Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture: A Study in Method

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.Its data can not be understood, either in themselves or in their relation to one another, except as the end-points of specific sequences of events reaching back into the remote past.Some of us may be more interested in the psychological laws of human development that we believe ourselves capable of extracting from the raw material of eth- nology and archaeology, than in the establishment of definite historical facts and relationships that would tend to make this material intelligible, but it is not at all clear that the formulation of such laws is any more the business of the anthropologist than of the historian in the customarily narrow sense of the word.If the anthropologist, more often than the historian, has argued from descriptive data to folk psychology, we must hold responsible for this two factors, First, we must take account of the fre- quent, indeed typical, lack of direct chronological guides in the study of the culture of primitive peoples, whereby he is led to neglect or undervalue the importance of chronological insight and to seek, as a substitute, the unravelling of general laws oper- ating regardless of specific time.In the second place, the cul- tures dealt with by the anthropologist exhibit, on the whole, less complexity than those made known to us by documentary evidence, whereby he is led to think of the former as less en- cumbered by secondary or untypical developments and better fit to serve as matter for psychological generalization.Something may also be credited to the fact that the data of the an- thropologist give him a view of a greater diversity of cultures than the historian is accustomed to take in at one glance, whereby the former is provided with a truer perspective, or thinks he is, for the evaluation of the typical in the development of culture in general.These and possibly other factors render intelligible the emphasis on the general and schematic that has to so great a degree characterized the study of cultural anthropology.It cannot be held, however, that the actual data of our science are with more appropriateness to be turned over as a corpus vile to the folk-psychologist than the data of the most advanced cultures of to-day.Granting that the labours of the folk-psy- chologist are justifiable in themselves, the main point remains that so-called primitive culture consists throughout of phenomena that, so far as the ethnologist is concerned, must be worked out historically, that is, in terms of actual happenings, however in- ferred, that are conceived to have a specific sequence, a specific localization, and specific relations among themselves.Few would be so bold as to maintain that the vast and ever growing mass of ethnological material will ever completely yield to such an historical interpretation, but it is highly important that an historical understanding of the facts be held up as the properly ethnological goal of the student.Assuming, then, that we are desirous of adopting as thoroughly historical a method of interpretation of aboriginal American culture as circumstances permit, the question immediately suggests itself: how inject a chronology into this confusing mass of purely descriptive fact ?All that, in the greatest number of cases, we know about a tribe, aside from scattered information on its external history, covering a relatively short span of time, is that such and such implements and processes were in use, customs practised, and beliefs entertained at a point of time but little antedating the present.Where, as in the case of the Aztec, Maya, and Peruvian cultures, our knowledge is based on the recorded testimonv of earlier writers, we are still dealing, in the main, with facts pertaining to a single point of time or, at best, to a brief span of time, too brief to throw much light on the development of the whole culture.Our problem may be meta- phorically defined as the translation of a two-dimensional photographic picture of reality into the three-dimensional picture which lies back of it.Is it possible to read time perspective into the flat surface of American culture as we read space perspective into the flat surface of a photograph ?