swanton: anthropology and provincialism 287 



any one may happen to have needs correction by a study of the 

 outlook of individuals belonging to other centers. Thus in 

 pre-Columbian North America we find that there was a culture 

 center in the eastern woodlands, one on the North Pacific coast, 

 one in the semi-arid Southwest, one, or perhaps, two, in Mexico 

 and Central America, and one in the West Indies. In South 

 America were two or three scattered along the Andean chain 

 and one in the region of Guiana. Turning to the Old World, 

 we are at once arrested by a few well-known culture centers like 

 those of China, India, and the eastern Mediterranean, while 

 centers more obscure may be detected in Polynesia and north- 

 east Africa. On examining some of these we note the further 

 interesting fact that they were originally complex, having resulted 

 from the fusion of several originally independent centers. This 

 is true in a way of the center in the eastern woodlands of North 

 America and those on the Andean plateau, but the most con- 

 spicuous example of the kind is to be found in that great east 

 Mediterranean culture center from which our own civilization is 

 descended. This is found to have incorporated a center in the 

 Nile valley, another in the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris, a 

 third on the island of Crete, and probably a fourth in eastern 

 Asia Minor. These facts show that we must not consider culture 

 centers as so many water-tight — or rather influence-tight — com- 

 partments having no meaning for one another. On the contrary 

 it is not likely that a single one could be pointed out which had 

 been affected in no degree by at least one other, and there is 

 reason to believe that there has never been a time when thought 

 vibrations have not been able to reach all parts of the human race, 

 no people that may be said to have been intellectually sterilized. 

 Each of these centers is to be regarded as the result of a particular 

 running-together or complex of thought waves, a systematization 

 of ideas found in their crude and dissociated condition among all 

 human beings, or at least among many more than those consti- 

 tuting the particular center. 



At the same time anthropology does not lose sight of or ignore 

 peoples not included in culture Centers. Viewed in one way they 

 may be divided up and attached to the several centers as so many 



