It may perhaps be objected that such arguments are theo- retical. As a matter of abstract logic, it may be said, it is possible that no culture is capable of a true judgment of any other, since no culture can lay aside its own limitations, and its appreciation is therefore inevitably relative. But look around you; mark what has been happening in the world for the past 100 years, and all your speculations will come to nought. Far from "keeping themselves to themselves", all civilizations, one after the other, recognize the superiority of one of their number — ^Western civilization. Are we not witnesses to the fact that the whole world is gradually adopting its technological methods, its way of life, its amuse- ments and even its costume? Just as Diogenes demonstrated movement by walking, it is the course followed by all human cultures, from the countless thousands of Asia to the lost tribes in the remote fastnesses of the Brazilian or African jungles which proves, by the unanimous acceptance of a single form of human civilization, such as history has never Avitnessed before, that that civilization is superior to any other; the complaint which the "underdeveloped" countries advance against the others at international meetings is not that they are being westernized, but that there is too much delay in giving them the means to westernize themselves. This is the most difficult point in our argument; indeed it would be of no use to attempt to defend the individuality of human cultures against those cultures themselves. Moreover, it is extremely difficult for an ethnologist to assess at its true value such a phenomenon as the universal acceptance of Western civilization. There are several reasons for this fact. In the first place, there has probably never before in history been a world civilization or, if any paralled does exist, it must be sought in remote pre-historic times, about which we know practically nothing. Secondly, there is very con- siderable doubt about the permanence of this phenomenon. It is a fact that for the past 150 years there has been a tendency for Western civilization to spread throughout the world, either 30 in its entirety or by the development of certain of its key features, such as industrialization; and that, where other cultures are seeking to preserve some part of their traditional heritage, the attempt is usually confined to the superstructure of society, thet is to say, to the least enduring aspects of a culture, v\^hich it may be expected will be swept away by the far more radical changes which are taking place. The process is still going on, however, and we cannot yet know what the result will be. Will it end in the complete westernization of our planet, with Russian or American variations? Will syncretic forms come into being, as seems possible so far as the Islamic world, India and China, are concerned.!^ Or is the tide already on the turn and will it now ebb back, before the imminent collapse of the Western world, brought to ruin, like the prehistoric monsters, by a physical expansion out of proportion to the structure on which their working depends? We must take all these possibilities into account in attempting to assess the process going on under our eyes, whose agents, instruments or victims we are, whether we know it or not. In the first place, we may note that acceptance of the Western way of life, or certain aspects of it, is by no means as spontaneous as Westerners would like to believe. It is less the result of free choice than of the absence of any alternative. W^estern civilization has stationed its soldiers, trading posts, plantations and missionaries throughout the world; directly or indirectly it has intervened in the lives of the coloured peoples; it has caused a revolutionary upheaval in their tra- ditional way of life, either by imposing its own customs, or by creating such conditions as to cause the collapse of the existing native patterns without putting anything else in their place. The subjugated and disorganized peoples have therefore had no choice but to accept the substitute solutions offered them or, if they were not prepared to do that, to seek to imitate Western ways sufficiently to be able to fight them on their own ground. When the balance of power is not so unequal, societies do not so easily surrender; their Weltanschauung tends rather to be similar to that of this poor tribe in eastern Brazil, whose members adopted the ethnographer, Curt Nimuendaju, as one of themselves and who, whenever he returned to them after a visit to civilization, would weep for pity to think of the sufferings he must have endured so far away from the only place — their village — where, in their opinion, life was worth living. Nevertheless, this reservation merely shifts the question to 31 another point. If Western culture's claim to superiority is not founded upon free acceptance, must it not be founded upon its greater vitality and energy, which have enabled it to compel acceptance? Here we are down to bedrock. For this inequality of force is not to be accounted for by the subjective attitude of the community as a whole, as was the acceptance we were discussing above. It is an objective fact, and can only be explained by objective causes. This is not the place to embark on a study of the philosophy of civilization; volumes might be devoted to a discussion of the nature of the values professed by Western civilization. We shall deal only with the most obvious of those values, those that are least open to question. They would seem to be two: in the first place, to borrow Dr. Leslie White's phrase. Western civilization seeks continually to increase the per capita supply of energy; secondly, it seeks to protect and prolong human life. To put the matter in a nutshell, the second aspect may be regarded as a derivative of the first, since the absolute quantity of energy available increases in propor- tion to the length and health of the individual life. For the sake of avoiding argument, we may also admit at once that compensatory phenomena, acting, as it were, as a brake, may go with these developments, such as the great slaughters of world warfare and the inequalities in the consumption of available energy between individuals and classes. Once this is admitted, it is immediately apparent that, while Western civilization may indeed have devoted itself to these forms of development, to the exclusion of all others — wherein perhaps its weakness lies — it is certainly not the only civi- lization which has done so. All human societies, from the earliest times, have acted in the same way: and very early and primitive societies, which we should be inclined to compare with the "barbarian" peoples of today, made the most decisive advances in this respect. At present, their achievements still constitute the bulk of what we call civilization. We are still dependent upon the tremendous discoveries which marked the phase we describe, without the slightest exaggeration, as the neolithic revolution: agriculture, stock-rearing, pottery, weav- ing. In the last eight or ten thousand years, all we have done is to improve all these "arts of civilization". Admittedly, some people exhibit an unfortunate tendency to regard only the more recent discoveries as brought about by human effort, intelligence and imagination, while the discoveries humanity made in the "barbarian" period are 32 regarded as due to chance, so that, upon the whole, humanity can claim little credit for them. This error seems to us so common and so serious, and is so likely to prevent a proper appreciation of the relations between cultures, that we think it essential to clear it up at once and for all. 33

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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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