The foregoing discussion of the American case would suggest that we ought to consider the difference between "stationary history" and "cumulative history" rather more carefully. Have we not, perhaps, acknowledged the "cumulative" character of American history simply because we recognize America as the source of a number of contributions we have taken from it, or which are similar to those we ourselves have made? W^hat would be the observer's attitude towards a civi- lization which had concentrated on developing values of its own, none of which was likely to affect his civilization? Would he not be inclined to describe that civilization as "stationary"? In other words, does the distinction between the two types of history depend on the intrinsic nature of the cultures to which the terms are applied, or does it not rather result from the ethnocentric point of view which we always adopt in assessing the value of a different culture? We should thus regard as "cumulative" any culture developing in a direc- tion similar to our own, that is to say, whose development would appear to us to be significant. Other cultures, on the contrary, would seem to us to be "stationary", not necessarily because they are so in fact, but because the line of their de- velopment has no meaning for us, and cannot be measured in terms of the criteria Ave employ. That this is indeed so is apparent from even a brief consider- ation of the cases in which we apply the same distinction, not in relation to societies other than our own, but within our own society. The distinction is made more often than we might think. People of advanced years generally consider that history during their old age is stationary, in contrast to the cumulative history they saw being made when they were young. A period in which they are no longer actively con- cerned, when they have no part to play, has no real meaning for them; nothing happens, or what does happen seems to them to be unproductive of good; while their grandchildren throw themselves into the life of that same period with all the passionate enthusiasm which their elders have forgotten. 24 The opponents of a political system are disinclined to admit that the system can evolve; they condemn it as a whole, and would excise it from history as a horrible interval when life is at a standstill only to begin again when the interval is over. The supporters of the regime hold quite a different view, especially, we may note, when they take an intimate part, in a high position, in the running of the machine. The quality of the history of a culture or a cultural progression or, to use a more accurate term, its eventfulness, thus depends not on its intrinsic qualities but on our situation with regard to it and on the number and variety of our interests involved. The contrast between progressive and stagnant cultures would thus appear to result, in the first place, from a differ- ence of focus. To a viewer gazing through a microscope focused on a certain distance from the objective, bodies placed even a few hundredths of a millimetre nearer or further away will appear blurred and "wolly", or may even be invisible; he sees through them. Another comparison may be made to disclose the same illusion. It is the illustration used to explain the rudiments of the theory of relativity. In order to show that the dimensions and the speed of displacement of a body are not absolute values but depend on the position of the observer, it is pointed out that, to a traveller sitting at the window of a train, the speed and length of other trains vary according to whether they are moving in the same or the contrary direction. Any member of a civilization is as closely associated with it as this hypothetical traveller is with his train for, from birth onwards, a thousand conscious and unconscious influences in our environment instil into us a complex system of criteria, consisting in value judgments, motivations and centres of interest, and including the conscious reflexion upon the historical development of our civilization which our education imposes and without which our civilization would be inconceivable or would seem contrary to actual behaviour. Wherever we go, we are bound to carry this system of criteria with us, and external cultural phenomena can be observed only through the distorting glass it interposes, even when it does not prevent us from seeing anything at all. To a very large extent, the distinction between "moving cultures" and "static cultures" is to be explained by a differ- ence of position similar to that which makes our traveller think that a train, actually moving, is either travelling for- ward or stationary. There is, it is true, a difference, whose 25 importance will be fully apparent when we reach the stage — already foreshadowed — of seeking to formulate a general theory of relativity in a sense different from that of Einstein, i.e. applicable both to the physical and to the social sciences: the process seems to be indentical in both cases, but the other way round. To the observer of the physical world (as the example of the traveller shows) systems developing in the same direction as his own appear to be motionless, while those which seem to move swiftest are moving in different directions. The reverse is true of cultures, since they appear to us to be in more active development when moving in the same direction as our own, and stationary when they are following another line. In the social sciences, however, speed has only a metaphorical value. If the comparison is to hold, we must substitute for this factor information or meaning. We know, of course, that it is possible to accumulate far more information about a train moving parallel to our own at approximately the same speed (by looking at the faces of the travellers, counting them, etc.) than about a train which we are passing or which is passing us at a high speed, or which is gone in a flash because it is travelling in a different direction. In the extreme case, it passes so quickly that we have only a confused impression of it, from which even the indications of speed are lacking; it is reduced to a momentary obscuration of the field of vision; it is no longer a train; it no longer has any meaning. There would thus seem to be some relationship between the physical concept of apparent movement and another concept involving alike physics, psy- chology and sociology — the concept of the amount of infor- mation capable of passing from one individual to another or from one group to another, which will be determined by the relative diversity of their respective cultures. Whenever we are inclined to describe a human culture as stagnant or stationary, we should therefore ask ourselves whether its apparent immobility may not result from our ignorance of its true interests, whether conscious or unconscious, and whether, as its criteria are different from our own, the culture in question may not suffer from the same illusion with respect to us. In other words, we may well seem to one another to be quite uninteresting, simply because we are dissimilar. For the last two or three centuries, the whole trend of Western civilization has been to equip man willi increasingly