¹ Some writers distinguish the field of Social Anthropology from that of Sociology on the basis of its subject matter (i.e. the study of non-literate or non-European peoples), others on the basis of its techniques (e.g. that of participant observation). For a discussion of these points, see Nadel, Siegfried F., The Foundations of Social Anthropology (London, 1951), p. 2.Google Scholar

² Durkheim, Émile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Swain, Joseph W. (London, 1915), p. 19.Google Scholar

³ Powdermaker, Hortense, Life in Lesu (New York, 1933), p. 292.Google Scholar See also Language, Thought, and Culture, ed. Henle, Paul (Ann Arbor, 1958), pp. 5–18.Google Scholar

⁴ Malinowski, Bronislaw, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages”, in Ogden, C. K. and Richards, I. A., The Meaning of Meaning (London, 1936), pp. 296–336,Google Scholar esp. p. 331. But see also the critical comments by Lévi-Strauss, Claude, La Pensée Sauvage (Paris, 1962), pp. 6, 15–16.Google Scholar

⁵ L' Année sociologique, 7 (1902–1903), pp. 1–72.Google Scholar See also Czarnowski, S., “Le morcellement de l'étendue et sa limitation dans la religion et la magie”, Actes du congrès international d'histoire des religions (Paris, 1925), I, pp. 339–359.Google Scholar

⁶ Jack Goody, unpublished field notes, 1950–52. See also Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), chapter 3, “Time and Space”,Google Scholar and Tait, David, The Konkomba of Northern Ghana (London, 1961), pp. 17 ff.Google Scholar For a general treatment of the subject, see Hallowell, A. Irving, “Temporal Orientations in Western Civilisation and in a Preliterate Society”, American Anthropologist, 39 (1937), pp. 647–670.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris, 1925);Google Scholar“Mémoire et société”, L' Année sociologique, 3e série, 1 (1940–1948), pp. 11–177;Google ScholarLa Mémoire collective, Paris, 1950.Google Scholar See also Bartlett, Frederic C. on the tendency of oral discourse to become an expression of ideas and attitudes of the group rather than the individual speaker, in Remembering (Cambridge, 1932), pp. 265–7,Google Scholar and Psychology and Primitive Culture (Cambridge, 1923), pp. 42–3, 62–3, 256.Google Scholar

⁸ Finley, M. I., The World of Odysseus (New York, 1954), p. 26.Google Scholar

⁹ Bohannan, Laura, “A Genealogical Charter”, Africa, 22 (1952), pp. 301–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peters, Emrys, “The Proliferation of Segments in the Lineage of the Bedouin of Cyrenaica”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 90 (1960), pp. 29–53.Google Scholar See also Godfrey, and Wilson, Monica, The Analysis of Social Change (Cambridge, 1945), p. 27.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ch. 49; further evidence supporting this assumption is found in the etymology of the Hebrew term Toledot, which originally denoted “genealogies”, and assumed also the meaning of “stories and accounts” about the origin of a nation. “In this sense the term was also applied to the account of the creation of heaven and earth” [Gandz, Solomon, “Oral Tradition in the Bible” in Jewish Studies in Memory of George A. Kohut, ed. Baron, Salo W. and Marx, Alexander (New York, 1935), p. 269].Google Scholar

¹¹ The Nuer (Oxford, 1940);Google Scholar“The Nuer of the Southern Sudan” in African Political Systems, ed. Fortes, Meyer and Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan (London, 1940);Google ScholarFortes, Meyer, The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi (London, 1945).Google Scholar

¹² “A Genealogical Charter”, p. 314.

¹³ Barnes, John A., “The Collection of Genealogies”, Rhodes-Livingstone Journal: Human Problems in British Central Africa, 5 (1947), pp. 48–56,Google Scholar esp. p. 52; Fortes, Meyer, “The Significance of Descent in Tale Social Structure”, Africa, 14 (1944), p. 370;CrossRefGoogle ScholarEvans-Pritchard, , The Nuer, pp. 199–200;Google Scholar Peters, “The Proliferation of Segments”, p. 32. See also Cunnison, I. G., The Luapula Peoples of Northern Rhodesia (Manchester, 1959), pp. 108–14.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Jack Goody, unpublished field notes, 1956–7; the heads of the divisions who could not succeed to the paramountcy also claimed descent from sons of the founding ancestor, Jakpa, but this was not an intrinsic part of the myth as usually told, and in any case their number remained constant during the period in question.

