Savage Beauties
Primitive Peoples Today. By Edward Weyer. (Hamish Hamilton, 63s.)
EVERY academic discipline must have a subject matter and 'The Study of Primitive Man' is a decent compromise for a subject which has sometimes been more libellously defined as 'The Study of Man (embracing Woman).' The public knows what it means. Anthropologists study Australian aborigines but not Australians, Africans but not South Africans, American Indians but not Americans, Black men but not White. This discrimination is a by-product of the social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century, which equated anthropology with human palm- ontology. Just as, in botany and zoology, fossils can be used to display the steady progress of evolution from primitive simplicity to complex specialisation, so also, it was supposed, anthro- pology can display the savages of today as fossil- ised representatives of our primeval ancestors.
The American author of this lovely picture book holds this view quite explicitly. He claims that anthropologists study aborigines because 'they might provide a mirror of the past'; primi- tive peoples are 'tribal groups living close to nature and showing definite roots in the prehis- toric past'; 'Eskimo culture gives us our best opportunity to observe what life was like in the Ice Age'; 'the Arunta are as perfect an example of Stone Age people as we have'; even the Lapps are 'a remnant race, reminiscent of the Palaeo- lithic era.'
There are very few contemporary British an- thropologists who would accept this kind of definition of their subject-matter, which must sug- gest to many people the cartoonists' image of an ape-like caveman brandishing a spiked club and
dragging his captured wife behind him by the hair. And indeed, despite Dr. Weyer's formal 11.'" pudiation of the notion that Primitive People are 'of low intellect, crude habits and brutish inv pulses,' he seems to go out of his way to refer t° human sacrifices, ceremonial cannibalism, sexual promiscuity, genital mutilation, and other per versions of conventional American morality. His blurb-writer makes it perfectly clear that it i5 sensationalism of this kind which is supposed !° sell the book.
Even beastly savages can be beautiful, and Or' Weyer's photographers have done a splendid job' but here again there are regrettable implica. tions. Most of the pictures exploit the fact this dark skins and bright colours show up well al tropical sunlight, with the result that, if it was0.1 for the Lapps and the Hairy Ainus, one would suppose that the only general characteristic 01 Primitive People is their state of approximate nudity. The general effect is a kind of Folk's Bergere view of anthropology. Doubtless Pr' Weyer's specimens are all very proper subjects for anthropological investigation, but this is not because of their clothes or the lack of them.An equally exotic collection of semi-naked bodi°,5 and curious garments might have been recorded from the beaches of St. Tropez—and heaven for- bid that we should rate Miss Brigitte Bardot as in any sense a primitive.
In Dr. Weyer's view, literacy is the critical fay" for which distinguishes primitive . from civilised: man, but it seems to me to be more a question bulldozers and bathtaps. In this book, Primitil People are people without gadgets, 'the naked and
almost possessionless Australian, still hurling his spear with a throwing stick invented in the palmo- lithic period.' But the variety of such peoples is rather limited, and if technology is the yardstick, it must be a matter of degree. Dr. Weyer is not quite sure where to draw the line. The Incas with 'their highly developed arts and elaborate govern- mental organisation' are not to be rated among the Primitives, but since bathing belles of Bali have to be got into the book somehow, we find that the Balinese rice terraces 'represent the most ambitious agricultural projects carried out by People lacking engineering science.' This seems a thin excuse. What is 'engineering science' and when did it begin? What price the Pyramids and the Parthenon? The primitive product of a pre- industrial society'? Yes, true enough.
It is not merely a white man's prejudice which inclines us to make technical apparatus the test of civilised virtue. The industrial and scientific revolutions of the past two centuries have, in a genuine sense, set a great gulf between our own civilisation and that of our predecessors and of our less sophisticated neighbours. But this gulf is not of the kind implied by Dr. Weyer's use of the word 'Primitive.' There is nothing in the least primwval about the 'technically underdeveloped' societies of the present day. In terms of scientific gadgetry our own Elizabethan ancestors were quite as far removed from us as are the contem- porary Balinese.
If it be true, as Dr. Weyer's title implies, that the population of our present world can usefully be placed in two great categories, the Civilised and the Primitive, then the distinction must lie between people like ourselves who are dependent on the products of large-scale industry and the intricacies of international commerce and those others who still have the economic orientation of a Peasant farmer in that they expect to satisfy the great bulk of their daily needs from the direct Product of their own labour. The difference be- tween these two types of economic system is very fundamental, but we surely need not conclude that all the simpler forms of order are mere fos- silised anachronisms. It is true that anthropolo- gists concentrate their main attention on societies of this latter, self-sufficient type, but they do lo not on account of any supposed antiquity or per- versity of custom, but simply because any varia- tions in modes of social or economic organisation are interesting phenomena in themselves. The an- thropologist is interested in possible ways of ex- isting Dr• Weyer refers to stages in the development °.,f Culture. There have likewise been stages in the development of anthropology, and on this tu.asis Dr. Weyer himself is something of a Primi- tive, When he describes a tribal people he simply lists a miscellaneous collection of odd customs. 'te Jivaro wear lip plugs, shrink heads. indulge i u ritual vomiting, use poisoned darts, initiate d 4s. practise the levirate. The emphasis is en- tirely upon the bizarre and the exotic; there is no attempt whatsoever to provide us with an all- theund Picture of the society or to indicate how ec Peoples concerned maintain themselves ;n °Inie existence.
more recent breed of anthropologists (those different as Functionalists) pursue their calling in a way. They are concerned in the first .pace to know how a particular society can man- age to exist at all. What is the process of its sub- sistence? What is the technique of maintaining taw and order'? What kinds of continuing institu- tion permit culture to be transmitted from genera- tion to generation? These are the problems which really interest us. It might be that the weird cus- toms which Dr. Weyer writes about are inLerest- ing, they may even be important, but it is not the anthropologist's proper function to evoke gasps of astonishment. His real task is to try to under- stand how it is that behaviour which seems strange to us can appear common sense to the performer. And that kind of understanding can only be achieved by placing oddities of custom firmly in the context of more mundane affairs. A description of the English which concerned itself exclusively with football at Wembley and sex-life in Hyde Park could scarcely be regarded as pro- viding a balanced picture of our whole society.,
The publishers, the author and a multitude of photographic contributors can be congratulated on producing a splendid piece of visual entertain- ment, but this should not be mistaken for an in- troduction to modern anthropology. Incidentally. the haywire pagination and the lack of biblio- graphy would drive any serious reader crazy in
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