powerful mechanical resources. If this criterion is accepted, 26 the quantity of energy available for each member of the popu- lation will be taken as indicating the relative level of develop- ment in human societies. Western civilization, as represented in North America, will take first place, followed by the European societies, with a mass of Asiatic and African societies, rapidly becoming indistinguishable from one another, bringing up the rear. But these hundreds, or even thousands of societies which are commonly called "under- developed" and "primitive", and which merge into an undifferentiated mass when regarded from the point of view we have just described (and which is hardly appropriate in relation to them, since they have had no such line of develop- ment or, if they have, it has occupied a place of very secondary importance) are by no means identical. From other points of view, they are diametrically opposed to one another; the classification of societies will therefore differ according to the point of view adopted. If the criterion chosen had been the degree of ability to overcome even the most inhospitable geographical conditions, there can be scarcely any doubt that the Eskimos, on the one hand, and the Bedouins, on the other, would carry off the palm. India has been more successful than any other civi- lization in elaborating a philosophical and religious system, and China, a way of life capable of minimizing the psycho- logical consequences of over-population. As long as 13 centu- ries ago, Islam formulated a theory that all aspects of human life — technological, economic, social and spiritual — are closely interrelated — a theory that has only recently been rediscovered in the West in certain aspects of Marxist thought and in the development of modern ethnology. We are familiar with the pre-eminent position in the intellectual life of the Middle Ages which the Arabs owed to this prophetic vision. The West, for all its mastery of machines, exhibits evidence of only the most elementary understanding of the use and potential resources of that super-machine, the human body. In this sphere, on the contrary, as on the related question of the connexion between the physical and the mental, the East and the Far East are several thousand years ahead; they have produced the great theoretical and practical summae represented by Yoga in India, the Chinese "breath-techniques", or the visceral control of the ancient Maoris. The cultivation of plants without soil, which has recently attracted public atten- tion, was practised for centuries by certain Polynesian peoples, who might also have taught the world the art of navigation, 27 and who amazed it, in the eighteenth century, by their revela- tion of a freer and more generous type of social and ethical organization than had previously been dreamt of. In all matters touching on the organization of the family and the achievement of harmonious relations between the family group and the social group, the Australian aborigines, though backward in the economic sphere, are so far ahead of the rest of mankind that, to understand the careful and deliberate systems of rules they have elaborated, we have to use all the refinements of modern mathematics. It was they in fact who discovered that the ties of marriage represent the very warp and woof of society, while other social institutions are simply embroideries on that background; for, even in modern societies, where the importance of the family tends to be limited, family ties still count for much: their ramifica- tions are less extensive but, at the point where one tie ceases to hold, others, involving other families, immediately come into play. The family connexions due to inter-marriage may result in the formation of broad links between a few groups, or of narrow links between a great number of groups; whether they are broad or narrow, however, it is those links which maintain the whole social structure and to which it owes its flexibility. The Australians, with an admirable grasp of the facts, have converted this machinery into terms of theory, and listed the main methods by which it may be produced, with the advantages and drawbacks attaching to each. They have gone further than empirical observation to discover the mathe- matical laws governing the systems, so that it is no exaggera- tion to say that they are not merely the founders of general sociology as a whole, but are the real innovators of measure- ment in the social sciences. The wealth and boldness of aesthetic imagination found in the Melanesians, and their talent for embodying in social life the most obscure products of the mind's subconscious activity, mark one of the highest peaks to which men have attained in these two directions. The African contribution is more complex, but also less obvious, for we have only recently suspected what an important part the continent had played as the cultural melting pot of the Old World — the place where countless influences came together and mingled to branch out anew or to lie dormant but, in every case, taking a new turn. The Egyptian civilization, whose importance to mankind is common knowledge, can be understood only when it is viewed as the co-product of Asia and Africa: and the great 28 political systems of ancient Africa, its legal organization, its philosophical doctrines which for so long remained unknown to Western students, its plastic arts and music, systematically exploring all the opportunities opened up by each of these modes of expression, are all signs of an extraordinarily fertile past. There is, incidentally, direct evidence of this great past in the perfection of the ancient African methods of working bronze and ivory, which were far superior to any employed in the West at the same period. We have already referred to the American contribution and there is no need to revert to it now. Moreover, it is unwise to concentrate attention too much upon these isolated contributions, for they might give us the doubly false impression that world civilization is a sort of motley. Too much publicity has been given to the various peoples who were first with any discovery: the Phoenicians with the use of the alphabet; the Chinese with paper, gun- powder and the compass; the Indians with glass and steel. These things in themselves are less important than the way in which each culture puts them together, adopts them or rejects them. And the originality of each culture consists rather in its individual way of solving problems, and in the perspective in which it views the general A'alues which must be approximately the same for all mankind, since all men, without exception, possess a language, techniques, a form of art, some sort of scientific knowledge, religious beliefs, and some form of social, economic and political organization. The relations aie never quite the same, however, in every culture, and modern ethnology is concentrating increasingly on discovering the underlying reasons for the choices made, rather than on listing mere external features. 29

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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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