Abstract

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST, for all his interest in uniqueness, would be hard pressed to find another society more distinctive than that which we might call the Industrial West. Feudalism, head hunting, or desert nomad existence pall in comparison with the life of the Machine Age. Consider some of the characteristics of western society. Here is a people who know their history more fully than any other group has ever known its past. Hence it includes within its boundaries more ancestors, on whom it is dependent, than any other civilization. From the nameless Neolithic farmers, spinners, weavers, and smelters have come cotton, textiles, and iron. From the Paleolithic sculptors and subsequent Homers and Raphaels descend arts more diverse in forms and idioms than any the world has ever known. Across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic stretches the vast cooperating network of this society. These diverse peoples are held in interdependence by their needs for Harris tweed, olive oil, canned beef, copra, beaver pelts, moving pictures, latex, and coconuts. Here is, without doubt, the greatest number of people who have ever been consciously interdependent since the beginning of human history. Comprising this vast society are large nations and within those nations populous communities called cities. Within each city mesh the lives of thousands of men and women who could never know each other by name, religion or politics-and are politely urged not to inquire. It flatters us to be written about with distinct objectivity, as if we were merely another sample in the anthropologist's series of groups. Even such treatment was never before possible in human history. The impersonal, scientific study of society is a product of the last few decades. We live in an industrial age, a scientific age, and therefore in an age of impersonality. The distraught wife expresses this last quality pithily when she stares from her apartment window to murmur, There isn't anyone I can really talk to! In that newest of social institutions, the factory, the

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