Tracking Anthropological Engagements: Histories of Anthropology Annual, Volume 12 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496208935 ISBN 13: 9781496208934

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2018

Synopsis

Histories of Anthropology Annual series presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology.

Volume 12, Tracking Anthropological Engagements, examines the work and influence of Hans Sidonius Becker, Franz Boas, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Mead, Karl Popper, and Anthony F. C. Wallace, as well as anthropological perspectives on the 1964 Project Camelot, Latin American cultures at the 1892 Madrid International Expositions, sixteenth-century cosmography and topography in Amazonia, the launch of the Great War Centenary Association website, and community-produced wartime narratives in Ontario, Canada.
 

About this title

About the Author

Regna Darnell is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology Emerita at the University of Western Ontario. She is coeditor of The Franz Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual—Theory, Ethnography, Activism (Nebraska, 2015). Darnell is the general editor of the multivolume series The Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition and co-editor of the Critical Studies in History of Anthropology series. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Tracking Anthropological Engagements

Histories of Anthropology Annual, Volume 12

By Regna Darnell, Frederic W. Gleach

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4962-0893-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Editors' Introduction, 
1. Topography and Cosmography in the Sixteenth Century: A Window into Early Ethnography Driton Nushaj, 
2. Faded Tracks of Austrian Anthropology: Hans Sidonius (von) Becker (1895–1948) and Some of His Contemporaries Christian Feest, 
3. Is It Anthropology?: Exhibiting Latin American Cultures at the 1892 Madrid International Expositions Nancy J. Parezo and Catherine A. Nichols, 
4. Worcester, Massachusetts, 1909: Language, Culture, and the Boas-Freud Intersection John Leavitt, 
5. Karl Popper's Enheartening of Derek Freeman's Attacks on Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa Stephen O. Murray, 
6. Anthropology's Camelot Myth — And What We Can Learn from It Herbert S. Lewis, 
7. A Model for Open Community Engagement: Six Nations, the GWCA, and the Production of Wartime Narratives Evan Habkirk, 
8. Guns and Ivy: An Anthropologist's Memoir Anthony F. C. Wallace, 
Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Topography and Cosmography in the Sixteenth Century

A Window into Early Ethnography

Driton Nushaj

The history of anthropology rarely extends beyond the turn of the nineteenth century. But before anthropologists took up the study of culture, historians, missionaries, ambassadors, and other travelers with an interest in the language and customs of the people they visited produced their own written accounts. Where do these pre-ethnographic accounts fit in relation to a contemporary understanding of "ethnography"? Ancient writers such as Herodotus, Strabo, Ptolemy, and Tacitus did not differentiate ethnographic interests from their broader historical and geographical inquiries (Vermeulen 2015, 2–3). Nevertheless, the questions, methods, and paradigms that travel writers have employed since antiquity to describe otherness provide a glimpse into the epistemological evolution of "ethnography."

Margaret Hodgen (1964), in her historical comparison of pre-ethnographic genres, has shown that early ethnography should not be dismissed simply because it does not conform to secular and rationalist social science originating with Enlightenment thought. Moreover, the sentiments expressed by sixteenth-century writers like Michel de Montaigne and Bartolome de las Casas show an appreciation for a premodern conception of cultural relativism (Martin 2007, 134–35). The history of ethnography is partly a question of legitimacy: Are its origins in Enlightenment science or did it begin as a colonial enterprise in the Age of Discovery (Vermeulen 2015, 24)? While it can be argued that the first usage of the terms "ethnography" and "ethnology" corresponds to the inception of the epistemological foundation of the two concepts (Vermeulen 2015, 269–71), it is equally valid to claim that methods and perspectives that formed a "discipline" may predate its foundation. Moreover, a dialogue about the genealogy of ethnography avant la lettre — the exploration of the tangled roots of the well-defined contemporary discipline — need not lead to the "projecting [of] later epistemological views on the past" (Vermuelen 2015, 270).

This paper will compare the ethnographic and literary techniques used by two mid-sixteenth-century French missionaries — the Catholic Andre Thevet and the Calvinist Jean de Léry — who came into contact with the Tupinambas around Guanabara Bay in Brazil. The approaches that Thevet and de Léry used to write about the indigenous populations amounted to two divergent methods: "cosmography" and "topography," respectively. "Cosmography" reflected Thevet's desire to order the world according to schema used by Renaissance science, combining classical — especially Aristotelian — paradigms within a Catholic worldview (Nushaj 2016). By contrast, the topographic narrative of de Léry is a personal history embedded in the greater struggle of Protestant Huguenots against the Catholic French majority. De Léry's account is therefore structured by a confessional mode of retelling an adventure that tests the fortitude and righteousness of the author as he lands in a remote settlement in Brazil (Lestringant 1990). The clash of methods leads each author to affirm the veracity of his account based on a claim of direct experience. This claim to direct experience was noticeably lauded by Montaigne as a prerequisite for a reliable account about faraway "savages" (de Certeau 1986).

