Yet it would seem that the diversity of cultures has seldom been recognized by men for what it is — a natural phenomenon resulting from the direct or indirect contacts between socie- ties; men have tended rather to regard diversity as something abnormal or outrageous; advances in our knowledge of these matters served less to destroy this illusion and replace it by a more accurate picture than to make us accept it or accommo- date ourselves to it. The attitude of longest standing which no doubt has a firm psychological foundation, as it tends to reappear in each one of us when we are caught unawares, is to reject out of hand the cultural institutions — ethical, religious, social or aesthetic which are furthest removed from those with which we inden- tify ourselves. "Barbarous habits", "not what we do", "ought not to be allowed", etc. are all crude reactions indicative of the same instinctive antipathy, the same repugnance for ways of life, thought or belief to which we are unaccustomed. The ancient world thus lumped together everything not covered by Greek (and later the Greco-Roman) culture under the heading of "barbarian": Western civilization later used the term "savage" in the same sense. Underlying both these epi- thets is the same sort of attitude. The word "barbarian" is probably connected etymologically with the inarticulate confu- sion of birdsong, in contra-distinction to the significant sounds of human speech, while "savage" — "of the woods" — also conjures up a brutish way of life as opposed to human civilization. In both cases, there is a refusal even to admit the fact of cultural diversity; instead, anything which does not conform to the standard of the society in which the individual lives is denied the name of culture and relegated to the realm of nature. There is no need to dwell on this naive attitude, which is nevertheless deeply rooted in most men, since this booklet — and all those in the same series — in fact refutes it. It will be enough, in this context, to note that a rather interesting para- dox lies behind it. This attitude of mind, which excludes 11 "savages" (or any people one may choose to regard as savages) from human kind, is precisely the attitude most strikingly characteristic of those same savages. We knov^, in fact, that «the concept of humanity as covering all forms of the human species, irrespective of race or civilization, came into being very late in history and is by no means widespread. Even where it seems strongest, there is no certainty — as recent history proves — that it is safe from the dangers of misunder- standing or retrogression. So far as great sections of the human species have been concerned, however, and for tens of thousands of years, there seems to have been no hint of any such idea. Humanity is confined to the borders of the tribe, the linguistic group, or even, in some instances, to the Nillage, so that many so-called primitive peoples describe themselves as "the men" (or sometimes — though hardly more discreetly — as "the good", "the excellent", "the well- achieved"), thus implying that the other tribes, groups or villages have no part in the human virtues or even in human nature, but that their members are, at best, "bad", "wicked", "ground-monkeys", or "lousy eggs". They often go further and rob the outsider of even this modicum of actuality, by referring to him as a "ghost" or an "apparition". In this way, curious situations arise in which two parties at issue present tragic reflexion of one another's attitude. In the GreaterH Antilles, a few years after the discovery of America, while the 1 Spaniards were sending out Commissions of investigation to discover whether or not the natives had a soul, the latter spent their time drowning white prisoners in order to ascertain, by long observation, whether or not their bodies Avould decompose. ■^ This strange and tragic anecdote is a good illustration of the paradox inherent in cultural relativism (which we shall find again elsewhere in other forms); the more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most "savage" or "barbarous" of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own character- istic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man N\ho believes in barbarism. Admittedly the great philosophic and religious systems which humanity has evolved — Buddhism, Christianity or Islam, the Stoic, Kantian of Marxist doctrines — have con- stantly condemned this aberration. But the simple statement 12 that all men are iialurally equal and should be hound together in brotlierhood, irrespective of race or culture, is not very satisfactory to the intellect, for it overlooks a factual diversity which we cannot help but see; and we are not entitled, either in theory or in practice, to behave as if there were no such diversity, simply because we say that it does not affect the essence of the question. The preamble to Unesco's second Statement on the race problem very rightly observes that the thing which convinces the man in the street that there are separate races is "the immediate evidence of his senses when he sees an African, a European, an Asiatic and an Ame- rican Indian together". Likewise, the strength and the weakness of the great