Manners And Customs of The Uncivilized Race of Men in Set of 2 Volumes ( An Old & Rare Book)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

To the ideologists of the World fraternity mankind may be one and the same throughout, but to the discerning eye of an anthropologist, a sociologist and to the student of humanities at large, man is not one and the same in all respects. He is different in so many ways than his own brother of another continent, another time and culture and of another environment, and this subtle line of difference is drawn out clearly on the basis of man's own patterns of manners and customs which provide him a definite but different kind of identity throughout, with the passage of time and the advance ment of civilization, this line of difference in manners and customs of each and every race of humanity is getting eroded almost every day and the man of our times is slowly emerging out with a set of cosmo politan pattern of similar manners and customs throughout the globe. Much before this dividing line of separate identity in case of each and every aborigin race of human kind based on the set patterns of man ners and customs gets almost com pletely eroded with, it is high time to have a full and graphic record o it. Needless to say that the singular aim of these volumes is to record such details of manners and customs of the human races from all over the world. Even though it is a matter of de bate to define as to which, of the human races is more civilized in case of its manners and customs than that of the others, this much is agreed on all hands that the races of human kind which lack in good number of advancements made by the man of modern times, are such that are comparatively less civilized in case of their manners and customs of everyday life.

Scholars of the centuries gone by preferred to address those races of human kind as the civilized races of the world. And this world of our social anthropologists, as the readers will see themselves, is far beyond the man made boundaries of the states and nations. Out of the two volumes, number one provides details on the manners and customs of the people of African continent dealing with more than fifty tribes and the other volume likewise deals with the manners and customs of the fore-fathers of the people from America, Australia, Asia and a good number of Islands. How does the pattern of behaviour reflecting on the manners and customs of the people of a parti cular area of the world differs to that of the people from the other area is well documented here in these volumes.

In good number of cases facts are also illumined by photographs and sketches providing authenticity to the text. Is it not curious to know that the people inhabiting the two banks of one and the same river in a continent differ entirely in case of their manners and customs? For example, we have, on one side of a river, a people well clothed, well fed and retaining but few of the old savage customs and on the other side of the same river, people without clothes, food and sunk deeply in all the squalid miseries of savage life.

THIS work is simply, as the title-page states, an account of the manners and customs of uncivilized races of men in all parts of the world. Many travellers have given accounts, scattered rather at random through their books, of the habits and modes of life exhibited by the various people among whom they have travelled. These notices, however, are distributed through a vast number of books, many of them very scarce, many very expensive, and most of them ill-arranged; and it has therefore been my task to gather together in one work, and to present to the reader in a tolerably systematic and intelligible form The varieties of character which develop themselves among races who have not as yet lost their individuality by modern civilization. In this task I have been greatly assisted by many travelers , who have taken a kindly interest in the work, and have given me the invaluable help of their practical experience. The engravings with which the work is profusely illustrated have been derived from many sources. For the most part the countenances of the people have been drawn from photographs, and in many instances whole groups taken by the photographer have been transferred to the wood-block, the artist only making a few changes of attitude, so as to avoid the unpleasant stiffness which characterises photographic groups. Many of the illustrations are taken from sketches made by travelers , who have kindly allowed me to make use of them; and I must here express my thanks to Mr. T. Baines, the accomplished artist and traveller, who made many sketches expressly for the work, and placed at my disposal the whole of his diaries and portfolios. I must also express my thanks to Mr. J. B. Zwecker, who undertook the onerous task of interpreting pictorially the various scenes of savage life which are described in the work, and who brought to that task a hearty goodwill and a wide knowledge of the subject, without which the work would have lost much of its spirit. The drawings of the weapons, implements, and utensils are all taken from actual specimens, most of which are in my own collection, made, through a series of several years, for the express purpose of illustrating this work.

That all uncivilized tribes should be mentioned, is necessarily impossible, and I have been reluctantly forced to omit altogether, or to dismiss with a brief notice, many interesting people, to whom I would gladly have given a greater amount of space. Especially has this been the case with Africa, to which country the moiety of the book is necessarily given, in consequence of the extraordinary variety of the native customs which prevail in that wonderful land. We have, for example, on one side of a river, a people well clothed, well fed, well governed, and retaining but few of the old savage customs. On the other side, we find people without clothes, government, manners, or morality, and sunk as deeply as man can be in all the squalid miseries of savage life. Besides, the chief characteristic of uncivilized Africa is the continual change to which it is subject. Some tribes are warlike and restless, always working their way seawards from the interior, carrying their own customs with them, forming settlements on their way, and invariably adding to their own habits and superstitions those of the tribes among whom they have settled. In process of time they become careless of the military arts by which they gained possession of the country, and are in their turn ousted by others, who bring fresh habits and modes of life with them. It will be seen, therefore, how full of incident is life in Africa, the great stronghold of barbarism, and how necessary it is to devote to that one continent a very con siderable portion of the entire work.

**Contents and Sample Pages**