The Natural History of the Folk Society

Abstract

W l rITH others, I have found the imagined construction of a generalized typical primitive or folk society useful in directing attention to certain kinds of questions about societies and people. The conception asks special questions; it does not answer these; only particular facts can do that. When others have taken the description of this imagined construction as an assertion of things found to be always true about real primitive societies, real cities, or real people, I have been puzzled at what seems to me a misconception. To describe the constructed folk society as one that is small, isolated, personal, and sacred is to imagine a limiting case of society that has qualities, that real primitive societies tend to have, in that extreme degree still consistent with human living. It is not to assert that this combination is invariably present. It is to invite the facts, as those from Guatemala, to show that in some instances a small and isolated society may be impersonal and secular, and so to lead one to find out under what circumstances this combinationunusual from the point of view assumed by the construction-may occur. One might not ask the question at all without the use of the idea of the folk society. So when Herskovits' remarks that in discussions of the folk society, African data nowhere taken into account, he seems to me to be doing just what the imagined construction was designed to bring about: he is beginning to take the West African data into account-into account with regard to the question, under what circumstances do personal relations persist in urban communities? When he then goes on to state that in these West African urban communities relationships are as personal as in any 'folk society', he is making a fresh and interesting assertion; and we await his demonstration that the relationships in these West African urban communities in fact as personal as relationships among, say, the Andamanese. Perhaps Herskovits would not be raising the point if the imagined construction had not caused him to make the assertion that I have just quoted. The kinds of questions to which the imagined typical folk society directs attention those arising out of respects in which folk or primitive societies tend to be different from urban societies. On the one hand it is true that primitive societies and primitive men equivalent to-have the same characteristics as-civilized societies and civilized men. This is so with regard to a great .many characteristics commonly considered in the comparative study of societies; all have families, age-group differences, division of labor, economies, religions, and so forth. On the other hand, it is also true that primitive societies and primitive men tend to have some characteristics which less apparent, in cases very much less apparent, in civilized societies and men; and in civilized societies and men new characteristics appear which hardly present, or not present at all, in the most primitive or folk-like societies. Dogmatic theology, ecumenical religions, systematic reflective and critical thought, a sense a people has of its destiny in the future, reform as a deliberately adopted program-these some of the many characteristics of civilized or urbanized human living which hard to find in isolated primitive societies. The construction thus carries along the work we have been doing less systematically without its help: illuminating all society by attending first to some hint given from the primitive world and then to some insight provided by the civilized world. A Melanesian people use the word for a conception of their own; the conception is reported by Codrington; similar conceptions noted under other names among American Indians; the word then comes to name a concept of social science; we look for mana in civilized life too, and link the idea with charisma. So with tabu, and totem. On the other hand, it is because we know law (for example) as something highly developed and much studied in the civilized societies that we enabled to look for the beginnings-the multiform beginnings-of law in societies so simple that without knowing about law in civilized societies we should not notice law at all in those most primitive societies. The conception of the folk society gathers up these many separately received impressions of the 1 Melville J. Herskovits, Man and His Works (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1948), p. 606.