decla- rations of human rights has always been that, in proclaiming an ideal, they too often forget that man grows to man's estate surrounded, not by humanity in the abstract, but by a traditional culture, where even the most revolutionary changes leave whole sectors quite unaltered. Such declarations can themselves be accounted for by the situation existing at a particular moment in time and in particular space. Faced with the two temptations of condemning things which are offensive to him emotionally or of denying differences which are beyond his intellectual grasp, modern man has launched out on countless lines of philosophical and sociological spe- culation in a vain attempt to achieve a compromise between these two contradictory poles, and to account for the diversity of cultures while seeking, at the same time, to eradicate what still shocks and offends him in that diversity. But however much these lines of speculation may differ, and however strange some of them may be, they all, in point of fact, come back to a single formula, which might probably best be described by the expression false evolutionism. In what does this consist.^ It is really an attempt to wipe out the diversity of cultures while pretending to accord it full recog- nition. If the various conditions in which human societies are found, both in the past and in far distant lands, are treated as phases or stages in a single line of development, starting from the same point and leading to the same end, it seems clear that the diversity is merely apparent. Humanity is claimed to be one and the same everywhere, but this unity and identity can be achieved only gradually; the variety of cultures we find in the world illustrates the several stages in a process which conceals the ultimate reality or delays our recognition of it. 13 This may seem an over-simplification in view of the enormous achievements of Darwinism. But Darwinism is in no way implicated here, for the doctrine of biological evolu- tion, and the pseudo-evolutionism we have in mind, are two very different things. The first was developed as a great working hypothesis, based on observations in which there was very little need for interpretation. The various types in the genealogy of the horse, for instance, can be arranged in an evolutive series for two reasons: firstly, a horse can only be sired by a horse; and secondly, skeletons varying gradually from the most recent to the most ancient forms are found at different levels in the earth, representing earlier and earlier periods of history as we dig deeper. It is thus highly probable that Hipparion was the real ancestor of Equus caballus. The same reasoning is probably applicable to the human species and the different races constituting it. When, however, we turn from biology to culture, things become far more compli- cated. We may find material objects in the soil, and note that the form or manufacture of a certain type of object varies progressively according to the depth of the geological strata. But an axe does not give birth to an axe in the physical sense that an animal gives birth to an animal. Therefore, to say that an axe has developed out of another axe is to speak metaphorically and with a rough approximation to truth, but without the scientific exactitude which a similar expression has in biological parlance. What is true of material objects whose physical presence in the earth can be related to deter- minable periods, is even more true of institutions, beliefs and customs, whose past history is generally a closed book to us. The idea of biological evolution is a hypothesis with one of the highest coefficients of probability to be found in any of the natural sciences, whilst the concept of social or cultural evolution offers at best a tempting, but suspiciously convenient method of presenting facts. Incidentally, this difference, which is too often overlooked, between true and false evolutionism can be explained by the dates of their development. The doctrine of biological evolu- tion admittedly gave sociological evolutionism a decided fillip but the latter actually preceded the former. Without going back to the views which Pascal took over from antiquity, and looking upon humanity as a living being passing through the successive stages of childhood, adolescence and maturity, we may see in the eighteenth century the elaboration of all the basic images which were later to be bandied about — Vico's 14 "spirals", and his "three ages" foreshadowing Comte's "three states", and Condorcet's "stairway". Spencer and Tylor, the two founders of social evolutionism, worked out and published their doctrine before the appearance of the Origin of Species, or without having read that work. Prior in date to the scientific theory of biological evolution, social evolutionism is thus too often merely a pseudo-scientific mask for an old philosophical problem, which there is no certainty of our ever solving by observation and inductive reasoning. 15

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リンク

• レヴィ＝ストロー ス『人種と歴史』について
  

文献

• Race and history / by Claude Lévi-Strauss, [Paris] : Unesco , c1958 [1952]. - (Race question in modern science)
  

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