Introduction
You often wonder why people obey invisible rules that make no logical sense. You inherit customs, manners, and laws that govern your daily life without ever choosing them. William Graham Sumner explains this puzzle in Folkways by showing how human groups form unexamined habits in the struggle for existence.
Society builds its institutions, morals, and laws unconsciously out of repetitive folkways driven by the struggle for existence and ethnocentrism.
You will see how small acts harden into mandatory social rules and rigid moral codes. The book examines these patterns across four major areas:
- How do spontaneous habits become unbreakable social rules?
- Why do people blindly defend their traditional mores against reason?
- How do tools, money, and language emerge without central planning?
- How do marriage and family structures evolve from ancient customs?
1. Origin and Nature of Folkways
Definition and Origin
You begin with acts rather than thoughts when basic needs demand attention. The experience of pleasure and pain selects expedient ways of satisfying your hunger, thirst, and shelter.
Folkways arise unconsciously from blundering efforts to satisfy basic needs through trial and failure, eventually turning into uniform group customs.
William Graham Sumner defines folkways as habits of the individual and customs of the society arising from attempts to satisfy needs. When they include a judgment that they are conducive to societal welfare and coerce individuals to conform without being coordinated by formal authority, they become mores. These popular usages and traditions are reinforced by habit, tradition, imitation, authority, and ghost fear.
Ethnocentrism
You find that groups naturally divide the world into an in-group and an out-group. The internal peace and cooperation of the we-groups are correlative to their hostility and warfare toward others-groups.
Ethnocentrism is the universal tendency of a human group to make itself the center of everything, viewing its own folkways as the only right ones while treating outsiders with contempt.
This chauvinism exaggerates and intensifies everything in local folkways that differentiates your group from others. The Lapps and many nature peoples call themselves men or human beings, treating outsiders as something else. The Caribs stated that we alone are people.
The ethos is the totality of characteristic traits, usages, standards, and codes by which a group is individualized and differentiated from other groups. A strong, traditional ethos provides immense stability, discipline, and cooperative power, though it often leaves little room for individual liberty. The governing classes of Japan voluntarily adopted occidental political and military structures while retaining their inherited ethos, displaying extraordinary solidarity and discipline in the 1904 war with Russia. This transformation occurred over fifty years, during which Japanese leaders remade their traditional political and military systems.
2. Characteristics of the Mores
Mores exert absolute authority, resist rational debate, and persist across generations despite superficial religious or political changes.
Authority of Mores
Mores have the absolute authority of unconsidered facts. They enter human consciousness unconsciously like the air you breathe. You are born into the mores and formed by them before reasoning begins.
Institutions deeply embedded in the mores resist all rational debate or criticism until they are translated into positive laws. Property, marriage, and American democracy cannot be altered by rational argument. The masses present a deaf ear because the mores themselves furnish the very norm by which you judge things. Free-lovers and advocates of polygamy or alternative property systems find no hearing when they attempt to rationally discuss inherited marriage and property customs.
Persistency and Modification
Mores possess extreme persistency and routinely overrule new religious systems. When a new religion is introduced, the popular religion and underlying social usages largely absorb it. You see the new creed transform into a revival of older practices such as demonism.
Central American Indians continue to follow ancient prescriptions of moderation centuries after adopting Christianity. The Roman Empire never succeeded in stamping out the child sacrifices of the Carthaginians.
Mores cannot be modified suddenly, extensively, or by arbitrary state decrees. They can only be slowly adapted through minute variations in the social ritual.
Emperor Joseph II of Austria enacted sweeping modernizing reforms, including making German the civil language in Hungary. This sparked fierce national resistance and forced him to revoke nearly all his innovations. Absolute rulers and reformers who attempt to alter deeply rooted national mores by administrative fiat or strokes of a pen provoke counter-suggestions, intense national resistance, and prolonged social disorder. Successful modifications require working slowly with the existing ritual and ensuring changes align with underlying interests.
Mores can fall into states of aberration and disease analogous to individual vices. This happens when philosophical generalizations divorce from sober interests and error corrupts societal energy. Bad or degenerate mores are those poorly fitted to a society's actual life conditions. Such corrupted periods occur when religious and civil sanctions weaken, taboos collapse, or ruling powers misuse social forces for selfish interests.
