The Evolution of Culture

Abstract

PROP. MURDOCK, of Yale University, has made an admirable translation of Lippert's “Kul-turgeschichte der Menschheit in ihrem organischen Aufbau”(1886–87), which together with his other writings, gained for the author the reputation in Germany of being in the front rank of sociologists, though his work has scarcely had due recognition in other countries. At that time trustworthy data on the ethnography of backward peoples were very scanty and incomplete, so it is not surprising that occasionally his imagination led him beyond his facts and that he was inclined to read too much into them. Such faults are characteristic of most pioneers, but Lippert consciously strove to be inductive, as is shown by his use of the method of comparative ethnology. His approach was distinctly evolutionary, as was almost inevitable at that time, and he covered, so far as he could, the whole field of social anthropology with a due regard to balance and perspective. He did not, however, make the common mistake of confusing evolution with progress. Although Lippert says that “human ingenuity has striven in different places to achieve the goal set by the care for life with the elements there at hand”(p. 169), he does not ignore diffusion from a single centre in the case of the bow (p. 180) and claims it for the fire cult (p. 584) and for the origin of grape wine (p. 199), but in his time the conception of the diffusion of cultures had not achieved the importance which it has now attained. The Evolution of Culture. By Julius Lippert. Translated and edited by Prof. George Peter Murdock. Pp. xxxiii + 716. (London: George Alien and Unwin, Ltd., 1931.) 20s. net.