¹⁵ Myth in Primitive Psychology (London, 1926), pp. 23, 43.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Boas, Franz, “The Folklore of the Eskimo”, Journal of American Folklore, 64 (1904), p. 2. Lévi-Strauss treats the absence of historical knowledge as one of the distinctive features of la pensée sauvage in contrast to la pensée domestiquée (La Pensée sauvage, p. 349).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Gelb, Ignace J., A Study of Writing (Chicago, 1952), pp. 24ff.Google Scholar

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¹⁹ Voegelin, “Typological Classification”, pp. 75–76.

²⁰ C. F. and F. M. Voegelin classify all these systems (Chinese, Egyptian, Hittite, Mayan and Sumerian-Akkadian) as “alphabet included logographic systems”: because they make use of phonetic devices, they include, under the heading “self-sufficient alphabets”, systems which have signs for consonant-vowel sequences (i.e. syllabaries), for independent consonants (IC), e.g. Phoenician, or for independent consonants plus independent vowels (IC + IV), e.g. Greek. In this paper we employ “alphabet” in the narrower, more usual, sense of a phonemic system with independent signs for consonants and vowels (IC + IV).

²¹ Gelb, , Study of Writing, p. 115;Google ScholarDiringer, David, The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind (New York, 1948), pp. 48, 196.Google Scholar

²² “Protoliterate” is often employed in a rather different sense, as when Kramer, S. N. [“New Light on the Early History of the Ancient Near East”, American Journal of Archaeology, 52 (1948), p. 161]CrossRefGoogle Scholar uses the term to designate the Sumerian phase in Lower Mesopotamia when writing was first invented. There seems to be no generally accepted usage for societies where there is a fully developed but socially restricted phonetic writing system. Dow, Sterling [“Minoan Writing”, American Journal of Archaeology, 58 (1954), pp. 77–129]CrossRefGoogle Scholar characterises two stages of Minoan society: one of “stunted literacy”, where little use was made of writing at all (Linear A); and one of “special literacy” where writing was used regularly but only for limited purposes (Linear B). Piggott, Stuart refers to both these conditions under the name of “conditional literacy” [Approach to Archaeology (London, 1959), p. 104].Google Scholar

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²⁵ cit. Childe, V. Gordon, Man Makes Himself (London, 1941), pp. 187–8;Google Scholar see also What Happened in History (London, 1942), pp. 105, 118.Google Scholar

²⁸ “Egyptian hieroglyphic writing remained fundamentally unchanged for a period of three thousand years”, according to David Diringer [Writing (London, 1962), p. 48]. He attributes the fact that it never lost its cumbrousness and elaboration to “its unique sacredness” (p. 50).Google Scholar

²⁷ Many authorities have commented upon the lack of development in Egypt after the initial achievements of the Old Kingdom: for a discussion (and a contrary view), see Wilson, John A. in Before Philosophy, ed. Frankfort, H. and others (London, 1949), pp. 115–16Google Scholar [pub. in U.S.A. as The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago, 1946)].Google Scholar

²⁸ “The world view of the Egyptians and Babylonians was conditioned by the teaching of sacred books; it thus constituted an orthodoxy, the maintenance of which was in the charge of colleges of priests” [Farrington, Benjamin, Science in Antiquity (London, 1936), p. 37].Google Scholar See also Childe, Gordon, What Happened in History, p. 121.Google Scholar

²⁹ Gelb, , Study of Writing, p. 196, maintains that all the main types of syllabary developed in just this way. Driver rejects the possibility that the Phoenician alphabet was invented on Egyptian soil, as it would have been “stifled at birth” by the “deadweight of Egyptian tradition, already of hoary antiquity and in the hands of a powerful priesthood” (Semitic Writing, p. 187).Google Scholar

³⁰ “Immensely complicated”, Driver calls the pre-alphabetic forms of writing Semitic (Semitic Writing, p. 67).

³¹ For Hittite, see Gurney, O. R., The Hittites (London, 1952), pp. 120–21.Google Scholar For Mycenean, see Chadwick, John, The Decipherment of Linear B (Cambridge, 1958).Google Scholar

³² Chadwick, , The Decipherment of Linear B, p. 130;Google Scholar see also “A Prehistoric Bureaucracy”, Diogenes, 26 (1959), pp. 7–18.Google Scholar

³³ As is exhaustively documented in Diringer, David, The Alphabet, A Key to the History of Mankind (New York, 1948).Google Scholar

³⁴ The Alphabet, pp. 214–218. On the “accidental” nature of this change see C. F. and F. M. Voegelin, “Typological Classification”, pp. 63–4.

