The Living Test Tube

MAN'S RISE TO CIVILIZATION AS SHOWN BY THE INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA FROM PRIMEVAL TIMES TO THE COMING OF THE INDUSTRIAL STATE by Peter Farb. 332 pages. Duffon. $8.95.

Was the North American Indian a noble red man or a bloodthirsty savage? Both and neither, is the inevitable answer provided in this fascinating though disorganized survey. Commuting between the Aztecs and the Eskimos, millennium-hopping from "primeval times to the coming of the industrial state," this book is as nomadic as its subject matter. Its author is a conservationist-archaeologist-anthropologist who divides his time between duties as consultant to the Smithsonian Institution and curator of American Indian cultures at New York's Riverside Museum.

He holds his many-stranded theme together half by a scientist's discipline, half by a moralist's passion.

Cruel Colonizinq. Scientist Farb sees the Indian as "a living test tube"--a "nearly ideal" controlled experiment in "the evolution of human customs and beliefs." Moralist Farb, blowing Scientist Farb's cool, views him as a victim of the brutal old art of colonizing. "The white," Farb writes in barely composed fury, "is an exploiter of human and natural resources; he has destroyed, often intentionally, almost every alien culture he has come in contact with."

Farb is at his best in disproving the stereotype of the Indian as a pure primitive. He concedes that the Indian's ancestors, who, he believes, crossed the

Bering Strait land bridge 10,000 to 25,000 years ago, comprised genetically "one of the most homogeneous populations on earth." But the Indian, he says, soon took on "the vastness and the variety of North America" itself.

This supposedly simple primitive evolved more than 500 distinct lan -guages, each with its own set of dialects. Great Lakes Indians, practicing what Farb calls "multiple-use conservation," utilized 275 species of plant for medicine, 130 for food, 27 for smoking. As for ceremonies, even the comparatively backward Shoshone would "make the court of Versailles or the Kremlin appear unusually permissive."

"No" Was "Yes." Outlining the evolving sophistication of Indian society --from family to tribe to chiefdom to state--Farb suggests that the Indian failed to survive not because he was too simple but because he was too complex. Among Northwest Coast Indians, for instance, the social pecking order was so exacting that instead of being arranged in classes, each individual had to have a separate ranking. Potlatch feasts took on nuances of snobbery rivaling a Truman Capote party. Among the Cheyenne, social life became so complicated that for sheer relief a club known as the "Contraries" was formed, whose members said "no" when they meant "yes," "left" when they meant "right," and, when summoned, promptly went in the opposite direction.

Despite their complexity, Indians adapted well to some kinds of change. After being introduced to the advantages of the horse for chasing game, Plains Indians switched in one generation from farming to hunting. What Indians could not do was simplify their social organizations to confront a white civilization resolved, as Ben Franklin put it, "to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth."

Even the Iroquois League--in many ways the most effective Indian attempt at alliance against the common enemy--remained paralyzed by a veto system like that of the United Nations.

As he follows the doomed redskins Farb snipes away at cultural myths. For example, does nature really abhor incest? No, says Farb. Besides man, "possibly the only other animal that avoids incest is the Canada goose." The real reason for the taboo is that marriage is too good a way of establishing outside alliances to waste within the family.

Loaded Parallels. Cultural theorizers play rough. As a scientist, Farb goes out of his way to deride earlier theorists like Freud and Marx, to say nothing of Konrad Lorenz. He aggressively defends his pet theory of "cultural evolution," which holds that the behavior of individuals is explained by the response of groups like tribe or family to the specifics of environment--"the unconscious adaptations" of a society. As a moralist, Farb is so eager to use the Indian to "hold up a mirror to modern America" that he overdoes his historical parallels. In cutting off the breasts of Navajo girls, Kit Carson and his "Long Knives" undoubtedly committed an atrocity that was up to 20th century standards. But the parallel between whites v. Indians and Nazis v. Jews hardly bears close scrutiny. Nor does his suggestion that Martin Van Buren's "cynicism" about Indian death marches closely resembles Lyndon Johnson's "pronouncements" about Viet Nam.

The book is hardly big enough for the author's ambitious theme. Too of ten he seems to lack either the patience or the space to complete a crucial argument. A suggestion that a "Society for the Preservation of Cultures" should be set up is thrown in at the end, as if at this late date the Indian could be res cued by a sort of save-the-redwoods campaign. Everything else in Man's Rise to Civilization implies that a culture is a dynamic and delicate balance of power that cannot be preserved under glass when its time is up. What can be done is to record lovingly the merit and appeal of a passing culture, and that, within his limits of space, temperament, and historical imagination, Peter Farb has done.

* A reply made by the French eccentric and man of letters, Gerard de Nerval (1808-55), when passersby were foolish enough to ask why Nerval paraded a lobster on a leash through the streets of Paris.

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