37 8 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920
who has demonstrated its inevitable applicability in feature after feature of human civilization. On the constructive side Wissler's American Indian marks what is easily the most comprehensive and soundest historic synthesis yet attempted along these lines. Lowie's book takes in a sense an even wider range, but applies the method to the social institutions of all the peoples of the world whom we are wont to call uncivilized.
The several chapters, besides the introductory and concluding ones, are on Marriage, Polygamy, the Family, Kinship Usages, the Sib, the History of the Sib, the Position of Women, Property, Associations (societies), the Theory of Associations, Rank, Government, and Justice. Being attached to no preformed opinion and noted as a student particu- larly free from bias, Lowie never goes farther than his facts warrant. The result is a double impression: on the one hand of the endless diver- sity of institutions; on the other, of the uniformity of human motives and social conduct among civilized and uncivilized peoples.
On the reader who makes his acquaintance with ethnology through this book, the effect must be overwhelming. He will realize the immense multiplicity of cultural phenomena. He will feel that these are as manifold and irregular in primitive as in civilized society and vice versa; and that subsumable generalizations fade more and more into the back- ground as the mass of facts is courageously faced and honestly dissected. About all that remains of generic principles, when Lowie has completed his analysis, is the demonstration of certain tendencies that run un- exceptionally through civilization but are at the same time so modified in actuality that there is nothing interpretative to be done with them. These tendencies stand revealed as mere boundaries within which the play of cultural forces is confined.
Thus, Lowie sums up his discussion of the family: "In short, the bilateral family is none the less an absolutely universal unit of human society." Inasmuch as there has been a prevalent inclination (due probably in large measure to the fact that the family is bilateral in our own civilization) to seek and find an essentially unilateral family in primitive society, this conclusion is of definite corrective value. It needs no argument, however, to prove that a principle of this nature cannot be used as a tool with which to shape other generalizations. It is much as if we confirmed the validity of the principle that all houses are built on foundations. This might be an extremely important affirmation if a theory held sway that houses could be built without foundations. But no theory of the necessity of foundations will give a working plan
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