Lesson55
Custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-off-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree, of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief over against our neighbour's superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.
RUYH BENEDICT Patterns of Culture
参考译文
通常并不认为风俗是具有任何重大意义的主题。我们认为自己脑海深处的活动才是值得研究的，而一般的想法是，风俗不过是最平凡的行为而已。实际上正好相反。世界上不管是哪一种传统风俗，也不管多么偏离常轨，都是比任何个人的行动所能逐渐形成
者更为令人感到惊异的细微行为总体。但这只不过是问题的次要一面。最重要的事实是风俗在经验和信仰上所起的突出作用，以及它五花八门的表现形式。
没有人会以质朴的眼光看这个世界。他看到的是经过特定组合的风俗、制度和思维方式剪辑过的世界。甚至在他的哲学家探索中，他也无法无视这些陈规；他的真理廖误观仍将同他特有的传统风俗有关。John Dewey曾严肃地说过，风俗在塑造个人行为中所起作用
之超过他以任何形式影响传统风俗的程度，犹如他本国语言的总词汇量远远超过被吸收放家庭用语中他自己的童语词汇量一样。当人们认真对有机会自发形成的社会制度进行研究时，这个比喻就成了确切而实事求是的评语。个人的生命史首先和最多也不过是对他
的社团代代相传的模式和准则的适应而已。从诞生开始，他所生于其中的风俗就塑造了他的经验和行为。到他能讲话时，他成为他所属的文化塑造的一个小生物，当他成长并能参与社会活动时，那种文化习惯就是他的习惯，那种文化信仰就是他的信仰，那种文化不可能做
到的他也做不到。在他那一群里诞生的每一个婴儿同他分享这一切，而出生在地球另一侧的婴儿则无一能获得那怕是其中的千分之一。没有任何社会问题比风俗的作用更需我们责无旁贷地予以了解。要到弄清了它的规律和多样性之后，我们才算懂得了人类生命的主要复杂事实。
只有接受了某些初步建议，而这些建议中有一些受到了激烈的反对之后，对风俗的研究才能有得益。首先，任何一种科学研究都要求不对挑选来加以考虑的一系列事件中的这一项或那一项有所偏重。在关于仙人掌、白蚁或星云本质所有这些争议较少的研究领域中，
只需收集有关资料，记下所有可能产生的变化形式和条件就可以了。通过这样做，可以说我们已取得了有关天文学定律或是群居性昆虫习惯等的所有知识。只是在研究人类本身时，主要社会科学才取代对一种地区性变化（例如西方文明）的研究。
只要我们同原始人、我们同野蛮人、我们同异教徒之间存在的区别在人们头脑中占支配地位，人类学按它的定义就不可能存在。首先要达到不再把我们的信仰凌驾于我们邻居的迷信之上的那种高级认识程度。必须认识到，在研究基于同一前提（即称之为超自然）的这
些习俗时，必须把我们自己的放入其余的当中一起来加以考虑。
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