Before Anthropology

[This is a short chapter from my forthcoming book, The Origins of Transcendentalism in Ancient Religion]

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Much of the discussion of ancient religion is from an anthropological perspective, so it makes sense to look first at the development of anthropological writing. The first chapter of Eriksen and Nielsens, A History of Anthropology (2001) gives a general account of what they call ‘proto-anthropology’, covering the period from Herodotus up to the European Enlightenment.

It is beyond doubt, however, that anthropology, considered as the

science of humanity, originated in the region we commonly refer to

as ‘the West’, notably in four ‘Western’ countries: France, Britain,

the USA and Germany. Historically speaking, this is a European

discipline, and its practitioners, like those of all European sciences,

occasionally like to trace its roots back to the ancient Greeks.*1

Eriksen and Nielsen begin their account of the history of anthropology with Herodotus, who is the earliest writer on other societies whose work is mostly still extant. They know that Herodotus is sometimes unreliable as a witness to the nature of foreign cultures, so they don’t spend a lot of time discussing his work, or the possible reasons some of his accounts are untrustworthy. Herodotus was constructing his history according  to a number of precepts. Apart from his concern with the nature of fame, the one everyone knows about is the long conflict with the Persians, which continued after his death. His stated purpose was to write the story of the conflict, and to provide a background to the conflict. Another one is his presumption that the nature of people and cultures is geographically determined. People in the north, south, east and west are different from each other on that account. If it is hot in one place and cool in another, they will be different from each other. Those somewhere in the middle (i.e., Greece) possess a more balanced nature as individuals, and also in cultural terms.

We could ask where this geographic determinism comes from. The question is rarely asked. The answer to the question, which will be discussed later, is very revealing.

 The Greeks are singled out as being conscious of foreign peoples and societies as something ‘other’, which is a term which often appears in anthropological writing. There are two ways to approach something which is ‘other’ however:

Many Greeks tested their wits against a philosophical paradox

that touches directly on the problem of how we should relate to

‘the Others’. This is the paradox of universalism versus relativism.

A present-day universalist would try to identify commonalities and

similarities (or even universals) between different societies, while

a relativist would emphasise the uniqueness and particularity of

each society or culture. The Sophists of Athens are sometimes

described as the first philosophical relativists in the European

tradition….

This is true not only for anthropologists, but true for most human beings. It is possible to look in two opposite directions – to what is universal, and to what is particular. And sometimes to see-saw between them, according to circumstances. We function within mental paradigms, open to some categories of what is important and can be understood, and closed to some others. What we see is what it is possible to see with the mental and cultural apparatus we have. And none of these apparatuses are universal in the human population.

The authors conjure a scene, drawn from two famous dialogues by Plato (427-347 BCE), the Gorgias and the Protagoras, in which Socrates is in argument with the Sophists:

We may picture them in dignified intellectual battle, surrounded by 

colourful temples and solemn public buildings, with their slaves scarcely 

visible in theshadows between the columns. Other citizens stand as spectators,

while Socrates’ faith in a universal reason, capable of ascertaining

universal truths, is confronted by the relativist view that truth will

always vary with experience and what we would today call culture.

Which is not the way either Plato or Socrates would have characterised the conflict between their view and the view of the Sophists. The Sophists were interested in the money that their rhetorical skills could bring them, and Plato said they argued to make the worse cause appear the better.  From the point of view of Plato and Socrates, the choice between addressing universals and particulars was not a valid choice at all. The pursuit of what was universal was the way to knowledge of what was true; the opposite was to separate one thing from another, and as a consequence, nothing true could be discovered. Eriksen and Neilsen point out that:

Plato’s dialogues do not deal directly with cultural differences.

But they bear witness to the fact that cross-cultural encounters

were part of everyday life in the city-states.

And they are done with Plato. Aristotle’s contribution to the development of anthropology is not quite so brief, but it is clear that though Aristotle 384-322 BCE) sought to describe and understand difference in the world, his interest is also in universals. The Greeks were always concerned with both however, since the philosophical process known as dialectic was based on the identification of what was the same, and what was different. The process is illustrated very clearly in the early part of Plato’s Sophist.

In his philosophical anthropology he (Aristotle)

discusses the differences between humans in general and animals,

and concludes that although humans have several needs in common

with animals, only man possesses reason, wisdom and morality.

He also argued that humans are fundamentally social by nature. In

anthropology and elsewhere, such a universalistic style of thought,

which seeks to establish similarities rather than differences between

groups of people, plays a prominent role to this day.

 However they concede that:

it seems clear that anthropology has vacillated up through history

between a universalistic and a relativistic stance, and that central

figures in the discipline are also often said to lean either towards

one position or the other.

Which is perhaps an admission that there is something problematic in the discipline of anthropology. Or perhaps there is something problematic and troubling in the human engagement with the world in general.

After a brief interlude after the collapse of the ancient world, and a few remarks about Arab scholarship during the long dark ages in Europe, the authors pick up their narrative in the early fifteenth century CE:

The ‘Age of Discovery’ was of crucial importance for later

developments in Europe and the world, and – on a lesser scale

– for the development of anthropology. From the Portuguese

King Henry the Navigator’s exploration of the West coast of

Africa in the early fifteenth century, via Columbus’ five journeys

to America (1492–1506), to Magellan’s circumnavigation of the

globe (1519–22), the travels of this period fed the imaginations of

Europeans with vivid descriptions of places whose very existence

they had been unaware of. These travelogues, moreover, reached

wide audiences, since the printing press, invented in the mid-fifteenth

century, soon made books a common and relatively inexpensive

commodity all over Europe.

