The Sibylline Books of Tribal Art

Extract

It is a charge commonly levelled by administrators against anthropologists—and by the more materialistic and revolutionary anthropologists against their more conservative colleagues (among whom I count myself)—that they advocate the preservation of primitive peoples as ‘museum pieces’, sheltered from the harmful influences of civilisation. There is a grain of truth in the taunt—for many an anthropologist must have wondered at times whether this tribe or that was not better off and happier before the introduction of corrugated iron and political ‘aspirations’— but it is really a gross over-simplification; it is, in truth, not change so much as revolution that is deplored. For the anthropologist has been trained to observe more clearly than most men how a tribal culture may be not merely disrupted but even completely destroyed by the opening of a mine or a plantation or the prohibition of initiation or polygamy; how, for example, the advent of the metal roof may lead not merely to the decay of the thatcher’s skill, but perhaps also to the collapse of a co-operative labour system. Far from being absolutely opposed to change, he understands that there are ways—if we are willing to look for them—of making changes rather as a graft upon the tree of tribal culture than by ruthlessly extirpating it, or inadvertently ringing the bark. So it is that he will sometimes be found seeking, however hopelessly, to retard changes threatened from outside until their promoters are ready, both in their own and in the tribal interest, to take account of research in human nature and institutions; he would be more than human in these days if he did not point to the East African Groundnuts Scheme as a classical and grandiose example of revolution unnecessarily applied to tribal cultures with an utter disregard of the very existence of human problems.