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 against any
way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the
total vocabulary of his mother tongue against those words of his own baby talk
that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously
studies the 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 mature 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 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.&