Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View: Being the Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford university junior scientific club on November 17, 1919Keith, Arthur, Sir
History
Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View: Being the Robert Boyle lecture delivered before the Oxford university junior scientific club on November 17, 1919
Keith, Arthur, Sir
Nationalism; Race
Herein we see a repetition, but on a small scale, of the
Saxon colonization of England. The settled communities established by
the Scotch pioneers sheltered and nursed the national spirit they
brought with them. As the fringe of colonists expanded it came to cover
Antrim and Down and made inroads on adjacent counties, overwhelming and
absorbing the tribal organization of the native population. In 1672 Sir
William Petty estimated that there were 100,000 Scots in Ulster. Thus
in the north-east of Ireland there has been established a people which
manifests all the qualities of a new nationality. History can explain to
us how it has come about that the inhabitants of Ireland, all of them
derivatives of the same breed of Europeans, should be divided into two
peoples, each possessed by its own peculiar sense of nationality. The
north is predominantly industrial and Protestant; the south is
predominantly pastoral and Catholic. But these circumstances are not
sufficient to account for a national--almost a racial--antagonism
between the inhabitants of a single small island who have so much to
gain by a sense of unity. To understand national antagonisms we have to
look at the inheritance which modern man has carried with him from his
distant past.
THE NATURE OF TRIBAL INSTINCT
I now enter the third stage of my argument. In the first I cited and
discussed the various forms in which racial and national feelings are
manifested by various peoples abroad; in my second I dealt with the
nature of the various national movements at home. We now set out in
search of the root from which the flower of our complex modern
civilization has sprung. In the world of to-day we see many peoples
exhibiting every phase in the evolution of that organization which
permits mankind to live in massed populations. Fortunately for us there
yet survive, in outlandish parts of the earth, remnants of native races
retaining the primitive organization which guided mankind through that
great hinterland of time lying between the emergence from apedom and the
dawn of the modern world. For the student of sociology the immense
primitive first stage of man's history is by far the more important. In
his _Voyage of the Beagle_, Darwin draws a picture of the Fuegians which
gives us a real insight into the ancient state of social organization.
Spencer and Gillan supply us with complementary pictures representing
the conditions of life among native tribes of Central Australia. These
primitive peoples live on the natural produce of the territory which
they inhabit and claim as their own. Their social organization
represents for us the conditions in which the modern races of mankind
were evolved. It is in such primitive societies that there must have
existed the machinery which differentiated mankind into races and racial
breeds. It is in the long first phase that we must search for the origin
of the social impulses and tendencies which have come down to modern man
by inheritance.[1]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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