The Claim to Truth

The requirement of firsthand knowledge reflects a new spirit of skepticism expressed by Montaigne in the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformation and the discovery of the "New World" brought about fundamental changes in the European view of the world (Neto et al. 2009). The formulation of an empirical, (pre)scientific autopsy (Lestringant 1994, 13) was taking hold, pitting the experience of the New World against the received knowledge of Renaissance civilization with its basis in classical thought (Neto et al. 2009). Montaigne, in his essay "Of Cannibals," even proposes that the ideal witnesses should be "simple [and] crude" and thus not so clever as to twist information to their own ends (2003, 184). Moreover, when it comes to writing reports,

we ought to have topographers who would give us an exact account of the places where they have been. But because they have over us the advantage of having seen Palestine, they want to enjoy the privilege of telling us news about all the rest of the world. I like everyone to write what he knows, and as much as he knows, not only in this, but in all other subjects; for a man may have some special knowledge and experience of the nature of a river or a fountain, who in other matters knows only what everybody knows. However, to circulate this little scrap of knowledge, he will undertake to write the whole of physics. From this vice spring many great abuses. (2003, 184–85)

Montaigne comes down firmly on the side of reports that limit themselves to the author's direct observation and no more. Topography moved toward describing what was seen and experienced in a single place (topos) with attention to minor details guided by an inquisitive and close enquiry. The importance of observation is fundamental to de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil; the author is more emphatic than Thevet in the importance of sensory experience (Lestringant 1990, 129). "Mon intention et mon sujet sera en ceste histoire, de seulement declarer ce que j'ay pratiqué, veu, ouy et observé" (de Léry 1994, 105). (My intention and my subject in this history will be to declare only what I have experienced, seen, heard and observed [trans. mine]). The avowed commitment to empirical observation for de Léry is a matter of personal circumstances as opposed to a demand made by a preexisting topographic method. Nevertheless, by writing in a mode that emphasizes sensory experience, de Léry was moving away from the conventions of earlier travel writers and cosmographers. By limiting the scope of his account, de Léry avoids some of the "abuses" that are committed by the unbounded epistemological breadth of cosmography.

Jean de Léry and Andre Thevet write in a "poetics of extreme witness" that highlights the adventures and risks undertaken by the voyager (Williams et al. 2006, 34). The claim of personal endangerment gives each writer his authority and the prerogative to contradict the other. Within the text, the appearance of danger simultaneously appeals to a sense of pathos and the credibility of the narrator, who was in the midst of tumultuous events. Yet, for de Léry, the witness claim is not just a rhetorical trope (as it often is for Thevet) but a consistent narrative theme that portrays his Histoire d'un voyage as a testament to a personal mission sanctioned by God as well as an attempt to correct the lies of Thevet (de Léry 1990, xlvi). Around 350 years before Bronislaw Malinowski set foot on the Trobriand Islands, de Léry claimed that his work was conducted through direct observation and living among the natives of Guanabara Bay:

When I speak of savage customs, I often use this kind of expression — "I saw," "I found," "this happened to me," and so on (as if I wanted to show myself off) — I reply that not only are these things within my own subject but also that I am speaking out of my own knowledge, that is, from my own seeing and experience; indeed, I will speak of things that very likely no one before me has ever seen, much less written about. I mean this however, not about all of America in general, but only about the place where I lived for about a year: that is, under the tropic of Capricorn among the savages called the Tupinamba. (1990, lxi)

Attempting to safeguard his reputation after de Léry's assault on Les singularités, Thevet writes in his subsequent publication ("La cosmographie universelle"):

It is true that the ancients have written about this place, but for the most part their words were based on their own imaginations, or mere reports; whereas I call on only the evidence of what I have myself ocularly seen [ce qu'oculairement i'ay veu], or heard from those who are in the place itself. (Thevet, cited in Williams 2006, 30)

Thevet noticeably fortifies his assertion of firsthand knowledge as a way of defending the authority of his text. By the late sixteenth century, Thevet's writings were "outmoded" (2011, 12); however, the preference for topography may not have lasted long — for instance, in the year of his death, de Léry's account was summarized and integrated into a multiauthor cosmography entitled "The manners, lawes, and customes of all nations" (Boemus et al. 1611). The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a return to a cosmographic, encyclopedic urge to chart the world (Hodgen 1964).

