ANIMISTIC AND RAiTIONAL THOUGHT

Sol Tax

One of the classical controversies in anthropology is the question

of whether there is any difference between primitive and civilized peoples
in the way they think. I think that, for most of us, this controversy

has long since been eettled, and I do not Intend to revlew the argument.
Goldenweiser's and Boas' statownts on the subject are familiar to all

students of Introductory anthropology.* 1urthermore, I am accepting their

conclusions: first, that both emotional associations and rational or logical
processes of thought characterize the lndividual in both the simple socie-
ties and our own -- and the difference is one of degree rather than kind;

second, that, in the words of Boaas, "The difference in the mode of thought
of primitive man and that of civilized man seems to consist largely In the

difference of character of the traditional material with which the new per-
ception associates itself."

I do not intend to diseuss the irrationality of modern man, which has
certainly been sufficiently emphasized by modern psychology. I would only
like to offer some remarks on the rational aspects of thought as they are
related to the character of the traditional material with which primitive
and civilized peoples deal.

I have had the fortune to spend some years amng the Indians of

Guatemala. During this experience I have been much lmpressed with the
degree to which animistic or more generally supernaturallstic beliefs

color native thought, while at the same time the economic behavior of the
people is on the whole very rattonal. In day to day relatione with prim-
itives, field ethnologists have always been impressed with the essential
rattonality of their subjects and my case is no exception. Sometimes,

I recall, a childish question would raise doubts in my mind, but a little
questioning invariably showed that however naive the Indian was he was
not illogical. For example, an Indian once remarked to me that in the

United States the sky must be closer to the earth than In Guatemala. How
on earth could he get such a silly Idea? But there was an explanation.
His language and tradition include the notion that the sun and God are

identical; also that the sky is a ceiling over the earth and that the sun
is on this ceiling. Protestant missionaries come from the United States
and talk considerably about being close to God, and as if they know E.m

personally. Taking such talk literally,, the Indian concludes that for this
to be possible, God (the sun) and hence the sky., must be closer to the

United States than in his own country. Examples of this order could be

multiplled; what at first sight appears an lllogical or foolish association
turns out to be a reasonable conclusion based on premises that are strange
to us.

For that matter the belief'-premises themselves are frequently logical
constructs. For example, several Indians told me that the mice of the

house are very happy when they know tha.t another baby will be born in the

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house and they at once come together to find out Its sex. When the midwife
says that the baby is a boy they dance with joy because they know that

later this boy will work and bring more things to the house, and they too
will have more corn and fruit and other things to eat. But when they ftnd
that the baby ts a girl, they becomw very angry because they know that

wown do not waste anything in the kitchen, keeping all the leftovers for
the domestic animals and letting the icoe go hungry. So the mtce have a

meeting and decide to go where the baby gtrl lies and they urtnate In her
mouth. Several other Indians told me the Bane thing, but In reverse.

The mice are happy when a     torl is born and angry when It is a boy. The
reason, however, ti equally logtcal. It is the women who prepare the

food tn the house and leave scraps around when they grind corn and cook;

a newborn girl is somebody who will give the mice food. On the other hahd,
man always kill mice when they get a chance because xice eat the grain in
the cornftelds for which the men have responsibility.   This difforence of
opinion on the part of the Indlane (if not the mice) shows   I think, how
the people continually apply their social conceptions and their daily

experience to the basic .doas of the cultural tradition, and rework them;
but logical rationaltzation is always Involvted in the process.

I want to give one other little example of the Indians' mental

behavior, this time to illustrate how rationally belhefa are related

to ordinary behavior. There Is a bellef, widespread in Guatemala and
firmly held, that corn should be harvested En the full or waning moon.
If it is harvested in the new or waxing moon, the corn wLll not keep

well In storage-space -- it will soon rot.   I had heard this from every-

body I talked to., and it was part of a pattern of beliefs about the .ssocta-
tion of the phases of the moon with living things. I do not doubt that
all of the Indtans f trmly bel.ieve this. One year I kept track of when
Indians were harvesting their corn and it seemed to me that they were

going counter to thie belief. I noticed quite a few people harvesting

patches during the new moon. Needless to say I awaited the opportunity
to catch somebody I know red-handed in the act to see what he had to

say for himself. The answer turned out to be slmple.    "Oh," said the first
culprit I asked, "That's Just a smll patch of corn that I harvested; it
will be used up before it has a chance to rot."    Sure enough, when I

went over my records of cornflelds harvested at the wrong time, I found

they were all small and the amount of corn was not great-enough to worry
about.