Of course these expeditions were not scientific, but about power money and resources. They were also about fame, which could easily come from such expeditions. It is hard to write truthfully when you are writing a testament to your own glory, and to the glory of the king who paid for the expedition. Even if you could grasp some aspects of the nature of the culture around you. And so:

Many of the early travelogues from the New World were full

of factual errors and saturated with Christian piety and cultural

prejudices. A famous example is the work of the merchant and

explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose letters describing his voyages to

the continent that still bears his name were widely circulated at the

time….  Occasionally, Vespucci seems to use the Native Americans

as a mere literary illustration, to underpin the statements he makes

about his own society. Native Americans are, as a rule, represented

as distorted or, frequently, inverted reflections of Europeans: they

are godless, promiscuous, naked, have no authority or laws; they are

even cannibals! Against this background, Vespucci argues effectively

for the virtues of absolutist monarchy and papal power, but his

ethnographic descriptions are virtually useless as clues to native

life at the time of the Conquest.

Not all of the accounts were bad, however. They point out that:

…contemporaries of Vespucci, such as the French

Huguenot Jean de Léry and the Spanish clergyman Bartolomé de

las Casas, who gave more truthful and even sympathetic accounts of

Native American life, and such books also sold well. But then, the

market for adventure stories from distant climes seems to have been

insatiable in Europe at this time. In most of the books, a more or less

explicit contrast is drawn between the Others (who are either ‘noble

savages’ or ‘barbarians’) and the existing order in Europe (which

is either challenged or defended).

The philosopher John Locke collected and read many of these more sympathetic books about the New World. He was opposed to the ideas of his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, who famously described human life as ‘nasty. Brutish, and short’. He preferred the idea of the noble savage to the barbarian. Though he did not discuss any of these accounts in his public writing. The books were found in his study after his death.

Eriksen and Neilsen concede that:

the legacy of these early, morally ambiguous accounts still weighs

on contemporary anthropology, and to this day, anthropologists

are often accused of distorting the reality of the peoples they write

about – in the colonies, in the Third World, among ethnic minorities

or in marginal areas. And, as in Vespucci’s case, these descriptions

are often denounced as telling us more about the anthropologist’s

own background than about the people under study.

The authors discuss the responses of European philosophers to the discovery of the New World, including Montaigne, Descartes, and John Locke. Some of their ideas have connections with anthropological thought from a later period. But they concede that anthropology is still some way beyond these important figures. It had been the case since antiquity that:

Exotic peoples had been described normatively (ethnocentrism) or

descriptively (cultural relativism). The question had repeatedly been

raised whether people everywhere and at all times are basically the

same (universalism) or profoundly different (relativism). There had

been attempts to define the difference between animals and humans,

nature and culture, the inborn and the learned, the sensual body and

the conscious mind. Many detailed descriptions of foreign peoples

had been published; some were based on meticulous scholarship.

In spite of these continuities, we maintain that anthropology as a

science only appeared at a later stage, though it is true that its birth

was a more gradual process than is sometimes assumed. Our reasons

for this are, first, that all the work mentioned so far belongs to one

of two genres: travel writing or social philosophy. It is only when

these aspects of anthropological enquiry are fused, that is, when

data and theory are brought together, that anthropology appears.

Fair enough. Though I regard social and cultural anthropology as arts subjects for the most part, rather than science (though in physical anthropology and archaeology there is a great deal of actual science). And then Eriksen and Neilsen make an extraordinary statement, which I’ve italicised.

Second, we call attention to the fact that all the writers mentioned

so far were influenced by their times and their society. This is of

course true of modern anthropologists as well. But modern anthropologists

live in a modern world, and we argue that anthropology

makes no sense at all outside a modern context. The discipline is a

product, not merely of a series of singular thoughts such as those

we have mentioned above, but of wide-ranging changes in European

culture and society, that in time would lead to the formation of

capitalism, individualism, secularised science, patriotic nationalism

and cultural reflexivity.

What on earth does that mean? Is this meant to imply that because anthropologists live in a modern world, they are more capable of detachment and objectivity than those who lived in earlier times? Or are they saying that it has a function in the modern world, which it did not and could not have had when thoughts were largely singular and could never become part of a consensus view and an agreed reality?  They say a little later:

…we have seen that the encounter with ‘the Other’ stimulated European

intellectuals to see society as an entity undergoing change and growth,

from relatively simple, small-scale communities, to large, complex

nations. But the idea of development or progress was not confined

to notions of social change. The individual, too, could develop,

through education and career, by refining his personality and finding

his ‘true self’ …  Only when the free individual was established as

‘the measure of all things’ could the idea of society as an association

of individuals put down roots and become an object of systematic

reflection. And only when society had emerged as an object to be

continuously ‘improved’ and reshaped into more ‘advanced’ forms

could the independent, rational individual change into something

new and different, and even ‘truer to its nature’. And without an

explicit discourse about these ideas, a subject such as anthropology

could never arise. The seeds were sown in early modern philosophy,

important advances were made in the eighteenth century, but it

was only in the nineteenth century that anthropology became an

academic discipline, and only in the twentieth century that it attained

the form in which it is taught today.

It is worth seeing it spelled out as clearly as that. In the minds of the authors the modern world is only possible because anthropology (as they understand it) is an explicit discourse about ideas of the improvement of the free individual, who is ‘the measure of all things’. As the authors said earlier, sometimes anthropologists are denounced for what they write, on the basis that it tells us more about the anthropologist’s own background, than about the people under study. 

1.Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Finn Sivert Nielsen A History of Anthropology Second Edition, 2001