Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1944, Blaðsíða 318
A FINNISH SOCIOLOGIST IN SOUTH
AMERICA
By Ragnar Numelin, Ph. D.
(of the Finnish Foreign Ministry).
A MONG the followers of Edward Westermarck in Finland
/\ (cf. Le Nord 1941: IV) the most original spirit is Rafael
/A Karsten (b. 1879, Lecturer in the Comparative Study of
Religion at the State University in Finland 1907, Professor of
Moral Philosophy 1922): a combative scientist with a well-
developed critical sense and extremely widely read, a field-worker
with a comprehensive first-hand knowledge of primitive ethno-
logy and religion.
Karsten’s main contribution to science lies in the spheres of
field-work and the scientific study of religion, but he has also
lectured and written on philosophical subjects — included among
his publications is Filosofisk etik, the second volume of which
is still to appear — and general sociology.
Perhaps the most suitable way of approaching Karsten is
through a small book Naturfolkens samhallsliv (1928),1 a work
constituting a good and concentrated orientation in many of the
main questions confronting the sociologist: the social instinct, the
origins of society, marriage and the family, age-classes and male
societies, initiation rites, the division of labour, forms of govern-
ment, property rights, judicial institutions. Karsten sees sociology
as a historical-empirical science, the task of which is the analytical
and synthetical elucidation of the development and functions of
social forms.2 The history of morals falls within the sphere of
sociology. Such cultural manifestations again as religion and art,
regarded by many research workers as sociological subjects, are
more appropriately, according to Karsten, to be regarded as
special sciences in spite of all their obvious social significance.
Karsten’s presentation of primitive society is based largely on
'Westermarck, but incorporates individual views. Karsten accepts,
in common with the majority of living sociologists, the hypothesis
of the family as the earliest form of primitive society, but inter-
polates that it had clearly been easier to expose the weakness
of the arguments against the promiscuity theory than to prove
anything positive about the nature of the earliest human society.