The mind of primitive man : $b A course of lectures delivered before the Lowell Institute, Boston, Mass., and the National University of Mexico, 1910-1911Boas, Franz
Science
The mind of primitive man : $b A course of lectures delivered before the Lowell Institute, Boston, Mass., and the National University of Mexico, 1910-1911
Boas, Franz
Ethnopsychology; Race
Another group of categories that offer a field of fruitful investigation
are those of object and attribute. The concepts of primitive man make it
quite clear that the classes of ideas which we consider as attributes
are often considered as independent objects. The best-known case of this
kind, one to which I have referred incidentally before, is that of
sickness. While we consider sickness as a condition of an organism, it
is believed by primitive man, and even by many members of our own
society, to be an object which may enter the body, and which may be
removed. This is exemplified by the numerous cases in which a disease is
extracted from the body by sucking or by other processes, in the belief
that it may be thrown into people, or that it may be enclosed in wood in
order to prevent its return. Other qualities are treated in the same
way. Thus the conditions of hunger, exhaustion, and similar bodily
feelings, are considered by certain primitive tribes as independent
objects which affect the body. Even life is believed to be a material
object that may become separated from the body. The luminosity of the
sun is considered as an object that the Sun himself may put on or lay
aside.
I have indicated before that the concept of anthropomorphism seems to be
one of the important categories underlying primitive thought. It would
seem that the power of motion of the self, and the power of motion of an
object, have led to the inclusion of man and movable objects in the same
category, with the consequent imputation of human qualities to the
moving objective world.
While in many cases we can see with a fair degree of clearness the
fundamental concepts underlying these categories, in other cases these
are not by any means clear. Thus the concept of incest groups—those
groups in which intermarriage is strictly forbidden—is omnipresent; but
no satisfactory explanation has so far been given for the tendency to
combine certain degrees of blood-relationship under this viewpoint.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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