Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 279

EDWARD WESTERMARCK
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Westermarck, who can as little escape remark for deficiencies in
his critical attitude towards his sources as Sir James G. Frazer
and earlier sociology in general, also lays himself open to the
charge that he has not sufficiently distinguished between the
present culture of primitive peoples and an assumed original cul-
ture. Yet there can be no question but that Westermarck’s ex-
haustive researches in primitive marriage will survive through
the ages as casting the sharpest possible light on the questions
and probably as defining the limit to which our knowledge of
the subject will ever succeed in penetrating backward. Wester-
marck’s sociological researches also reveal that primitive peoples
are in many aspects closer to us than we are inclined to believe,
and that in the habits and customs of our own times there remain
many relics from earlier cultural stages which retain their full
vitality, and ancient institutions of significance for the social
life of the people. Other relics may be regarded as survivals
with no special function to-day. The ideas on which they were
based may possibly have vanished long ago, nevertheless the out-
ward forms remain. And to understand the source of those ideas
it is necessary to study the conditions under which they could
have originated.
The latest edition of the History of Human Marriage opens
with a methodological investigation, in the course of which the
author is led to deal especially with the comparative sociological
method (or the evolutionary school) and the ethnological school,
which particularly studies the cultural contact between peoples.1)
The former, which attempts psychologically to apply biological
and psychological laws to social and cultural phenomena, has
found an answer in the fact that the human psyche is somewhat
similar everywhere, which makes spontaneous origin and similar
expressions of the human spirit possible in the case of different
peoples in different parts of the world. In opposition to this
one the ethnological school bases its theory of common origin
on migration and borrowings through contacts between different
cultural strata. A score of years ago, when Westermarck was at
the height of his sociological activity, the last-named theory was
being propounded with great energy by the Vienna school of
anthropology headed by Graebner and Father Schmidt, and by
x) Also treated by Westermarck in Journ. of the Anthr. Inst. (London
1937).