³⁵ According to Turner, Ralph E., The Great Cultural Traditions (New York, 1941), I, pp. 346, 391, the Hebrews took over the Semitic system in the eleventh century B.C., and the Indians a good deal later, probably in the eighth century B.C.Google Scholar

³⁵ Gandz, “Oral Tradition in the Bible”, pp. 253–4.

³⁷ e.g. Luke, 20; Matthew, 23; in the 7th century B.C., even kings and prophets employed scribes, Jer. xxxvi, 4, 18.

³⁸ Driver, Semitic Writing, pp. 87–90, where he instances the case of one scribe who having no son “taught his wisdom to his sister's son”.

³⁹ “If the alphabet is defined as a system of signs expressing single sounds of speech, then the first alphabet which can justifiably be so called is the Greek alphabet”. Gelb, , Study of Writing, p. 166.Google Scholar

^39a I. Kings 17, iv-vi; see A Dictionary of the Bible… ed. Hastings, James (New York, 1898–1904), s.v. “Elijah”.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ 810 a. From the ages 10 to 13.

⁴¹ L' Adoption universelle des caracteres latins (Paris, 1934);Google Scholar for more recent developments and documentation, see Gray, William S., The Teaching of Reading and Writing: An International Survey, Unesco Monographs on Fundamental Education X (Paris, 1956), especially pp. 31–60.Google Scholar

⁴² Starr, Chester G., The Origins of Greek Civilization (New York, 1961), pp. 189–190, 349 ff.Google Scholar

⁴³ Starr, , The Origins of Greek Civilization, pp. 87–88, 357.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Starr, , The Origins of Greek Civilization, p. 169.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Jeffery, L. H., The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (Oxford, 1961), p. 21;Google ScholarCook, R. M. and Woodhead, A. G., “The Diffusion of the Greek Alphabet”, American Journal of Archaeology, 63 (1959), pp. 175–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For North Syria, see Sir Woolley, Leonard, A Forgotten Kingdom (London, 1953).Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Chester Starr speaks of its use by “a relatively large aristocratic class” (p. 171) and Miss Jeffery notes that “writing was never regarded as an esoteric craft in early Greece. Ordinary people could and did learn to write, for many of the earliest inscriptions which we possess are casual graffiti” (p. 63).

⁴⁷ Kenyton, Frederic G., Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome (2nd ed., Oxford, 1951), p. 67.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Carcopino, Jérôme, L' Ostracisme athénien (Paris, 1935), pp. 72–110.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Protagoras, 325 d.

⁵⁰ 1. 1114; in 414 B.C. See also Plato, Apology, 26 d, and the general survey of Kenyon, Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome.

⁵¹ The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, 1955), II, p. xiii;Google Scholar and An Essay on Man (New York, 1953), especially pp. 106–130,Google Scholar 281–3. For Jaeger, Werner, see especially The Theology of The Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford, 1947).Google Scholar

⁵² “Magic, Science and Religion” in Science, Religion and Reality, ed. Needham, Joseph (New York, 1925),Google Scholar reprinted Magic, Science and Religion (New York, 1954), p. 27.Google Scholar For an appreciation of Lévy-Bruhl's positive achievement, see Evans-Pritchard, , “LévyBruhl's Theory of Primitive Mentality”, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of Egypt, 2 (1934), pp. 1–36. In his later work, Lévy-Bruhl modified the rigidity of his earlier dichotomy.Google Scholar