It ie of course these numberless experiences with the very logical
reasoning of exotlc peoples that cause field ethnologists to laugh off

any notion that native peoples are prelogical or lllogical or non-rattonal.
Given a premise, the primitive will reach a conclusion through the same
logtcal processes that we do.

The interesting quest on still remains, however: How do we account

for the preseflce of theso peculiar premlses -- these beliefe that furnlsh
the basis of so much more of the thlnkpn.ot "primitives" than of ours?

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When Tylor saye that animistic thipking characterizes prtmitives and

not us; when Boas says that emotional and socially determined assoctations
of sense Impressions and activities are replaced In parts of our society
by intellectual associations; when Kelsen says that in primitive society
nature and society are not distingutshed and that causation ts conceived
in terms of the will of some being on the principle of retribution; when
Lecky says the change le from a belief in the miraculous to a disbelief

In the possibility of anything miraculous -- there ts obviously one gen-
eral Idea of a major difference between the primitive conception of the
personalization and soctalizat on of nature and admission of the super-

natural as opposed to our materialistic predisposition to dtstinguish ant-
mate from inanimate and man from other antmate objects and to deny the
existence of anything that cannot be sensed by man.

I would like to reduce these differences to a simple difference in
the nature of the content of cultural expertence. To do so. I propose
to set up a distinction which I believe, cuts across all cultures,

between two kinds of information that peoples have. One kind I shall

call sclentific knowledge or simply knowledge; the other the opposite
of knowledge, or ignorance.

When I speak of the "known" as opposed to the "unkown," or of

"knowledge" as opposed to Ignorance, I am defintng knowledge as more

or less synonymus with "scientiftc knowldge" wAthout the proviso,, how-

ever, that tt must be systematic. Knowledge I would llke to use for any
item of information that ts derived from the sctentifIc Interrelating of
sense-perceived phenomena and Is hence verifiable I.n 1he same. manner.
I do not mean that the indi.vtdual who knows something has necessarily

(or even usually) produced that knowledge -- or even that he has vert.f led

.t by means of his own senses and hLs own logic. When the Panajachel Indlan
says that a goiter is caused by drinking out of a large jar, or when I

say that It Is caused by a defictency of iodine in the system -- netther
of us believes this as a result of tnvestigatton.    Or when the Indtan

says an ecl'pse o the moon causes a child to be born deformed, and when
I say that the moon causes the rising and falling of the tides -- both
of us must rest our cases in an appeal to authority. But the Indian
tn each case ti ignorant --- in my definitton -- and I am not, because

somewhere En my cultural tradition somebody has verifled by the method
of science the relattonship of the moon to the tides and of iodCne to

goiter. My belief is scientific knowledge -- no credtt to me -- that of
the Indian is still just belief.

I take It as obvious that all people and all peoples have some know-
ledge in the sense I have used it but that our culture happens to have
achieved much more of it than any other. In other words, the area of

the known among us has increased at the expense of the are of the unknown
enormously more than among other peoples.

Even in the most isolated societies there is considerable knowledge
because there Is use made of sclentif tc method of the crude sort that I

have defined. The Panajachel Indian knowe that onions will not grow without

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water, because on the basis of observatton his ancetors have - in the

manner of science implicitly at least - related water to growing plants.

The region of the unknown is pretty large, of coUrse, even in agriculture.
The Indian does not know all of the conditions necessary for the succees-

ful growing of onions and it ti precisely In the realm in which he is ignor-
ant that his social Imagination gets free rein. Thus, when the crop is

attacked by disease (about which he knows nothing) he Is willinrg to belteve
that "the spirlt of the onion" has gone elsewhere because of some fault

committed by the people. If he should learn what really causes the onion-

dIsease he might no longer be willing to believe anything about the sptrit

of the onion, in that context; his credulity would be limited and his super-
naturalistic thinking, or emotional assoclation, or personalization of

nature, or notion of retribution as cause, might be correspondingly reduced.
It also might not be -- because naturalistic explanations and beliefs are
not always dominant over deep-eated supernaturalistlc.    In the long rm
I think that they are.

