Transcription
I suppose that just about everyone is fascinated with the study of exotic peoples and reading about them, but how do you feel the anthropologists can apply all of this varied information to the understanding of, say, our own civilization?
What we have to do is to take each one of these societies as a kind of a laboratory in which we study some of the possibilities of human nature and then come back and say, "Human beings could do this that we thought they couldn't do." And we have to re-examine our own culture-bound, ethnocentric notions of how how people can learn and how they can live and what kind of people they can be. And then re-examining our own notions, widening them so that we have a far greater sense of what people might do, could do, then we can go ahead and make changes that are constant with our own society and with our own ideals.
Now, you mentioned about people sometimes being culture-bound, such as believing that their own society is the best, has the best ideology and way of life and all. How do you, how do you cope with that sort of problem, particularly with Americans who feel that, very often feel that they have the best society in the whole world?
Yes, of course, Americans are particularly likely to to have this point of view because we're made up of people who left other countries because they thought America was going to be better. And when they got here, were pretty busy showing their cousins they left behind how much better it was. So that we gradually build up a picture of the best of all possible worlds. And we've been extraordinarily fortunate too, because we had this great empty continent with vast resources on which we could build new ways of life, unfettered by the past. But of course, in doing it, we've ended up with this pretty narrow notion.
So that one of the most useful things that anthropology can do, especially for Americans, and there's some other countries that need quite a lot of it too, uh, Great Britain, the Scots, Scandinavian countries, all of them. They're fortunate countries that have fared very well in recent history and tend to feel that they have the best solutions in the world. They can all profit by a knowledge of the contrast between themselves and other societies and realizing that their culture is comparatively speaking, very recent, very special, and only one version of the way in which human beings can do things.
This brings us back again to the concept of culture-boundness. Say, for example, the kind of misconceptions that can arise when we apply our concept or idea of what the marriage pattern for society should be, such as in our society, it's monogamy, to a group who allow promiscuous sexual relationships. And then we say that they are bad, while we are right. I know this, this has several variations. The notion that savages, of course, do things differently from the way we do. The notion that we're superior, monogamy's superior, we're superior, and therefore the people that we put on a lower scale couldn't possibly behave the way we do.
And then a lot of odd beliefs in the 19th century about evolution, you see, that put us at the top of the scale. So whatever we were had to be farthest away from what the most primitive man was. So they invented something called group marriage, which we've never found anywhere. And then you went from group marriage to mother right, nobody knew who the father was. And then finally up to polygamy, and then to monogamy.
This flower of civilization that we have now, this is mainly, we think today, a myth that monogamy is the fundamental form of pair relations of in the human species. Takes a lot of money to have polygamy. And this is just a way of looking after widows. Uh, polygamy has never been very widespread for the whole of the population. You can have a king with a thousand wives, or you can have a chief with 200 wives. You can have the two or three strongest men in the village that maybe have six or seven wives. But the basic form of marriage right around the world has always been monogamy.
And some people, of course, have the kind of monogamy that you can't remarry again, especially widows. Most sexual morality, of course, is based on what you make women do, not on what you make men do. And the more uncomfortable we make the women, the more moral we feel we are. Now, uh, we have today what can be technically called brittle or serial monogamy, because the minute you permit divorce, of course, you people may all be monogamous at any one moment, but they're not married to the same person. And today, except for those religious groups that don't permit remarriage, uh, we are moving towards something that is a good deal like a good many very primitive people, a fair degree of freedom of choice and a fair degree of freedom of divorce if a particular marriage doesn't work out.