⁵³ Witchcraft, , Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford, 1937).Google Scholar See also Gluckman's, Max essay, “Social Beliefs and Individual Thinking in Primitive Society”, Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 91 (1949–1950), pp. 73–98. From a rather different standpoint, Lévi-Strauss has analysed “the logic of totemic classifications” (La Pensée sauvage, p. 48 ff.) and speaks of two distinct modes of scientific thought; the first (or “primitive”) variety consists in “the science of the concrete”, the practical knowledge of the handy man (bricoleur), which is the technical counterpart of mythical thought (p. 26).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ e.g. the Trobriands (Malinowski, , Myth in Primitive Psychology, pp. 33ff).Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Jeffery, , The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, p. 46.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ “It was in Ionia that the first completely rationalistic attempts to describe the nature of the world took place” [Kirk, G. S. and Raven, J. E., The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1957), p. 73]. The work of the Milesian philosophers, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, is described by the authors as “clearly a development of the genetic or genealogical approach to nature exemplified by the Hesiodic Theogony” (p. 73).Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Jacoby, F., Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, Vol. I, Genealogie and Mythographie (Berlin, 1923), fr. 1.a.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Reflections on Violence, trans. Hulme, T. E. (New York, 1941), p. 136;Google Scholarcit. Redfield, Robert, The Primitive World and its Transformations (Ithaca, New York, 1953), p. 125.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ cit. Hone, Joseph, W. B. Yeats (London, 1942), p. 405 (our italics).Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Diels, Hermann, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin, 1951), fr. 11, 23;Google Scholar see also Burnet, John, Early Greek Philosophy (2nd ed.London, 1908), pp. 131,Google Scholar 140–141, and Jaeger, Werner, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford, 1947), pp. 42–7;Google ScholarKirk, and Raven, , The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 163 ff.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, fr. 40, 42, 56, 57, 106; see also Cornford, Francis M., Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought (Cambridge, 1952), pp. 112 ff.;Google ScholarKirk, and Raven, , The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 182 ff.Google Scholar

⁶² Cornford, Francis M., Greek Religious Thought from Homer to the Age of Alexander (London, 1923), xv–xvi.Google Scholar See also Burnet, , Early Greek Philosophy, p. 1.Google Scholar

⁶³ 1st Olympian Ode.

⁶⁴ See Warmington, Eric H., Greek Geography (London, 1934), pp. xiv, xxxviii.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ History, 4, 36–40.

⁶⁶ Warmington, , Greek Geography, pp. xvii–xviii, xli ff.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Cit. Pearson, Lionel, Early Ionian Historians (Oxford, 1939), p. 3.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ Jacoby, Felix, A tthis (Oxford, 1949), p. 354.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ History, I, 1, See also Finley, Moses I. (ed.), The Greek Historians (New York, 1959), pp. 4 ff.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ See Pearson, , Early Ionian Historians, pp. 152–233, especially pp. 193, 232–33.Google Scholar

⁷¹ See, for instance, Malinowski, Bronislaw, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London, 1922), pp. 290–333.Google Scholar

⁷² Thucydides, History, I, 20–22, 97. For a picture of note-taking (hypomnemata) among Athenians, see Theaetetus, 142 c–143 c.

⁷³ Felix Jacoby notes that “fixation in writing, once achieved, primarily had a preserving effect upon the oral tradition, because it put an end to the involuntary shiftings of the mnemai (remembrances), and drew limits to the arbitrary creation of new logoi (stories)” (Atthis, 1949, p. 217). He points out that this created difficulties for the early literate recorders of the past which the previous oral mnemones or professional “remembrancers” did not have to face: whatever his own personal view of the matter, “no true Atthidographer could remove Kekrops from his position as the first Attic king… Nobody could take away from Solon the legislation which founded in nuce the first Attic constitution of historical times.” Such things could no longer be silently forgotten, as in an oral tradition.

The general conclusion of Jacoby's polemic against Wilamowitz's hypothesis of a “pre-literary chronicle” is that “historical consciousness… is not older than historical literature” (p. 201).

⁷⁴ As writers on the indigenous political systems of Africa have insisted, changes generally take the form of rebellion rather than revolution; subjects reject the King, but not the kingship. See Evans-Pritchard, , The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan (The Frazer lecture, Cambridge, 1948), pp. 35ff;Google ScholarGluckman, Max, Rituals of Rebellion in South-East Africa (The Frazer lecture, 1952), Manchester, 1954.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ See Marrou, Henri-Irénée, Histoire de l'éducation dans l'antiquité (Paris, 1948), pp. 76–7, 84–6, 94,, 139–142, 150–2.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Protagoras, 313 e.

⁷⁷ 259 e; 274–275. From Hackforth's, Reginald translation in his Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge, 1952).Google Scholar

⁷⁸ A great deal of relevant information, and a wealth of further references, are given in the valuable article by Notopoulos, James A., “Mnemosyne in Oral Literature,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 69 (1938), pp. 465–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁹ Phaedrus, 276 a.