The later Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and Renaissance Italy exhibited evil and disordered mores. You find them characterized by flourishing prostitution, palace intrigues, broken taboos, and rampant vice.
3. Societal Processes and Artifacts
Tools, language, and money develop as unconscious products of cooperative labor, trade, and superstition.
The pursuit of the food supply serves as the purest illustration of the development of folkways, driven by expediency mixed with superstition. Primitive hunting and fishing devices display acute observation, ingenuity, and clever adaptation. Although utilitarian, the food quest is invariably accompanied by mystic elements, rituals, incantations, and taboos designed to secure supernatural favor or avoid bad luck. Natives of New South Wales catch birds by feigning sleep on a rock with fish in hand, or swim under water breathing through a reed to pull ducks under by the legs.
Stone implements and weapons were developed through persistent trial and error, conditioned by the natural qualities of the material and human muscular action. Archæological collections demonstrate a sequence of improvement from crude chipped stones to polished axes. Experiments show that identical materials and manufacturing methods lead craftsmen independently to produce similar forms, such as turtle-backs. Tasmanians made cutting tools by picking up a flat stone and chipping off flakes from one side without a handle, exactly matching paleolithic implements from the cave of le Moustier in Dordogne. An experiment using a modern polished axe cut down an oak tree with a circumference of 0.73 meter in 2200 blows, taking 11 hours and 45 minutes of work.
Language and Tools
Language is a societal institution and a product of the folkways, generated by the practical need for cooperative understanding rather than deliberate invention. No individual ever consciously invented a language. Every vocabulary and grammatical form grows through unconscious usage, metaphor, and analogy to satisfy immediate needs. Dialects emerge naturally through isolation, individual peculiarities of pronunciation, and children adopting slight blunders that eventually become the norm. A castaway American negro on Raven's Island with a native wife and relatives produced a new and peculiar dialect within forty years.
Money and Wealth
Money originated as an unconscious product of trade and property customs, evolving long before the abstract concept of economic value was formulated. Money arose from two distinct origins: intragroup money from valuable property, amulets, and social dues such as bride price, fines, and fees, and intergroup money from trade in predominant wares. Predominant wares are items of universal desire or utility that serve as a third term of reference in barter until one commodity is selected for its efficiency as a medium. In the British Museum, bronze rings from Ireland are displayed that served simultaneously as garment armor and money. Exchange rates reflect this primitive variety, where 2200 cowries equal one franc, and 5600 tin coins equal one dollar in the Indian Archipelago.
Modern democratic parliamentary states inherently foster political corruption and financial scandal by educating citizens to manipulate legislation for special pecuniary advantages. Because no ruling class can be trusted without checks against self-aggrandizement, modern middle-class states fall prey to special interests using the legislative machinery for public plunder. This infiltrates public opinion, degrades standards of right and wrong, and results in pervasive graft. In the nineteenth-century United States, banks of issue and the protective-tariff system served as elaborate legislative mechanisms to tax citizens for the private benefit of favored cliques.
4. Sex Mores and Marriage
Marriage and family structures evolve from primitive horde customs and property relations into complex legal and religious institutions.
The family institution is more primitive than marriage, arising from the necessity of child-rearing and the cooperative struggle for existence. Because the sex relation alone provides no continuing bond between a man and a woman, the family originated when a woman with a child united with a man to carry on the struggle for existence. Marriage developed subsequently as the conventionalized agreement and form of contract regulating this cooperative association within the folkways. Among Australians and Bushmen, the man roams abroad for meat while his wife stays at the trysting place to care for children and collect plants.
Evolution of Marriage
The transition from the mother family to the father family revolutionized social structure, property rights, and the status of women. In the mother family, descent was reckoned through women, who stayed at home with their kin while husbands came to them, granting women high status and independence. When life conditions changed, men were able to acquire wives away from their kin through capture, purchase, or contract, placing wives and children under male dominion and transforming female honor into submissive chastity. Ancient Lycians operated under the mother family system where men were treated with harshness and abuse due to the distribution of social power.
