380 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920
also a book which every sociologist, if his sociology is to be more than a series of spun-out hypotheses, will have to take cognizance of. And finally it is a work whose point of view and conclusion cannot be dis- regarded in the teaching of the social sciences. In short, Primitive Society is a clear and fair representative of what modern ethnology has to offer.
If now we revert attention from the success of the book as the logical exemplification of a method to that method itself, what can be said of the value of this method? This admission seems inevitable: that though the method is sound, and the only one that the ethnologist has found justifiable, yet to the worker in remote fields of science, and to the man of general intellectual interests, its products must appear rather sterile. There is little output that can be applied in other sciences. There is scarcely even anything that psychology, which underlies anthropology, can take hold of and utilize. There are in short no causal explanations. The method leads us to the realization that such and such has happened on such and such an occasion. Human nature indeed remains the same with its conservatism, inertia, and imitativeness (p. 436). But the particular forms which institutions assume evidently depend on a multi- plicity of variable immediate factors, and if there are common and permanent factors they either cannot be isolated or remain as vague as the three trends mentioned. In essence, then, modern ethnology says that so and so happens, and may tell why it happened thus in that par- ticular case. It does not tell, and does not try to tell, why things happen in society as such.
This default may be inevitable. It may be nothing but the result of a sane scientific method in a historical field. But it seems important that ethnologists should recognize the situation. As long as we con- tinue offering the world only reconstructions of specific detail, and con- sistently show a negativistic attitude toward broader conclusions, the world will find very little of profit in ethnology. People do want to know why. After the absorption of the first shock of interest in the 'fact that the Iroquois have matrilineal clans and that the Arunta have totems, they want to know why they have them when we have not. The answer of ethnology as typified by Lowie is in substance that there are tribes fully as primitive as the Iroquois and Arunta who are like ourselves in that they possess neither clans nor totems. But again the justifiable question obtrudes: Why do some primitive cultures develop clans and totems while others fail to? And we say that we do not know or that diffusion of an idea did or did not reach a certain area. Now it may be
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