Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1944, Page 322

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LE NORD
with a couple of scalps. Karsten’s researches in this field have
been highly valued also by American sociologists.9
There is much new material also in Karsten’s Inkariket och
dess kultur (1938), a work based both on personal research ex-
tending without a break over a period of close on twenty years
and on the archaeological researches carried out at Cuzco before
the Great War and the study of old sources previously very
little utilized, if at all. The main weight in this work is on
social conditions and religion in the ancient Inca state Tahuan-
tinsuyu. Karsten shows that among the South American Indians
the division into clans and agrarian. communism are ancient in-
stitutions which were not introduced by the Incas, but were
built on by the Inca state when it created a real state organization
with an efficient system of administration that — contrary to
the opinion or earlier explorers — did not oppress the lower
classes. In the legislative sphere the Inca state anticipated
social measures, the usefulness of which it was left to our own
modern community to discover. Sun-worship, spread by the Incas,
has ancient forerunners among the peoples of the Andes, in the
same way as other religious institutions which existed there be-
fore the Incas. That the Inca state collapsed can be ascribed
partly to the conservatism and passivity that characterize the
mountain Indians even to-day, but above all to the circum-
stance that the Indians were here confronted with a statecraft
to whose ruthless methods they were unequal.
This industrious researcher is reported at present to be
engaged on a work dealing with Lapp religion, a history of
sociology, and the revision of an earlier work: Studies in Primitive
Greek Religion (1907).
Karsten’s individuality finds expression already in his con-
ception of sociology as a science, not least in regard to its
methods. As sociology is an empirical and not a speculative
science, it follows that its methods must be historical and psy-
chological and essentially inductive in character. The task of
sociology is to describe the origin and development of social
phenomena and discover the laws governing their development.
A hypothesis that cannot be verified by concrete evidence is of
little value. Opposition to comparative ethnology is perhaps most
clearly marked in his South American researches. Karsten, whose
own guiding principle is “intensive study of limited areas”, rightly
draws attention to the lack on the part of comparative ethnology