Pair marriage is an exclusive, permanent union of one man and one woman characterized by mutual and reciprocal rights, duties, and powers. Unlike polygamy or patriarchal control, pair marriage aims at the highest satisfaction of sex interests through monopoly and the complete fusion of two lives and interests. It emerged from humble social classes, resisted church and Renaissance corruptions, and rose to prominence alongside modern middle-class democracy and capitalism. Modern realistic love stories became established around the 1800s. Augustine maintained the full equality of spouses in rights and duties, and Ulpian stated in the Digest that it is unjust for a man to demand chastity while failing to observe it himself.
Historical Customs
Early Christian views on marriage struggled with the contradiction between procreation as a holy duty and sexual intercourse as a descent into sensuality, a tension resolved by the Reformation. Christianity inherited an ascetic tradition that viewed celibacy as a superior, meritorious state, making marriage an uneasy compromise between passion and renunciation. Monkish asceticism treated women through the distorting mirror of suppressed desire across fifteen hundred years of Christian church struggling with inconsistent views of marriage. In the sixteenth century, this was resolved by Protestants who repudiated the false merit of celibacy and framed marriage as a rational regulation of sex relations.
During the thirteenth century, the medieval church integrated social interests by positioning itself at the center of marriage, shifting weddings into ecclesiastical functions. Driven by prevailing religiosity, the church strove to turn marriage into an ecclesiastical sacrament by displacing traditional prolocutors, introducing church blessings, and enforcing rules on forbidden degrees of relationship. This was backed by the 1175 Synod of Westminster ordinance prescribing church marriage in England, the 1240 constitutions of Walter de Cantelupe calling marriage a sacrament, and 1246 synodal statutes.
You can observe how church integration shaped concrete practice:
- Priests teach that betrothal and consummation constitute irrevocable marriage.
- Invoke church blessings on the couple, often after consummation in early periods.
- Ecclesiastic blesses the bed of the spouses to drive away evil spirits.
Ancient Chaldeans believed that demons sought opportunities during major life crises, such as weddings, to exert malignity. To ward off this interference, weddings involved specific formulas, recitations by grooms of silver and gold abundance, priestly blessings, and morning purification rituals to drive away evil spirits. Ancient Hebrew marriage was a simple domestic and family transaction controlled by ancient mores without priestly functions, evolving after the exile into more ceremonial practices. Originally, Hebrew marriage consisted of a father giving his daughter in exchange for gifts following a family feast. Following the Babylonian exile, Jewish marriage adopted Persian-influenced customs, requiring a one year delay after betrothal for a maid and one month for a widow, plus ten guests required to be present in the groom's house as witnesses.
Heathen Germans practiced marriages with and without jural consequences based on rank and property. The old German folkway held that consensus followed by cohabitation created a marriage, with witnesses attending to verify the consummation rather than a promise. Emperor Frederick III met his bride, a Portuguese princess, at Naples, where they briefly lay down on a bed and were covered by a coverlet in the presence of the court, much to the shock of the Portuguese ladies.
The Council of Trent established the sacerdotal theory of marriage in 1563 to curb clandestine unions, while Puritans completely secularized marriage by making it a civil magistrate's duty.
10 Key Ideas
- Folkways arise unconsciously from blundering efforts to satisfy basic needs through trial and failure, eventually turning into uniform group customs.
- Ethnocentrism is the universal tendency of a human group to make itself the center of everything, viewing its own folkways as the only right ones while treating outsiders with contempt.
- Mores exert absolute authority, resist rational debate, and persist across generations despite superficial religious or political changes.
- Mores cannot be modified suddenly, extensively, or by arbitrary state decrees, but only through minute variations in the social ritual.
- Language is a societal institution and a product of the folkways, generated by the practical need for cooperative understanding rather than deliberate invention.
- Money originated as an unconscious product of trade and property customs, evolving long before the abstract concept of economic value was formulated.
- Modern democratic parliamentary states inherently foster political corruption and financial scandal by educating citizens to manipulate legislation for special pecuniary advantages.
- The family institution is more primitive than marriage, arising from the necessity of child-rearing and the cooperative struggle for existence.
- Pair marriage is an exclusive, permanent union of one man and one woman characterized by mutual and reciprocal rights, duties, and powers.
- Christianity inherited an ascetic tradition that viewed celibacy as a superior, meritorious state, making marriage an uneasy compromise between passion and renunciation.