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Primitive Messianism and an Ethnological Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Robert H. Lowie
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Extract

One of the perennial problems of theoretical ethnology has been the interpretation of cultural similarities between remote peoples. In fact, the question troubled observers long before the rise of anthropology as a distinct branch of learning. When the painter George Catlin saw Mandan Indians crossing the Missouri in hide-covered craft resembling an inverted open umbrella, he recalled the Welsh coracle and concocted the amazing theory that the Mandan were the descendants of Welsh immigrants to America. Equally flimsy was the view that the natives of America represented the Ten Lost Tribes of Irsael because redskin and Jew shared such observances as menstrual taboos—customs by no means peculiar to them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 5 , Issue 19 , September 1957 , pp. 62 - 72
Copyright
Copyright © 1957 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1. For a general summary of relevant data see Wilson D. Wallis, Messiahs: Their Role in Civilization (Washington, D.C., American Council on Public Affairs, 1943).

2. Ralph Linton, "Nativist Movements," American Anthropologist, XLV (1943), 230-40.

3. A. Métraux, "Les Hommes-dieux chez les chiriguano et dans l'Amerique du Sud," Revista del Instituto de Etnología de la Universidad Nacional de Tucuan, II (1931), 66-91.

4. James Mooney, "The Ghost Dance Religion," Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Part II (Washington, D.C., 1896); A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington, D.C., 1925), pp. 868-73; Cora DuBois, The 1870 Ghost Dance ("Anthropological Records," Vol. III, No. I [Berkeley, 1939]); Leslie Spier, The Prophet Dance of the Northwest and Its Derivatives: The Source of the Ghost Dance ("General Series in Anthropology," No. I [Menasha, Wis., 1935]).

5. Joseph Shooter, The Kafirs of Natal and the Zulu Country (London, 1857), pp. 195-212. Cf. S. C. Willoughby, The Soul of the Bantu (New York, 1928), pp. 123-26.

6. Andreas Lommel, "Der Cargo Kult in Melanesien," Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, LXXVIII (1953), 17-63.

7. Mooney, op. cit., pp. 663-68.

8. Op. cit.

9. Otto Mänchen-Helfen, Reise ins asiatische Tuwa (Berlin, 1931), p. 96; Lommel, op. cit., p. 35; Mooney, op. cit., pp. 677 ff.

10. Curt Nimuendajù, "Die Sagen von der Erschaffung und Vernichtung der Welt als Grundlagen der Religion der Apapocuva-Guarani," Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, XLVI (1914), esp. pp. 287, 318-20, 327, 399.

11. Spier, op. cit., pp. 7 ff.