“What I wish to make clear … is … that from all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics.” Thus the founder of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schroedinger, expounds in a recent book “the obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for … events” which occur in a living organism.

The full moon in May is the occasion of the greatest festival of the year in the Buddhist world, it being the triple anniversary of the birth of Sakyamuni, of his ascent to the omniscience of a Buddha, and of his final extinction in Parinirvana. Ceylon and the countries of southeast Asia, which adopted the Singhalese Buddhism in the thirteenth century—Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos—are monsoon lands where the month of May coincides with the beginnings of the rains, thus signaling great rejoicing exemplified by offerings to the monks, recitals of prayers, and nocturnal circumambulations of the temples by the faithful torchbearers.

India has furnished the work of the English historian with a relatively large number of its elements. Without a doubt there is in this domain no material comparable in density and in erudite development to the excursus on the Achaemenian Empire which fills pages 580-689 of Volume VII of A Study of History. But there are enough passages, both long and short, to enable the reader fully to discern the author's reaction to this civilization. Where, indeed, would he have found so many motivated changes, so many external stimuli and internal absorptions, coupled with such continuity in time and in human habitation, to illustrate the general theses of his work?

American ethnologists are currently discovering a type of man and a “culture.” Their attention had been focussed for a long while on the various Indian tribes as a favored field of investigation, and, more recently, on the inhabitants of large or middle-sized American cities. This scientific “isolationism” had, therefore, effectively hidden from them the condition of the two-thirds of humanity who are neither “primitives” nor city-dwellers but, rather, peasants.

Robert Redfield, whose first inquiries took him to Mexico, there encountered what he called “folk culture.” Dispersed about the globe, his students brought back studies which led him to think that “peasant society and culture have a generic quality. This species of human organization has a certain uniformity throughout the world.” Studying the life of Polish, Chinese, European, Latin-American, and Hindu peasants, he noted what he calls “this imperturbable sameness.”

In his article on tragedy (Diogenes, No. 7), Mr. Charles G. Bell has offered us some provocative insights and opinions. I am compelled to question, however, some of the basic concepts he brings to the interpretation of tragedy.

It would seem that Mr. Bell, despite the depth of his thinking, has embraced several of the current clichés, which perhaps have their origin in the writings of A. C. Bradley. Critics adhering to this school hold that, for one reason or another, it is not possible to write tragedy in the twentieth century and that no work ending in bleak pessimism or despair is tragic. Mr. Bell, combining literary and historical criteria, is particularly severe in his limitation of the field of tragedy and the possibilities open to it. If I read him aright, only Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and the earlier Sophocles (before he fell from grace) have ever really earned admission to the exclusive realm.

In the long history of man, not the least interesting moments have been those ebullient and often creative occasions when two of his civilizations have met and mingled. One thinks most readily of the Hellenistic period, that entrancing millennium in the Near East from Alexander to Muhammad, which gave rise to so much ferment and so much of permanent and profound consequence for all our lives. One might think also, perhaps, of “Indo-China,” as designating not a political entity today but a cultural occasion and achievement in the classical past; or of the Muslims of India, who also for a millennium have for good or ill been the children as it were of a broken home—itself based on a shotgun wedding. These, it might be argued, would repay intensive study in our day, for an understanding of intercultural contact, more richly than can the oversimplified instances, dear to the anthropologist, of the one-sided impact of massive, dynamic “civilization” on the so-called underdeveloped cultures of our contemporary “primitives.” Yet these occasions in the past of civilizations in mutual impingement, fascinating though they be and instructive, and deserving, I think, of much more attention than they currently command, nonetheless adumbrate only partially what is happening in our world today. It is something unique that is going on before our eyes.

Some of us may still remember the time when the ancient civilizations— the Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese—were considered as isolated phenomena and as products of completely independent developments. It was only for later periods that influences from outside were conceded to a certain, rather limited, extent, such as those of the Near East in Greece, of Hellenism in India, or of the nomad peoples in China. In general, specialists looked but rarely beyond the invisible walls with which they had surrounded their domains. There were even those who resented any allusion to the possibility that foreign influence might have contributed to the formation of their favorite civilization. A few bold scholars had already attempted to trace cultural diffusion across wider expanses, to prove, for instance, that Chinese civilization was derived directly from that of Babylonia. But these premature and rather naïve attempts, based on entirely insufficient data, were only apt to discourage any too daring comparison.

Modern literature, viewed superficially, presents two phenomena that attest its vitality rather than its decline, at least in our Vestern countries: the anormal development of the novel and the advent of criticism as a genre.

The novel today appears to be omniscient and does not always succeed in disguising its didactic intent. Formerly, the various disciplines—once their methods were acquired and their end discerned—detached themselves from literature, leaving to it exclusively the domain of fiction. Devoured by the voracity of the novel, not only the young and as yet uncertain sciences such as psychoanalysis, ethnology, and criminology, but older ones as well, like philosophy, history or law, come back to it and use it readily in maintaining their theses and in emphasizing their needs. Thus the novel takes over their diverse ambitions.

Confucian humanist thought takes as its pivot human life, both in its spirituality and in its love for everything that is. It consists in the perfecting of self and of everything existent, always following the laws of life, in order to arrive, through beneficent knowledge, at perfect union. Since it contemplates man in his relationship with other men, with Heaven, with everything that is, from the vantage points of economics, politics, society, morality, virtue, arts and letters, philosophy, in order to attain the diverse degrees of natural knowledge, there is nothing that it cannot encompass within itself. The general structure of the whole of Confucian humanist thought tends to the traditional objective, which consists in the benevolent appraisal of the aspirations of people in conformity with the creative principle that the heavens embrace everything and that everything emanates from their generously protective climate.

The doctoral theses of Georges Balandier, professor at the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes—Sociologie actuelle de l'Afrique noire (“Current Sociology of Negro Africa”) and Sociologie des Brazzavilles noires (“Sociology of the Negro Brazzavilles”)—are the culmination of studies undertaken in French Equatorial Africa while he was working in the Office de la Recherche scientifique Outre-Mer (French Bureau of Scientific Research Overseas). They are equally far removed from metaphysical sociology and from a static ethnography which seeks pure states and original traditions. They treat a moving present, ethnic groups already formed, African societies concerned about European intervention and about their own deveoping future. “Sociology,” Louis Wirth used to say, “is the science and the art of human relations.” Humanity is indeed the object of sociology, but sociology should be as well a tool for humanity. Balandier's work is a precious tool for understanding present-day Africa beyond what appears on the surface, and perhaps even for helping to construct the new Africa.

Words, like human beings, embody avatars. Their meaning is transformed, expanding or contracting under multiple influences; in the end it is the collective will that always triumphs despite the resistance of elites or of schools. Such was the fate of the word which originally denoted the science of man in his totality and in his complexity: the word “anthropology·”