Levi-Strauss, 1952
It may seem somewhat surprising, in a series of booklets intended
to combat racial prejudice, to speak of the contribu- tions made by
various races of men to world civilization. It vs^ould be a waste of
time to devote so much talent and effort to demonstrating that, in the
present state of scientific knowledge, there is no justification for
asserting that any one race is intellectually superior or inferior to
another, if we were, in the end, indirectly to countenance the concept
of race by seeming to show that the great ethnic groups constituting
human kind as a whole have, as such, made their own peculiar
contributions to the common heritage. Nothing could be further from our
intentions, for such a course of action would simply result in an
inversion of the racist doctrine. To attribute special psychological
charac- teristics to the biological races, with a positive definition,
is as great a departure from scientific truth as to do so with a
negative definition. It must not be forgotten that Gobineau, whose work
was the progenitor of racist theories, regarded "the inequality of the
human races" as qualitative, not quan- titative; in his view, the great
primary races of early man — the white, the yellow and the black —
differed in their special aptitudes rather than in their absolute
value. Degeneration resulted from miscegenation, rather than from the
relative position of individual races in a common scale of values; it
was therefore the fate in store for all mankind, since all mankind,
irrespective of race, was bound to exhibit an increasing intermixture
of blood. The original sin of anthro- pology, however, consists in its
confusion of the idea of race, in the purely biological sense (assuming
that there is any factual basis for the idea, even in this limited
field — which is disputed by modern genetics), with the sociological
and psychological productions of human civilizations. Once he had made
this mistake, Gobineau was inevitably committed to the path leading
from an honest intellectual error to the unintentional justification of
all forms of discrimination and exploitation. When, therefore, in this
paper, we speak of the contribu- tions of different races of men to
civilization, we do not mean that the cultural contributions of Asia or
Europe, Africa or America are in any way distinctive because these
continents are, generally speaking, inhabited by peoples of different
racial stocks. If their contributions are distinctive — and there can
be little doubt that they are — the fact is to be accounted for by
geographical, historical and sociological circumstances, not by special
aptitudes inherent in the anatomical or physiological make-up of the
black, yellow or white man. It seemed to us, however, that the very
effort made in this series of booklets to prove this negative side of
the argument, involved a risk of pushing into the background another
very important aspect of the life of man— the fact that the development
of human life is not everywhere the same but rather takes form in an
extraordinary diversity of societies and civilizations. This
intellectual, aesthetic and sociological diversity is in no way the
outcome of the biological differ- ences, in certain observable
features, between different groups of men; it is simply a parallel
phenomenon in a different sphere. But, at the same time, we must note
two important respects in which there is a sharp distinction. Firstly,
the order of magnitude is different. There are many more human cultures
than human races, since the first are to be counted in thousands and
the second in single units; two cultures developed by men of the same
race may differ as much as, or more than, two cultures associated with
groups of entirely different racial origin. Secondly, in contrast to
the diversity of races, where interest is confined to their historical
origin or their distribution over the face of the world, the diversity
of cultures gives rise to many problems; it may be wondered whether it
is an advantage or a disadvantage for human kind, and there are
naturally many subsidiary questions to be con- sidered under this
general head. Last and most important, the nature of the diversity must
be investigated even at the risk of allowing the racial preju- dices
whose biological foundation has so lately been destroyed to develop
again on new grounds. It would be useless to argue the man in the
street out of attaching an intellectual or moral significance to the
fact of having a black or white skin, straight or frizzy hair, unless
we had an answer to another question which, as experience proves he
will immediately ask: if there are no innate racial aptitudes, how can
we explain the fact that the white man's civilization has made the tre-
mendous advances with which we are all familiar while the civilizations
of the coloured peoples have lagged behind, some of them having come
only half way along the road, and others being still thousands or tens
of thousands of years behind the times? We cannot therefore claim to
have formulated a convincing denial of the inequality of the human
races, so long as we fail to consider the problem of the inequality —
or diversity — of human cultures, which is in fact — however
unjustifiably — closely associated with it in the public mind.
++++++++++++
リンク
文献
その他の情報
Copyleft, CC, Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j, 2018
Do not paste, but [Re]Think our message for all undergraduate students!!!