If one asks for the process by which so-called "rational thinking"

comes into being, he really means to ask how cultural beliefs of the kind
that involve animism, magical associations, and what Levy-Bruhl called
"participations" are replaced by cultural premises of the kind that

depend upon or originate in the scientific manner of associating phenom-
ena. According to the analyssL I am making here, this comes down to
asking for the process by which scientific knowledge is increased.

Reduced to such terms, the problem of why the small and preliterate

societies are characterized by "prelogical" or animistic thought Is easily
solved if one only grants that mankind began in a state of Ignorance --
an assumption difficult to avoid unless you believe in the story of

Adam and Eve. If mankind started In a state of ignorance, the growth of
rationalism has been part and parcel of the slow and irregular accumula-
tion of knowledge. The smaller and more Isolated communtties have been
understandably more backward In this evolution, since contact of large

bodies of people, with the possibilities of more frequent creati.ve minds,
gives impetus to the Increase in knowledge. Literacy is a great help,

both because It increases communicatton and makes easler larger accumu-

lations of knowledge and because the work of the gentus of one generation
ts not lost to the genius of the next who might build upon it. Improved
technology is part and parcel of increased knowledge, of course, and it
also makes posesble and necessary specialization, which increasee efft-

clency and hence knowledge. These are some of the factors clearly tnvolved
in the differenttal growth of knowledge.

These same factors -- increasing size, the breakdown of geographic
barriers, literacy  technological advance and increaseddilvision of

labor -- lead frequently or generally to the impersonalization and secu-

larization of society. And impersonalization and secularization themselves
involve the freeing of minds from old ideas and hence encourage the spirit
of inquiry and the greater accumulation of knowledge.

In Western society one can trace the history of so-called "rational"
thinking In terms of the accumulation of knowledge of the kind based

ultimately on observations of the relations of material things. One can
see the place of the geniuses among the Greeks, the Arabs, in the Renais-

sance in Europe, and in the growth of modern science. One can see, egually,
how theologians of the Middle Ages (who tried to get knowledge about the
unknowable and thuse could not be expected to increase substantially the

realm of the known) really discouraged the non-primitive type of thinking
despite their emphasis on logic; and one can see in our society today the
connection between ignorance and irrational thinking wherever it is found.
All this on the hypothesis, as I have developed It, that what is often
called "rational" thinking is equivalent to knowledge of the world of

nature and of man that the scientific method, based ultimately on obser-
vation of the relations of material things, provides.

After completing a preliminary draft of this paper, I showed it to
my colleague, Dr. Redfield. In rewriting the paper, I have profited by
many of his suggestions. One question which he asked me I have not ans-

wered. He asked whether I had sufficiently taken into account the possi-
bility that the idea of causality has Itself a history and that primitive

thinking developed its characteristics without the benefit of this history.
As a matter of fact, in a previous paper published some years ago, I did
entertain this as a possibility. The motivation of the present paper is

precisely that I have abandoned that possibility. It is inconsistent with
what I have been trying to say. I do not know if there is such a thing
as a separate "idea of causality" (excepting if it be in the minds of

philosophers). If by it is meant what I have referred to several times
as the scientific manner of interrelating sense-perceived phenomena, the
source of what I have called knowledge, then clearly it is no invention

of the Greeks or anybody else. How did so many different peoples achieve
as much. knowledge as they obviously did If they did not causally, or

scientifically) interrelate things?  Perhaps the Greeks are to be credited
with the first important systematizations of knowledge and the first dis-
cussions scientific method, but surely men before them and besides them
have discovered and have used facts easily verifiable by the methods of
science. Implicit in the results is the "idea of causality."

But of course I am answering the guestion in terms of the system I

have erected, when doubtless Dr. Redfield intended to question the validity
or usefulness of the system itself.

* Boas, Franz

1938    The Mind of Primitive Man. Rev. Ed, Chap. 11, esp. pp. 220-

225. The Macmillan Co., New York.
Goldenwelser, Alexander

1922    Early Civilizations.  Part 3, Chap. 17 and pp. 380-389.

Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

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