esia)? How do the peoples of the given area divide themselves as
cultural beings? what are the outstanding "cultural areas" and what are
the dominant ideas in each (e.g., the Mohammedan north of Africa; the
primitive hunting, non-agricultural culture of the Bushmen in the south;
the culture of the Australian natives, poor in physical respects but
richly developed in ceremonialism; the more advanced and highly
specialized culture of Polynesia)?

The man in the street does not stop to analyze his position in the
general scheme of humanity. He feels that he is the representative of
some strongly integrated portion of humanity--now thought of as a
"nationality," now as a "race"--and that everything that pertains to him
as a typical representative of this large group somehow belongs
together. If he is an Englishman, he feels himself to be a member of the
"Anglo-Saxon" race, the "genius" of which race has fashioned the English
language and the "Anglo-Saxon" culture of which the language is the
expression. Science is colder. It inquires if these three types of
classification--racial, linguistic, and cultural--are congruent, if
their association is an inherently necessary one or is merely a matter
of external history. The answer to the inquiry is not encouraging to
"race" sentimentalists. Historians and anthropologists find that races,
languages, and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion, that
their areas of distribution intercross in the most bewildering fashion,
and that the history of each is apt to follow a distinctive course.
Races intermingle in a way that languages do not. On the other hand,
languages may spread far beyond their original home, invading the
territory of new races and of new culture spheres. A language may even
die out in its primary area and live on among peoples violently hostile
to the persons of its original speakers. Further, the accidents of
history are constantly rearranging the borders of culture areas without
necessarily effacing the existing linguistic cleavages. If we can once
thoroughly convince ourselves that race, in its only intelligible, that
is biological, sense, is supremely indifferent to the history of
languages and cultures, that these are no more directly explainable on
the score of race than on that of the laws of physics and chemistry, we
shall have gained a viewpoint that allows a certain interest to such
mystic slogans as Slavophilism, Anglo-Saxondom, Teutonism, and the