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