Anthropology and the Classics

Anthropology and the Humanities—on verbal grounds one might suppose them coextensive; yet in
practice they divide the domain of human culture between them. The types of human culture are, in
fact, reducible to two, a simpler and a more complex, or, as we are wont to say (valuing our own
achievements, I doubt not, rightly), a lower and a higher. By established convention Anthropology
occupies itself solely with culture of the simpler or lower kind. The Humanities, on the other hand—
those humanizing studies that, for us at all events, have their parent source in the literatures of
Greece and Rome—concentrate on whatever is most constitutive and characteristic of the higher life
of society.
What, then, of phenomena of transition? Are they to be suffered to form a no-man's-land, a buffer-
tract left purposely undeveloped, lest, forsooth, the associates of barbarism should fall foul of the
friends of civilization? Plainly, in the cause of science, a pacific penetration must be tolerated, nay,
encouraged, from both sides at once. Anthropology must cast forwards, the Humanities cast back.
And there is not the slightest reason (unless prejudice be accounted reason) why conflict should arise
between the interests thus led to intermingle.