Spencer Heath Archive

Item 562

Heath’s evaluation of an anthropology book by Leslie White, sent to him from the University of Washington by Spencer MacCallum

No date

Original is in item 558.

In its references to the natural sciences, of nature other than man, this book is unexceptionable. But in its appraisement of the nature of man it is sorely deficient in its premises in that it does not distinguish the nature of man above that of the beasts. It sees both merely as creatures under the dominion of environment, but man in the worse case as being under the dominance also of a “culture” — traditions and tools, customs and institutions, of his own making — to which he is helplessly and hopelessly enslaved. Scholarly and sophisticated, it is the most profoundly erroneous and completely misleading book, to the intellectually naive, that I have ever seen.