Peter Farb Quotes

89 Sourced Quotes

About 1932 one of Sapir's students at Yale, Benjamin Lee Whorf drew on Sapir's ideas and began an intensive study of the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Whorf's brilliant analysis... seemed to support the view that man is a prisoner of his language. Whorf emphasized grammar—rather than vocabulary, which had previously intrigued scholars—as an indicator of the way a language can direct a speaker into certain habits of thought.

Peter Farb
Gestures and facial expressions do indeed communicate, as anyone can prove by turning off the sound on a television set and asking watchers to characterize the speakers from the picture alone.

Peter Farb
An inability to communicate has little to do with international friction-as is seen in the special ferocity of wars fought between people who speak the same language.

Peter Farb
Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo.

Peter Farb
At every moment of his life the Shoshone must be careful to observe the complicated folkways of his group, to do reverence to superhuman powers, to remember the courtesies and obligations of family, to pay homage to certain sacred plants, or to avoid particular places.

Peter Farb
Men in all societies possess the biological equipment to remove their hats or shoes, but it is the birth within a particular culture that decides that a Jew will keep his hat and shoes on in his place of worship, a Mohammedan will take off his shoes, and a Christian will keep his shoes on but remove his hat.

Peter Farb
No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

Peter Farb
An invention or new combination can be successful only if all if the elements necessary for the recombination are present in the culture.

Peter Farb
An incestuous marriage establishes no new bonds between unrelated groups; it is an absurd denial to the right to increase the number of people whom one can trust. Marriages in simple societies are... usually alliances between families rather than romantic arrangements between individuals.

Peter Farb
The Indians have not only refused to vanish, but have... managed to salvage a part of their native culture through revitalization and messianic movements.... they are of further interest to anthropologists for the light they shed on such movements in general.

Peter Farb
The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms.

Peter Farb
The more simple the society, the more leisured its way of life.

Peter Farb
Within a century or so after the discovery of America, more than fifty new foods had been carried back to the Old World, including maize, turkey, white potato, pumpkin, squash, the so-called Jerusalem artichoke, avocado, chocolate, and several kinds of beans. (Potatoes and maize now rank second and third in total tonnage of the world's crops, behind rice but ahead of what is probably man's oldest cultivated grain, wheat.) The European has turned for relief to drugs and pharmaceuticals the Indians discovered: quinine, ephedrine, novocaine, curare, ipecac, and witch hazel.

Peter Farb
A human being cannot survive alone and be entirely human. It is through the nature of their social and political institutions that the differences and similarities among cultures are to be accounted for.

Peter Farb
In 1830... Joseph Smith... prophesied that a New Jerusalem would arise in the wilds... The Mormons sent emissaries to the Indians, whom he renamed the Lamanites, inviting them to join the Mormon colonies and to be baptized. Joseph Smith was also to have prophesied in 1843 that if he... lived until 1890—the messiah would appear in human form.... It was in 1890 that... Wovoka appeared and began teaching the [revitalized] Ghost Dance religion.

Peter Farb
General Phil Sheridan... had urged the destruction of the bison herds, correctly predicting that when they disappeared the Indians would disappear along with them; by 1885 the bison were virtually extinct, and the Indians were starving to death on the plains.... the Indian Wars finally ended; and with the enforced peace came an economic recession in the West, for the United States government had spent there about one million dollars for every Indian killed by 1870.

Peter Farb
At the time of the Europeans discovery of North America, the American Indians already cultivated a wider variety of plants than did the Europeans.

Peter Farb
About 1790 the Cherokee decided to adopt the ways of their White conquerors and... established churches, mills, schools, and well cultivated farms... they adopted a written constitution providing for an executive, a bicameral legislature, a supreme court, and a code of laws.

Peter Farb
The Puritans failed miserably in their dealings with the Indians of New England, with scarcely a glimmer of kindness to illuminate black page after black page of cruelty and humiliation.... conversion of the heathen was not one of the compelling motives—or justifications—for the Puritan settling of New England...

Peter Farb
When the Pequots resisted the migration of settlers into the Connecticut Valley in 1637, a party of Puritans surrounded the Pequot village and set fire to it. About five hundred Indians were burned to death or shot while trying to escape... The woods were then combed for any Pequots who had managed to survive, and these were sold into slavery. Cotton Mather was grateful to the Lord that "on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to hell."

Peter Farb
The seventeenth-century Iroquois... practiced a dream psychotherapy that was remarkably similar to Freud's discoveries two hundred years later. The Iroquois recognized the existence of an unconscious, the force of unconscious desires, the way in which the conscious mind attempts to repress unpleasant thoughts, the emergence of unpleasant thoughts in dreams, and the mental and physical (psychosomatic) illnesses that may be caused by the frustration of unconscious desires. The Iroquois knew that their dreams did not deal in facts but rather in symbols.... And one of the techniques employed by the Iroquois seers to uncover the latent meanings behind a dream was free association...

Peter Farb
Complex civilization is hectic... such hunters and collectors of wild food as the Shoshone are among the most leisured people on earth.

Peter Farb
... the intensity of the indignation was in direct proportion to a White's distance from the Indian. On the frontier, the Indian was regarded as a besotted savage; but along the eastern seaboard, where the Spaniards, Dutch, English, and later Americans had long since exterminated all the Indians, philosophers and divines began to defend the Red Man.

Peter Farb
Perhaps we, who for so long regarded ourselves as bringers of light to the shadowy recesses of North America, will finally admit that there is much about which the Indians can illuminate us.

Peter Farb
The Whites were in full control... remnants were shifted about again and again... All of which led Sioux chief Spotted Tail, grown old and wise, to ask the weary question: "Why does not the Great Father put his red children on wheels, so he can move them as he will?"

Peter Farb
Voluntary assimilation, known as Indianization in the Americas, is one response that has occurred at other places and in other times when two cultures collided. An unusual manifestation of it is when the whole dominant culture takes up the ways of the conquered. That does not happen very often, but it did occur when the Hyksos conquered Egypt about 1700 B. C. and when the Romans conquered the Greeks in the second century B. C.

Peter Farb
There are strong parallels between the hope for salvation of the Jews and the hopes of the Indians who followed native prophets, between the early Christian martyrs and the Indian revolts against United States authority, between the Hebrew and the [native American] Indian prophets.... the Jews and early Christians have served as models for oppressed peoples from primitive cultures... Almost everywhere the White missionary has penetrated, primitive people have borrowed from his bible those elements in which they saw a portrayal of their own plight... They regard the arrest and execution of a native on charges of being a rebel against White authority in the same terms as the trials undergone by the Hebrew prophets or the passion of Jesus.

Peter Farb
What most impresses the people around the prophet is the personality change he has undergone.... when stress reaches a certain intensity in the culture, only certain individuals feel called forth to become prophets while most do not. In any event, the prophet has emerged in a new cultural role, and his personality is liberated from the stress that called his response into being in the first place. Immune to the stress under which his brethren still suffer, he must appear to them supernatural.

Peter Farb
To say that the invention "was in the air" or "the times were ripe for it" are just other ways of stating that the inventors did not do the inventing, but that the cultures did.

Peter Farb
Before the passage of the Removal Act of 1830, a group of Cherokee chiefs went to the Senate committee that was studying this legislation to report on what they had already achieved... They expressed the hope that they would be permitted to enjoy in peace "the blessings of civilization and Christianity on the soil of their rightful inheritance." Instead they were... denied even the basic protection of the federal government. The Removal Act was carried out almost everywhere with total lack of compassion, but in the case of the Cherokee—civilized and Christianized as they were—it was particularly brutal.

Peter Farb