⁸⁰ 341 c-d. [trans. Bluck, R.S., Plato's Life and Thought (London, 1949)].Google Scholar

⁸¹ Phaedrus, 275 d; 277 c; 275 c.

⁸² For a modern example, see David-Neel, Alexandra and Yongden, Lama, The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects (Calcutta, 1959).Google Scholar

⁸³ See especially Greene, William Chase, “The Spoken and the Written Word”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 60 (1951), pp. 23–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸⁴ 606 e [Jaeger, , Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, pp. 42,Google Scholar 211]. See also Cornford, , Principium Sapientiae, pp. 154–5.Google Scholar

⁸⁵ Memorabilia, i, 6, 16. See also Phaedo, 98–99; Phaedrus, 230 d–e.

⁸⁸ Platon (Berlin, 1919), I, 389.Google Scholar

⁸⁷ See especially Plato's Laws 793 a–c. Plato is shown to represent both the old veneration and the new distrust of Homer in Apfel's, H. V. “Homeric Criticism in the Fourth Century B.C.”, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 69 (1938), p. 247.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ 264 c; 265 d-266 b; 277 b–c.

⁸⁹ The Decline of the West, trans. Atkinson, C. F. (New York, 1934), II, p. 149.Google Scholar

⁹⁰ Statesman, 278. See also Cratylus, 424 b–428 c.

^90a Theaetetus, 201–202. The analogy is continued to the end of the dialogue.

⁹¹ 184 b. There were, of course, many precursors, not only Plato and his laws of the dialectic but the Sophists and grammarians with their semantic interests (see Sandys, John Edwin, A History of Classical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1921), I, pp. 27, 88 ff).Google Scholar

⁹² Jaeger, , Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

⁹³ This question is discussed in greater detail by Goody, Jack in “Religion and Ritual: the Definitional Problem”, British Journal of Sociology, 12 (1961), pp. 142–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹⁴ See, for example, Taylor, Alfred E., Aristotle (London, 1943), pp. 24–39.Google Scholar

⁹⁵ Geography, 608–9, cit. Sandys, , History of Classical Scholarship, I, p. 86.Google Scholar See also ibid., pp. 76–114 and Thompson, James Westfall, Ancient Libraries (Berkeley, 1940), pp. 18–21.Google Scholar

⁹⁶ Decline of the West, II, 150.

⁹⁷ Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, ed. Coss, John J. (New York, 1924), p. 74.Google Scholar

⁹⁸ Cit. Innis, Harold A., “Minerva's Owl”, The Bias of Communication (Toronto, 1951), p. 24.Google Scholar Harold Innis was much occupied with the larger effects of modes of communication, as appears also in his Empire and Communications (Oxford, 1950).Google Scholar This direction of investigation has been taken up by the University of Toronto review Explorations; and the present authors are also indebted to the as yet unpublished work of Professor E. A. Havelock on the alphabetic revolution in Greece. Among the many previous writers who have been concerned with the Greek aspect of the problem, Nietzsche, [Beyond Good and Evil (Edinburgh, 1909), p. 247],Google Scholar and Gasset, José Ortega y [”The Difficulty of Reading”, Diogenes, 28 (1959), pp. 1–17]CrossRefGoogle Scholar may be mentioned. Among those who have treated the differences between oral and literate modes of communication in general, Reisman, David [“The Oral and Written Traditions”, Explorations, 6 (1956), pp. 22–28,Google Scholar and The Oral Tradition, the Written Word and the Screen Image (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1956)] and Park, Robert [“Reflections on Communication and Culture”, American J. of Sociology, 44 (1938), pp. 187–205] are especially relevant here.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹⁹ Gulliver's Travels, Part IV, ch. 9, ed. Case, Arthur E. (New York, 1938), p. 296.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁰ “The Use and Abuse of History”, Thoughts out of Season, trans. Collins, Adrian (Edinburgh, 1909), pp. 33, 9.Google Scholar

¹⁰¹ Chan Kom, a Maya Village (Washington, D.C., 1934);Google ScholarThe Folk Culture of Yucatan (Chicago, 1941);Google ScholarA Village that Chose Progress: Chan Kom Revised (Chicago, 1950);Google Scholar and for a more general treatment, The Primitive World and its Transformations (Ithaca, New York, 1953), pp. 73,Google Scholar 108. See also Worsley, Peter, The Trumpet Shall Sound (London, 1957).Google Scholar For the concept of anomie, see Durkheim, Émile, Le Suicide (Paris, 1897), Book II, Ch. V.Google Scholar

