4o6 swanton: internationaIv misunderstandings 



double-dealing has no abiding place in his thoughts. The 

 problem of rendering justice to the intentions of our immediate 

 neighbors and associates is, however, a matter of individual 

 ethics and must be considered by each as his personal problem. 

 What I wish to call attention to here is a similar attribution of 

 motive as between groups of people, races, nations, classes, 

 because in it is to be found the source of endless misunderstand- 

 ings and the seed-bed for a large part of the controversies and 

 wars which have afflicted mankind. 



Every human group assumes that its peculiar views and cus- 

 toms are the normal, sane views and customs which everyone 

 should hold, and that the deviations which are observed among 

 its neighbors are departures from that norm which prove them 

 to be inferior creatures, to be tolerated, if necessary, and sup- 

 pressed, if possible. The home people being normal and the 

 foreign people abnormal, one should expect in the latter not 

 merely abnormal ideas and actions but even abnormal physical 

 characteristics. Hence those persistent reports of cannibals, 

 Amazons, centaurs, men with eyes in their breasts, and so on. 

 Within the memory of the writer a book of African travel pub- 

 lished by Harper Bros, was advertised to contain arguments 

 for the existence of "tailed men" in Africa. It is only in recent 

 years that the world has been obliged to content itself with 

 pygmies and give up all of the other abnormal races for which 

 it had been eagerly looking. In abandoning its mythic race 

 with physical tails, however, the world has been unable or un- 

 willing to give up its men with mental tails, i.e., mental ab- 

 normalities. Even neighboring, cultured peoples are called 

 "queer," or "funny," simply because they are different, and 

 there is nothing that the average civilized human being is un- 

 willing to believe regarding the more primitive peoples of the 

 earth. This view was unintentionally encouraged by some early 

 anthropologists who in their heroic efforts to divest themselves 

 of preconceived ideas regarding the lower races almost removed 

 the latter from the human category. They deceived themselves 

 and their readers alike, by assuming that to be most primitive 

 which was most diverse from that to which they and their own 



