swanton: anthropology and provincialism 289 



more clearly what are the essential accompaniments of human 

 life and human association, what are its nonessentials, also what 

 institutions have been worked out by different peoples and found 

 of benefit, what have been found harmful, what laws seem to be 

 justified by the experience of mankind in other parts of the world 

 and in other periods. In this way anthropology paves the way 

 for a broader outlook on the questions which every culture center, 

 every people, nay every individual, has to face. It renders 

 available as guides, not merely the experience of our immediate 

 ancestors, of related peoples, of our cultural forebears who 

 happened to be possessed of the art of writing, but the experience 

 and experiments of all peoples without any limit other than that 

 set by the boundaries of the globe or the extent to which human 

 memorials have been preserved. 



And in the very processes that this study sets at work there 

 is involved a most important corollary. As the more intelligent 

 of all nations seize upon data provided in this manner the cos- 

 mopolitanization of thought is certain to extend until mutual 

 toleration and appreciation take the place of mutual repugnance, 

 dislike, and hostility, and much of the psychology that now 

 ultimates itself in war passes away. An obsession that the good 

 of the world requires that its culture shall be all German, or 

 French, or English, or American is but the display on a wider 

 field of the provincialism which holds that it should be patterned 

 on that of Jones county or Smithville. It is an obsession that 

 the prosecution of anthropological studies and the diffusion of the 

 results of such studies are certain to destroy, and I presume that 

 no reasonable human being will, in the light of current history, 

 consider such destruction of other than practical value. 



