Here are differences in the character of the cultural life which can scarcely be measured quantitatively in terms of gross intellectual capacity. Historical causes do not, it seems, adequately account for them. So far as this is true we are perhaps warranted in regarding them as modifications of transmitted tradition due to innate traits of the people who have produced them. Granted that civilization, as we find it, is due to the development of communication and the possibility of mutual exchange of cultural materials, still every special culture is the result of a selection and every people borrows from the whole fund of cultural materials not merely that which it can use but which, because of certain organic characteristics, it finds stimulating and interesting.
The question then resolves itself into this: How far do racial characteristics and innate biological interests determine the extent to which one racial group can and will take over and assimilate the characteristic features of an alien civilization? How far will it merely take over the cultural forms, giving them a different content or a different inflection? This problem, so far as it is related to the lives of primitive peoples, has already been studied by the ethnologists. Rivers, in his analysis of the cultures of Australian people, has found that what we have hitherto regarded as primitive cultures are really fusions of other and earlier forms of culture.81 The evidence of this is the fact that the fusion has not been complete. In the process of interchange it frequently happens that what Rivers calls the "fundamental structure" of a primitive society has remained unchanged while the relatively formal and external elements of alien culture only have been taken over and incorporated with it.
There are indications also that, where cultural borrowings have taken place, the borrowed elements have for the people who have taken them over a meaning different from what they had for the people from whom they were borrowed. W.J. McGee, in an article entitled "Piratical Acculturation," has given an interesting illustration of this fact.82 McGee's observations of the Beri Indians go to show that they imitated the weapons of their enemies, but that they regarded them as magical instruments and the common people did not even know their names. There are numerous other illustrations of this so-called "piratical acculturation" among the observations of ethnologists. It is said that the Negroes in Africa, when they first came into possession of the white man's guns, regarded them as magical instruments for making a noise and used them, as the Germans used the Zeppelins and the newspapers, merely to destroy the enemy's morale.
No doubt the disposition of primitive peoples is to conceive everything mystically, or animistically, to use the language of ethnology, particularly where it concerns something strange. On the other hand, when the primitive man has encountered among the cultural objects to which civilization has introduced him, something which he has been able to make immediately intelligible to himself, he has at once formed a perfectly rational conception of it. Some years ago at Lovedale, South Africa, the seat of one of the first successful industrial mission schools, there was an important ceremony to which all the native African chiefs in the vicinity were formally invited. It was the introduction and demonstration of the use of the plow, the first one that had ever been seen in those parts. The proceedings were followed with great interest by a large gathering of natives. When the demonstration was finished one old chief turned to his followers and said with great conviction: "This is a great thing which the white man has brought us. One hoe like that is worth as much as ten wives." An African chief could hardly have expressed appreciation of this one fundamental device of our civilization in more pragmatic or less mystical terms. The wise old chief grasped the meaning of the plow at once, but this was because he had been pre-adapted by earlier experience to do so.
It is the subjective, historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult, though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious institutions to people of a different racial type and a different social tradition. William James' essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," in which he points out how completely we are likely to miss the point and mistake the inner significance of the lives of those about us, unless we share their expedience, emphasizes this fact. If then the transmission and fusion of cultures is slow, incomplete and sometimes impossible, it is because the external forms, the formulas, technical devices of every social tradition can be more easily transmitted than the aims, the attitudes, sentiments and ideals which attach to them are embodied in them. The former can be copied and used; the latter must be appreciated and understood.
For a study of the acculturation process, there are probably no materials more complete and accessible than those offered by the history of the American Negro. No other representatives of a primitive race have had so prolonged and so intimate an association with European civilization, and still preserved their racial identity. Among no other people is it possible to find so many stages of culture existing contemporaneously. It has been generally taken for granted that the Negro brought a considerable fund of African tradition and African superstition from Africa to America. One not infrequently finds in the current literature and even in standard books upon the Negro, references to voodoo practices among the Negroes in the Southern States. As a matter-of-fact the last authentic account which we have of anything approaching a Negro nature worship in the United States took place in Louisiana in 1884. It is described by George W. Cable in an article on "Creole Slave Songs" which appeared in the Century Magazine in 1886. In this case it seems to have been an importation from the West Indies. I have never found an account of a genuine instance of voodoo worship elsewhere in the United States, although it seems to have been common enough in the West Indies at one time.
My own impression is that the amount of African tradition which the Negro brought to the United States was very small. In fact, there is every reason to believe, it seems to me, that the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind him almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament. It is very difficult to find in the South today anything that can be traced directly back to Africa. This does not mean that there is not a great deal of superstition, conjuring, "root doctoring" and magic generally among the Negroes of the United States. What it does mean is that the superstitions we do find are those which we might expect to grow up anywhere among an imaginative people, living in an intellectual twilight such as exists on the isolated plantations of the Southern States. Furthermore, this superstition is in no way associated, as it is in some of the countries of Europe, southern Italy for example, with religious beliefs and practices. It is not part of Negro Christianity. It is with him, as it is with us, folk-lore pure and simple. It is said that there are but two African words that have been retained in the English language. One of these is the word Buckra, from which comes Buckra Beach in Virginia. This seems remarkable when we consider that slaves were still brought into the United States clandestinely up to 1862.83
The explanation is to be found in the manner in which the Negro slaves were collected in Africa and the manner in which they were disposed of after they arrived in this country. The great markets for slaves in Africa were on the West Coast, but the old slave trails ran back from the coast far into the interior of the continent, and all the peoples of Central Africa