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Author Title
1
Arression No.
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Paul
Primitive man as philosophy
This book shoulJ be returned on or bctou: the date
last
inarK,
4
Man
Primitive
as Philosopher Dr. Radin here essays to describe the of
role
peoples
thought the
among
attitude
among them towards
of
primitive thinkers
the
life
and
society,
the theories held of the soul, the
human
personality, the nature of the external
world, let
etc.
how
Dr, Radin knows
to
the aboriginal speak for himself, but
illuminated always by the proximity of the highly sophisticated mind, so that
the primitive appears always warmer, nearer to our time, and to
our
understanding.
more
accessible
The
material
offered holds great fascination
and
derived largely from the author's
is
own
first-hand investigations of the life of
the
Winnebago
Indians.
Primitive Man as Philosopher by
Paul Radin, Ph.D. Research Fellow of Yale University and sometime Lecturer in Ethnology in Cambridge University; editor of "Crashing Thunder, the Autobiography of an American Indian"
with a foreword by
John Dewcy Professor of Philosophy in Columbia University
New
York and London
D, Appleton and Company 1927
COPYRIGHT, D.
1927,
APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
MY WIFE
PREFACE When a modern of
historian desires to study the civilization
any people, he regards
he divest himself, so
He
as a necessary preliminary that
it
far as possible, of all prejudice
between cultures
realizes that differences
does not feel that differs in
people
it is
exist,
bias.
but he
necessarily a sign of inferiority that
customs from his own.
ever, to be a limit to
and
what an historian
a
There seems, howtreats as legitimate
a limit not always easy to determine. On the may be said that he very naturally passes the same
difference,
whole
it
judgments that the majority of his fellow countrymen do. Hence, if some of the differences between admittedly civilized peoples often call forth unfavorable judgments or even provoke outbursts of horror, how much more must we expect this to
be the case where the differences are of so funda-
mental a nature as those separating us from people we have been accustomed to call uncivilized.
The term
whom
a very vague one, and it is spread over a vast medley of peoples, some of whom have "uncivilized"
is
comparatively simple customs and others extremely complex ones. Indeed, there can be said to be but two characteristics possessed in common by all these peoples, the absence of a written language and the fact of original posses-
when the various civilized European and Asiatic nations came into contact with them. But among all aboriginal races appeared a number of customs which sion of the soil
undoubtedly seemed exceedingly strange to their European and Asiatic conquerors. Some of these customs they had never heard of; others they recognized as similar to observvli
PREFACE
viii
ances and beliefs exi