Culture, Language
and Equality
Culture is the sum total of all the traditions,
customs, belief and ways of life of a given group of human beings. In this
sense, every group has a culture, however savage, undeveloped, or uncivilized it
may seem to us.
To the professional anthropologist, there is no
intrinsic superiority of one culture over another, just as to the professional
linguist there is no intrinsic hierarchy among languages.
People
once thought of the languages of backward groups as savage, undeveloped form of
speech, consisting largely of grunts and groans. While it is possible that
language in general began as a series of grunts and groans, it is a fact
established by the study of “backward” languages that no spoken tongue answers
that description today. Most languages of uncivilized groups are, by our most
severe standards, extremely complex, delicate, and ingenious pieces of machinery
for the transfer of ideas. They fall behind the Western languages not in their
sound patterns or grammatical structures, which usually are fully adequate for
all language needs, but only in their vocabularies, which reflect the objects
and activities known to their speakers. Even in this department, however, two
things are to be noted: 1. All languages seem to possess the machinery for
vocabulary expansion, either by putting together words already in existence or
by borrowing them from other languages and adapting them to their own system. 2.
The objects and activities requiring names and distinctions in “backward”
languages, while different from ours, are often surprisingly numerous and
complicated. A western language distinguishes merely between two degrees of
remoteness (“this” and “that”); some languages of the American Indians
distinguish between what is close to the speaker, or the person addressed, or
remote from both, or out of sight, or in the past, or in the future.
This study of language, in turn, casts a new light upon the claim of the
anthropologists that all cultures are to viewed independently, and without ideas
of rank or hierarchy. |
