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Old World Traits Transplanted
Old World Traits Transplanted
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Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original edition for your reading pleasure. (Worth every penny!)
***
An excerpt from:
Chapter I: Immigrant Heritages.
DURING the past seventy years the various tribes, races, and nationalities of mankind have been examined in detail by the students of ethnology, and a comparison of the results shows that the fundamental patterns of life and behavior are everywhere the same, whether among the ancient Greeks, the modern Italians, the Asiatic Mongols, the Australian blacks, or the African Hottentots. All have a form of family life, moral and legal regulations, a religious system, a form of government, artistic practices, and so forth. An examination of the moral code of any given group, say the African Kaffirs, will disclose many identities with that of any other given group, say the Hebrews. All groups have such "commandments" as Honor thy father and mother," "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not steal." Formerly it was assumed that this similarity was the result of borrowing between groups. When Bastian recorded a Hawaiian myth resembling the one of Orpheus and Eurydice, there was speculation as to how this story had been carried so far from Greece. But it is now recognized that similarities of culture are due, in the main, not to imitation, but to parallel development. The nature of man is everywhere essentially the same and tends to express itself everywhere in similar sentiments and institutions.
HERITAGES DEFINED
On the other hand, the different races and nationalities differ widely in the details of their conception and practice of life, and even their behavior in connection with general ideals which they hold in common is often curiously and startlingly different. Thus, "Honor thy father and mother" implies among certain African tribes that children shall kill their parents when the latter reach a certain age. Among these people life after death is conceived as a continuation of this life, under somewhat improved conditions, and the parents wish to reach the next world while still young enough to enjoy it. Similarly, among many peoples "faithful unto death" does not exhaust the possibilities of marital fidelity; the widow is expected to follow the husband to the next world. When, in 1836, the English governor of India forbade the suttee (the practice of burning widows) a petition was presented, signed by 18,000 persons, many of them representing the best families of Calcutta, requesting the revocation of the edict.
These examples illustrate the well-known fact that different races and nationalities attach values to different things, and different values to the same thing. This is the chief factor in the problem of "Americanization," of harmonizing the life of the immigrants with our own. Every human group has developed in the course of its experience a certain fund of values particular to itself and a set of attitudes toward these values. Thus, a poem, a folk dance, a church, a school, a coin, is a value, and the appreciation of any one of these objects is an attitude. The object, the practice, the institution, is the value; the feeling toward it is the attitude. For the purpose of the, present study we call the fund of attitude and values which an immigrant group bring to America—the totality of its sentiments and practices—its "heritage."
ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS
We add below some documents illustrating further the variety of attitudes and values which exist in the world and which may be brought to America as immigrant heritages. These are used at this point simply as a concrete means of defining heritages. They are not an attempt to characterize the groups in question, though they necessarily do this to some extent. It would be possible to cite in connection with each group examples of both good and bad heritages, as we have done in the case of the Chinese.
1. When I was five years old I began to go to cheder [school] . . . Such was my diligence that I went through the sidur [prayer book] and the Pentateuch in one winter, and I also began to study "Gemorah." At six and a half, my father brought me into the famous yeshiba of Vilna...
The sole source of maintenance for almost all the yeshiba-bahurim [pupils] was the system of "day eating," at the homes of some well-to-do or poorer members of the community—at a different home each day. As a rule, the bahurim are not residents of the city where the yeshiba is situated. To maintain them, each is assigned to eat one day in the week in certain houses; he thus rotates through seven houses a week...
***
An excerpt from:
Chapter I: Immigrant Heritages.
DURING the past seventy years the various tribes, races, and nationalities of mankind have been examined in detail by the students of ethnology, and a comparison of the results shows that the fundamental patterns of life and behavior are everywhere the same, whether among the ancient Greeks, the modern Italians, the Asiatic Mongols, the Australian blacks, or the African Hottentots. All have a form of family life, moral and legal regulations, a religious system, a form of government, artistic practices, and so forth. An examination of the moral code of any given group, say the African Kaffirs, will disclose many identities with that of any other given group, say the Hebrews. All groups have such "commandments" as Honor thy father and mother," "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not steal." Formerly it was assumed that this similarity was the result of borrowing between groups. When Bastian recorded a Hawaiian myth resembling the one of Orpheus and Eurydice, there was speculation as to how this story had been carried so far from Greece. But it is now recognized that similarities of culture are due, in the main, not to imitation, but to parallel development. The nature of man is everywhere essentially the same and tends to express itself everywhere in similar sentiments and institutions.
HERITAGES DEFINED
On the other hand, the different races and nationalities differ widely in the details of their conception and practice of life, and even their behavior in connection with general ideals which they hold in common is often curiously and startlingly different. Thus, "Honor thy father and mother" implies among certain African tribes that children shall kill their parents when the latter reach a certain age. Among these people life after death is conceived as a continuation of this life, under somewhat improved conditions, and the parents wish to reach the next world while still young enough to enjoy it. Similarly, among many peoples "faithful unto death" does not exhaust the possibilities of marital fidelity; the widow is expected to follow the husband to the next world. When, in 1836, the English governor of India forbade the suttee (the practice of burning widows) a petition was presented, signed by 18,000 persons, many of them representing the best families of Calcutta, requesting the revocation of the edict.
These examples illustrate the well-known fact that different races and nationalities attach values to different things, and different values to the same thing. This is the chief factor in the problem of "Americanization," of harmonizing the life of the immigrants with our own. Every human group has developed in the course of its experience a certain fund of values particular to itself and a set of attitudes toward these values. Thus, a poem, a folk dance, a church, a school, a coin, is a value, and the appreciation of any one of these objects is an attitude. The object, the practice, the institution, is the value; the feeling toward it is the attitude. For the purpose of the, present study we call the fund of attitude and values which an immigrant group bring to America—the totality of its sentiments and practices—its "heritage."
ILLUSTRATIVE DOCUMENTS
We add below some documents illustrating further the variety of attitudes and values which exist in the world and which may be brought to America as immigrant heritages. These are used at this point simply as a concrete means of defining heritages. They are not an attempt to characterize the groups in question, though they necessarily do this to some extent. It would be possible to cite in connection with each group examples of both good and bad heritages, as we have done in the case of the Chinese.
1. When I was five years old I began to go to cheder [school] . . . Such was my diligence that I went through the sidur [prayer book] and the Pentateuch in one winter, and I also began to study "Gemorah." At six and a half, my father brought me into the famous yeshiba of Vilna...
The sole source of maintenance for almost all the yeshiba-bahurim [pupils] was the system of "day eating," at the homes of some well-to-do or poorer members of the community—at a different home each day. As a rule, the bahurim are not residents of the city where the yeshiba is situated. To maintain them, each is assigned to eat one day in the week in certain houses; he thus rotates through seven houses a week...
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