44 · 文化的模式
Patterns of Culture
区分观点、依据、例子与限制，用自己的话准确重建论述。
阅读提示：原文中的“原始人”“野蛮人”“异教徒”等称谓，是作者讨论、反思文化等级观时使用的时代语言；理解其批评对象，不将这些称谓当作今天描述群体的中性标签。通指人的 he 在中文中按语意译为“人”“一个人”等。
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Anthropology is the study of human beings as creatures of society. It fastens its attention upon those physical characteristics and industrial techniques, those conventions and values, which distinguish one community from all others that belong to a different tradition.
The distinguishing mark of anthropology among the social sciences is that it includes for serious study other societies than our own.…
Now custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual, as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth, the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief over against our neighbour's superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.
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整篇课文
Anthropology is the study of human beings as creatures of society. It fastens its attention upon those physical characteristics and industrial techniques, those conventions and values, which distinguish one community from all others that belong to a different tradition.
The distinguishing mark of anthropology among the social sciences is that it includes for serious study other societies than our own.…
Now custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual, as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth, the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief over against our neighbour's superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.
人类学研究的是作为社会成员的人。它关注不同群体在身体特征、生产技术、习俗和价值观上的差异；正是这些差异，使一个群体有别于其他传统中的群体。
人类学与其他社会科学的一个显著区别，是它把我们自身社会以外的其他社会，也纳入严肃研究的范围。……
人们通常并不认为习俗是什么特别重要的研究对象。我们觉得，自己大脑内部的运作才格外值得探究；至于习俗，总觉得不过是最平常的行为罢了。事实却恰恰相反。放眼世界，传统习俗包含着数量庞大、细致入微的行为，比任何个人凭一己之力形成的行为都更加惊人，无论这个人多么离经叛道。不过，这还只是问题中相当次要的一面。真正重要的是，习俗对人的经历和信念起着支配作用，而且呈现出的形式极其多样。
没有人能以毫无成见的眼光看世界。一个人眼中的世界，早已由特定的习俗、制度和思维方式筛选、整理过。即使进行哲学探索，他也无法完全摆脱这些固有模式；就连他判断真伪的观念，仍然离不开自己所承袭的习俗。约翰·杜威曾郑重地说：习俗塑造个人行为的力量，与个人改变传统习俗的力量相比，就好比母语的全部词汇，与他幼年牙牙学语时说出、后来被家人沿用的那几个词相比。认真研究过那些有机会自主发展的社会秩序，就会发现，这个比喻不过是对事实准确而平实的描述。一个人的一生，首先就是不断适应所在群体世代相传的模式和准则。从出生那一刻起，身边的习俗就在塑造他的经历和行为。等到会说话时，他已是自己文化塑造的小小产物；等到长大、能够参与社会活动时，这个群体的习惯便成了他的习惯，信念便成了他的信念，群体认为不可能的事，他也认为不可能。出生在同一群体的每个孩子，都会与他共享这些东西；而出生在地球另一边某个群体的孩子，连其中的千分之一也未必能拥有。没有哪一个社会问题，比习俗的作用更值得我们认真理解。在弄清习俗的规律和多样性以前，人类生活中那些主要的复杂事实，仍会让我们难以理解。
要让习俗研究取得成果，必须先接受一些基本前提，而其中有些前提曾遭到激烈反对。首先，任何科学研究都要求：对所选取的一系列研究对象，不能预先偏重其中某一项。在仙人掌、白蚁或星云性质等争议较少的研究领域，必要的方法是把相关材料归类，并留意所有可能的变异形式及其条件。比如，我们对天文学规律和群居昆虫习性的了解，都是这样获得的。唯独在研究人类自身时，主要的社会科学却用一种局部形态——西方文明——的研究，代替了对整体的研究。
只要“我们与原始人”“我们与野蛮人”“我们与异教徒”这类区分还支配着人们的头脑，严格说来，人类学就不可能成立。人们必须先有足够成熟的认识，不再把自己的观念称为“信仰”，却把邻人的观念贬作“迷信”。我们必须承认：凡是建立在相同前提——例如超自然观念——之上的制度，都应放在一起考察，我们自己的制度也不例外。
学完这一课
列出比较维度，再明确要区别哪两类群体。
译文依据整理稿，由本站按中文表达重新校订；解析据吴应时整理资料及首轮审校稿；词伙与练习提示为本站学习设计。原PDF第197—204页，2022年2月第2版。