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The idea of progress

 Levi-Strauss, 1952

池田光穂

We must first consider the cultures in the second category we defined above: the historical predecessors of the "observer's" culture. The situation here is far more complicated than in the cases we have considered earlier. For in this case the hypothesis of evolution, which appears so tenuous and doubt- ful as a means of classifying contemporary societies occupying different areas in space, seems hard to refute, and would jindeed appear to be directly borne out by the facts. We know, from the concordant evidence of archaeology, pre- historic study and palaeontology, that the area now known as Europe was first inhabited by various species of the genus Homo, who used rough chipped flint implements; that these first cultures were succeeded by others in which stone was first more skilfully fashioned by chipping, and later ground and polished, while the working of bone and ivory was also perfected; that pottery, weaving, agriculture and stock rearing then came in, associated with a developing use of metals, the stages of which can also be distinguished. These successive forms therefore appear to represent evolution and progress; some are superior and others inferior. But, if all this is true, it is surely inevitable that the distinctions thus made must affect our attitude towards contemporary forms of culture exhibiting similar variations. The conclusions we reached above are thus in danger of being compromised by this new line of reasoning. The progress which humanity has made since its earliest days is so clear and so striking that an attempt to question it could be no more than an exercise of rhetoric. And yet, it is not as easy as it seems to arrange mankind's achievements in a regular and continuous series. About 50 years ago, scholars had a delightfully simple scheme to represent man's advance: the old stone age, the new stone age, the copper, bronze and iron ages. But in this, everything was over-simplified. We now suspect that stone was sometimes worked simultaneously by the chipping and polishing methods; when the latter replaced the former, it did not simply represent a natural 20 technical advance from the previous stage, but also an attempt to copy, in stone, the metal arms and tools possessed by other civilizations, more "advanced" but actually contemporary with their imitators.

On the other hand, pollery-making, which used to be regarded as a distinctive feature of the so-called "polished stone age", was associated with the chipping pro- cess of fashioning stone in certain parts of northern Europe. To go no further than the period when chipped-stone implements were manufactured, known as the palaeolithic age, it was thought only a few years ago that the variants of this method — characteristic of the "core-tool", "flake-tool" and "blade-tool" industries — represented a historical pro- gression in three stages, known respectively as lower palaeoli- thic, middle palaeolithic and upper palaeolithic. It is now recognized that these three variants were all found together, representing not stages in a single advance, but aspects or, to use the technical term, "facies" of a technique which may not have been static but whose changes and variations were extremely complex. In fact, the Levallois culture which we have already mentioned, and which reached its peak between the 20th and 70th millenary B.C., attained to a perfection in the art of chipping stone which was scarcely equalled until the end of the neolithic period, 245,000 to 65,000 years later, and which we would find it extremely difficult to copy today. Everything we have said about the development of cultures is also true of races, although (as the orders of magnitude are different) it is impossible to correlate the two processes. In Europe, Neanderthal Man was not anterior to the oldest known forms of Homo sapiens; the latter were his contempo- raries and maybe even his predecessors. And it is possible that the most diverse types of Hominidae may have been contem- porary even though they did not occupy the same parts of the world — "pygmies" living in South Africa, "giants" in China and Indonesia, etc. Once more, the object of our argument is not to deny the fact of human progress but to suggest that we might be more cautious in our conception of it. As our prehistoric and archaeological knowledge grows, we tend to make increasing use of a spatial scheme of distribution instead of a time scale scheme. The implications are two: firstly, that "progress" (if this term may still be used to describe something very different from its first connotation) is neither continuous nor inevitable; its course consists in a series of leaps and bounds, or, as the biologists would say, mutations.

These leaps and 21 bounds are not always in the same direction; the general trend may change too, rather like the progress of the knight in chess, who always has several moves open to him but never in the same direction. Advancing humanity can hardly be likened to a person climbing stairs and, with each movement, adding a new step to all those he has already mounted; a more accurate metaphor would be that of a gambler who has staked his money on several dice and, at each throw, sees them scatter over the cloth, giving a different score each time. What he wins on one, he is always liable to lose on another, and it is only occasionally that history is "cumulative", that is to say, that the scores add up to a lucky combination. The case of the Americas proves convincingly that "cumu- lative" history is not the prerogative of any one civilization or any one period. Man first came to that enormous conti- nent, no doubt in small nomadic groups crossing the Behring Straits during the final stages of the Ice age, at some date which cannot have been much earlier than the 20th millenary B.C. In twenty or twenty-five thousand years, these men pro- duced one of the most amazing examples of "cumulative" history the world has ever seen: exploring the whole range of the resources of their new natural environment, cultivating a wide variety of plants (besides domesticating certain species of animals) for food, medicines and poisons, and — as no- where else — using poisonous substances as a staple article of diet (e.g. manioc) or as stimulants or anaesthetics; collect- ing various poisons or drugs for use on the animal species particularly susceptible to each of them; and finally de- veloping certain industries, such as weaving, ceramics and the working of precious metals, to the highest pitch of perfection. To appreciate this tremendous achievement, we need only assess the contribution which America has made to the civi- lizations of the Old World, starting with the potato, rubber, tobacco and coca (the basis of modern anaesthetics), repre- senting four pillars of Western culture, though admittedly on very different grounds; followed by maize and ground- nuts, which were to revolutionize the economy of Africa before perhaps coming into general use as an article of diet in Europe; coca, vanilla, the tomato, the pineapple, pepper, several species of beans, cottons and gourds. Finally, the zero on the use of which arithmetic and, indirectly, modern mathematics are founded, was known and employed by the Maya at least 500 years before it was discovered by the Indian scholars, from whom Europe received it via the Arabs. 22 Possibly for that reason, the Maya calendar, at the same period of history, was more accurate than that of the Old World. Much has already been written on the question whether the political system of the Inca was socialistic or totalitarian, but, at all events, the ideas underlying it were close to some of those most characteristic of the modern world, and the system was several centuries ahead of similar developments in Europe. The recent revival of interest in curare would serve to remind us, if a reminder were needed, that the scientific knowledge of the American Indians con- cerning many vegetable substances not used elsewhere in the world may even now have much to teach the rest of the globe. 23


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