined to desert, mountain, jungle, or Arctic wastelands. Some have been studied and described by anthropologists: the central and northern Australians, the Bushmen of the Kalahari in southern Africa, the Pygmies of the central African forests, the Pygmies of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, the Ona and Yahgan Indians of southern South America, the “Digger” Indians of Nevada, the Indians of the northern Canadian forests, and the Canadian, Alaskan, and Greenland Eskimos.

All of these peoples inhabit areas representing almost every extreme in climate and environment, but they have one thing in common: their marginality to, or relative isolation from, modern economic systems. Their techniques and forms of acquiring food vary greatly. The Eskimos, for example, are entirely dependent on hunting and fishing; the African San (Bushmen), the Australian Aborigines, and the Nevada Indians are chiefly dependent on the gathering of seeds, nuts, and tubers.

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The significance of nomadism to the student of primitive cultures may be suggested by a comparison of the Ona and Yámana (Yahgan) of Tierra del Fuego. The Ona inhabit the interior forests and depend heavily on hunting guanaco (a small New World camel). The Yámana are canoe-using fishermen and shellfish gatherers. Yet, despite their utterly different ecological adaptation, the two Indian societies have cultures that are so similar that anthropologists conventionally group them with the neighbouring Chono and Alakaluf of Chile into one “Fuegian culture area.” They are all nomadic, though the Ona are “foot Indians” and the others are “canoe Indians”; they are all relatively sparsely scattered over the landscape and poor in material culture, and they have similar social, political, ceremonial, and ideological customs and institutions.

All of the nomads so far mentioned share important general characteristics. The first and most obvious is that their nomadism severely restricts the amount of their “baggage,” or material culture. Bows and arrows (except in Australia, where the unique boomerang is used instead) and perhaps a simple spear javelin, or in some areas throwing sticks or clubs, are the usual hunting and fighting weapons. In warmer zones shelter is a simple lean-to or small beehive hut of sticks, twigs, and leaves. In Arctic zones there are the caribou-skin tent and the famous Eskimo igloo—or, in more permanent or revisited places, the stone hut.

Camps are small and impermanent. The nuclear family likes to camp near related families when possible. Usually this group forms the patrilineally extended family consisting of brothers with their own nuclear families and perhaps a few dependent elders. But the size of the camp depends on the season: in times of easily gathered plant food, large groups may come together for ceremonies such as puberty rites. At other times, the constituent families may scatter widely because food and water are scarce. Patrilineally related men and their families, scattered or not, commonly regard themselves as a group with rights over a particular territory and may be distinguished from neighbours on a territorial basis as well. Marriages are often arranged among territorial groups so that contiguous groups tend to be related, or at least certain members of different groups are related. But this is the only organizing principle that extends beyond the territorial band. Each band may be thought of as part of a larger society composed of distant as well as close relatives—a “tribe” in one of the original meanings of the word.

The social organization looks as though it had been built up from within, so to speak. Family-like statuses and roles, alliances by marriage, and systems of “social distance” based on family relationships are the bones and connective tissues of the society. These are all ingredients of the family itself, however extended or metaphorically construed; it is as though these societies were simply the result of the growth of individual families. But this is only appearance; such societies also grow by accretion. But inasmuch as alliances and the compounding of different groups normally are brought about by arranged marriages, the familistic appearance of the whole is therefore maintained.

Almost all status positions rest upon the same criteria of age, sex, and kinship distance. The only achieved status is that of the magical curer, the shaman. Again, with the exception of the shaman, the only division of labour in these societies is on the basis of age and sex—just as in the individual nuclear family unit. Among adults, the hunting of big game is confined to men, whereas the gathering of vegetable foods or small animals, birds’ eggs, and so on are women’s tasks. This division of labour seems obviously related to men’s relative ability to range far from camp, women being too burdened with the tasks of motherhood to track animals wherever they may lead. But the separation of tasks is usually more rigid and confining than the physical and circumstantial differences between men and women dictate, since these would vary among individuals and from society to society—and for that matter, from day to day. Domestic tasks are strictly defined as female and are undertaken only by women even when they seem exceptionally taxing, as attest the following remarks by Lewis Garrard, who traveled with a Cheyenne Indian camp in 1846:

After a ride of two hours, we stopped, and the chiefs, fastening their horses, collected in circles, to smoke the pipe and talk, letting their squaws unpack the animals, pitch the lodges, build fires, arrange the robes, and when all was ready, these “lords of creation” dispersed to their several homes, to wait until their patient and enduring spouses prepared some food. I was provoked, nay, angry, to see the lazy, overgrown men, do nothing to help their wives; and, when the young women pulled off their bracelets and finery, to chop wood, the cup of my wrath was full to overflowing, and, in a fit of honest indignation, I pronounced them ungallant, and indeed savage in the true sense of the word.

(Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail; University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Okla., 1966)

Status within the family is based on age, sex, relationships by blood, or marriageability. Males are regarded as superior to women in most activities; the elders are respected as repositories of both secular and spiritual wisdom; and people, such as cousins who may be of the same genealogical distance, are frequently divided into “marriageable” and “nonmarriageable” groups, with consequent differences in their interpersonal behaviour. But in all other respects hunting-gathering societies are profoundly egalitarian, especially in intergroup relations.

Outside the family there is no system of coercive authority. Some persons may, by their wisdom, physical ability, and so on, rise to positions of leadership in some particular endeavour, such as a raiding party or a hunt. But these are temporary and variable positions, not posts or offices within a hierarchical structure. Social order is maintained by emphasizing correctness in conduct—etiquette—and ritual and ceremony. Ceremonies bring together the scattered members of the society to celebrate birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Such ceremonies have the effect of minimizing social dangers (or the perception of them) and also of adjusting persons to each other under controlled emotional conditions. (It may very well be true that “the family that prays together, stays together.”)

The passage rites at birth, marriage, and death are universal in human society, though puberty celebrations are less common in the modern world, except for such survivals as the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. In most hunting-gathering societies, however, male puberty rituals take up more social time and engage more people than do the other three ritual occasions. They may last as long as a month, food supplies permitting. Almost universally, puberty rites include a period of instruction in adult responsibilities, rituals dramatizing the removal of boys from the mothers’ care and signalizing the changed social relations between boys and girls of the same generation, and physical ordeals, including scarification or some other mark that will permanently demonstrate the successful passage to manhood.