¹⁰² “Our Educational Emphases in Primitive Perspective”, American Journal of Sociology, 48 (1943), p. 637.Google Scholar

¹⁰³ Edda and Saga (London, 1931), pp. 162–3.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁴ Granet, Marcel, La Pensée chinoise (Paris, 1934), especially pp. vii–xi,Google Scholar 8–55; see also Shih, Hu, The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China (Shanghai, 1922).Google Scholar

¹⁰⁵ Cit. Richards, I. A., Mencius on the Mind (London, 1932), p. 35.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁶ Autobiographies (London, 1955), p. 194.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁷ Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, trans. Louise, and Maude, Aylmer (New York, 1942), pp. 1078–9.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁸ Radin, Paul, Crashing Thunder: the Autobiography of an American Indian (New York, 1926),Google Scholar and Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York, 1927).Google Scholar

¹⁰⁹ Smith, Mary F., Baba of Karo, a Woman of the Muslim Hausa (London, 1954).Google Scholar

¹¹⁰ Durkheim, Émile, The Division of Labor in Society, trans. Simpson, G. (New York, 1933), p. 130.Google Scholar

¹¹¹ In the Theaetetus, for example, emphasis is placed on the inner dialogue of the soul in which it perceives ethical ideas “by comparing within herself things past and present with the future” (186 b).

¹¹² Jaeger, , Paideia (Oxford, 1944), II, 18, speaks of the dialogues and the memoirs by many members of the circle of Socrates as “new literary forms invented by the Socratic circle… to re-create the incomparable personality of the master.”Google Scholar

¹¹³ Just as it has been argued that a proper understanding of Homer depends upon a “non-Aristotelian literary criticism” which is appropriate to oral literature: Notopoulos, James A., “Parataxis in Homer: a New Approach to Homeric Literary Criticism”, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 80 (1949), pp. 1, 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹⁴ “Codifications of Reality: Lineal and Nonlineal”, in Freedom and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1959), pp. 105–120;Google Scholar see also her “Conceptual Implications of an Indian Language”, Philosophy of Science, 5 (1938), pp. 89–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹⁵ “Languages and Logic”, Technological Review, 43 (1941),Google Scholar reprinted in Language, Thought, and Reality, Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (New York, 1956), p. 238.Google Scholar

¹¹⁶ “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language”, Language, Culture, and Personality, Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir, ed. by Spier, Leslie (Menasha, Wis., 1941), reprinted in Language, Thought, and Reality, p. 153.Google Scholar

¹¹⁷ op. cit. p. 153.

¹¹⁸ For example in his paper “A linguistic consideration of thinking in primitive communities” (Language, Thought and Reality, pp. 65–86), Whorf discusses Lévy-Bruhl's account of the thinking of primitive man as characterized by participation mystique, and suggests that the differences are related to the structure of language. No mention is made of the role of writing and he seems to see language itself as the independent variable, although in his later paper on “Habitual thought”, he does make a passing reference to writing, as well as to the interdependence of language and culture (p. 153). Lévi-Strauss, who is much concerned with the linguistic aspects of the problem, makes no mention of the role of literacy in his analysis of the differences between la pensée sauvage and la pensée domestiquée, but again the actual process of domestication is peripheral to his study (1962).

¹¹⁹ Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, ch. 17, 84.

¹²⁰ From Max Weber; Essays in Sociology, trans. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York, 1946), pp. 298–9.Google Scholar See also The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, trans. Henderson, A. M. and Parsons, Talcott (New York, 1947), pp. 184–6.Google Scholar

¹²¹ Especially in the “Author's Introduction” to The Protestant Ethic, trans. Parsons, Talcott (London, 1930), pp. 13–31, where Weber gives a rapid but comprehensive survey of the problem of “what combination of circumstances” made some aspects of Western civilization “lie in a line of development having universal significance and value”. See also his lecture “Science as a Vocation” (From Max Weber, especially pp. 138–143).Google Scholar

¹²² The authors are much indebted to John Beattie, Glyn Daniel, Lloyd Fallers, Moses Finley, Joseph Fontenrose, Harry Hoijer, the late Alfred Kroeber, Simon Pembroke and Nur Yalman for reading and commenting upon earlier versions of this paper. They are also grateful to the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, California, for the opportunity of working together on the manuscript in Spring, 1960.