Читать книгу Elements of Folk Psychology - Wilhelm Max Wundt - Страница 13

The more extensive social groups generally result from the fact that during the rainy season families withdraw into caves among the hills. The larger caves are frequently occupied in common by a number of families, particularly by such as are most closely related. Yet the groups of co-dwellers are not so much determined by considerations of kinship as by the size of the places of refuge; a single family occasionally occupies a small cave by itself. Nevertheless, this community life plainly furnishes the incentive to a gradual formation of wider social groups. This, no doubt, accounts for the fact that during the favourable season of the year several families of the Veddahs claim for themselves a specific plot of ground, whose supply of game, as well as of the products of the soil, which the women gather, belongs exclusively to them. Thus, there is a division of the people into districts, and these are determined geographically rather than ethnologically. Every one is entitled to obtain his food, whether game or products of the soil, from a specified territory. Custom strictly guards this communal property, just as it protects the single marriage. The Veddah, for example, who encroaches upon the territory belonging to a group other than his own, is in no less danger of falling a victim to an arrow shot from an ambush than is the one who trespasses on marriage ties.

These various institutions form the beginnings of social organization, but as yet they do not represent developed clan groups or established joint families of the patriarchal type. On the contrary, as they arise through the free association of individuals, so also may they be freely dissolved. Each man has exclusive possession of his wife. Without interference on the part of his clan, moreover, he exercises absolute control over his children, who remain with the individual family just as in the case of a developed monogamy. There is no trace of sex-groups, such as are later to be found in the case of the men's houses and the age-groups. Only temporarily, on the occasion of common undertakings, such as the hunting of large animals, which requires a considerable measure of strength, or when new hunting-grounds are being sought, is a leader appointed from among the older men. His leadership, however, ceases with the completion of the undertaking. There are no permanent chiefs, any more than there are clans or tribal organizations.

Thus, in summary, we might say: Whenever the social organization of primitive man has remained uninfluenced by peoples of a higher culture, it consists in a firmly established monogamy of the form of single marriage—a mode of existence that was probably carried over from a prehuman stage resembling that of the present-day anthropoids. There are also scanty beginnings of social groups. If we consider these tribes as a whole, they still continue to lead the life of a horde, meaning by this an unorganized, in contrast to an organized, tribe of people. Indeed, it was through a curious change of meaning that this word acquired its present significance. It is supposed to have originated in a Mongolian idiom, whence it found its way first into the Russian and later into other European languages. The Tartars called a division of warriors a horda. First used in this sense, the word apparently did not receive its present meaning in Germany until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Having in mind the "Golden Horde" of the Tartars, a horde was understood to mean a particularly dreaded division of warriors. The furious force of these Asiatic hordes, and the terror which they spread, later caused the concept to be extended to all unorganized, wild, and unrestrained masses of men. Taking the word in this wider significance, we may now say that the horde, as a fairly large social group in which only very meagre suggestions of an organized tribal system occur, is characteristic of primitive times, no less than are the isolated single family and the beginnings of the joint family. Thus defined, however, the horde does not differ essentially from the animal herd, in the meaning which the latter concept would possess when applied to human-kind. And it is not impossible that in the extension of the meaning of the term 'horde,' this association of the foreign word with the original Germanic word 'herd' played a part. A horde, we might say, is a human herd, but it is precisely a human herd. Between the members of a horde, therefore, there exists a relation that is lacking in the animal herd, in flocks of migratory birds, for example, or in herds of sheep and cattle. This relation is established and preserved through a community of language. Herder, therefore, truthfully remarks that man was from the beginnings a 'herding animal,' in so far as he possessed social instincts. Even in the formation of language these social instincts were operative. Without a community life, and, we may add, without the mental interaction of individuals, language would be impossible. Language, however, in turn, strengthened this community life, and elevated it above the status of the animal herd or of an association concerned merely with momentary needs.

Thus, these reflections concerning the social relations of primitive man lead us to a further field of phenomena which likewise affords a glimpse into the mental characteristics of primitive peoples. For that which differentiates the horde from the herd is the language of primitive man, together with the activity most closely bound up with language, namely, thinking.