Entering the World of the Tupis: Orientations toward Sameness and Difference

Thevet begins his description of the Tupis (chapter 28) by assuming an almost ironic tone that appears to mock their beliefs: "Les uns ont reconnu le Soleil commme souverain, les autres la Lune, et quelques autres les etoiles; les autres autrement ainsi que nous recitent les histoires" (1983, 39–40). (Some recognized the Sun as their lord, others the Moon, yet others the stars; the others worshiped differently, as the histories tell us [trans. mine]). The statement conveys a lack of surprise that plays with the audience's expectations. It confirms that the Tupis are polytheistic and immediately superimposes on them the typologies of the "savage" developed by earlier writers. Thevet suggests that his readers already know what to expect of the "savages"; as soon as the cosmographer enters into the region inhabited by the Tupis, he already sees that they are "like" others he has already encountered. The friar adopts a dismissive, distant tone to make his cosmographic perspective appear earnest — readers realize later on that Thevet is hardly an impartial witness. The cosmographer attenuates the novel customs of the "savages" by a direct analogy to other pantheistic peoples that removes the need to consider this particular polytheism as something new. The cosmographer is therefore prepared to observe new beliefs and customs only as they illustrate existing forms seen elsewhere. The application of the cosmographic paradigm creates the impression that new things are quite like the old. Frank Lestringant calls this a "montage" of new observations onto existing knowledge (Thevet 2011, 6). Typological and analogical connections bridge current and past knowledge in order to illustrate a topic. This manner of comparison was also frequently used by other cosmographers. For example, Sebastian Muenster's Cosmographia notes that the Turks abstain from wine just like Roman women (Hodgen 1954, 520). Thevet uses the same strategy to append his observations to similar cases cited in cosmographic works. For instance, he tells readers that, like the Romans, Tupi men incite their young to be belligerent (1983, 97–98). Thus, analogy is the act of an a priori principle that seizes two distinct things, rejects their differences, and declares them to be alike according to some common perceived quality. Michel Foucault, however, is highly skeptical of the epistemological validity of cosmography and other contemporary disciplines.

By positing resemblance as the link between signs and what they indicate (thus making resemblance both a third force and a sole power, since it resides in both the mark and the content in identical fashion), sixteenth-century knowledge condemned itself to never knowing anything but the same thing, and to knowing that thing only at the unattainable end of an endless journey. (1994, 61)

Whereas cultural and chronological relevance may be called into question by modern readers accustomed to historicist hermeneutics, the cosmographic paradigm appears to reveal that certain human traits (and, often, monstrous forms) bridge the past and the present through a continuity of analogical resemblance. Montaigne's call for a rustic, simple reporter is, perhaps, the philosopher's desire to disavow the cosmographic ordering principles that filter difference before it can be understood.

Les singularités is a collection of curiosities in which analogy creates the basis for subsequent categorization. Thevet embarks upon his project by relating the remarkable things he sees and hears as a collage of topics, but then he proceeds to systematize and evaluate his observations. Thevet's methods, especially his tendency to amass examples of strange things — a gathering of "singularités" — represents a conventional cosmographic style of description (Hodgen 1964, 161–63). However, Thevet also introduces his own novel categories, based on his own analogically reduced understanding of the essential similarities linking things. In Cosmographie Universelle, for example, he places the sloth that he first describes in Les singularités under a category entitled "things which live on air"; the reason for this category is apparently that they live high in the trees and do not appear to eat (1983, 122). Despite recognizing the "newness" of the American continent, Thevet uses an "outdated analogic system ('reseau analogique') to position new discoveries in a pre-established, stable, hierarchic system" (Reeser 2006, 220). So fond is the cosmographer of this paradigm that he sometimes devises his own families of analogical resemblance in order to demonstrate his findings.

De Léry first mentions the "savages" in his fifth chapter. In his brief preview of the Brazilians he describes four tribes that, with difficulty, cooperate with one another, by living in proximity and trading together (1994, 154). De Léry appears to begin his "history" in a similar fashion to Thevet's: he compares one tribe of fast runners, the "Ouetaca," to the Basques because they both speak strange languages and run quickly (1994, 155). This familiarization of a strange group with a region closer to France bridges the distance of the Atlantic. As a gloss that suggests that perhaps things are not as strange across the ocean as one expects, it mimics the generalizations developed by previous travel writers, but this is where the similarities end. Further into Histoire d'un voyage, it becomes clear that de Léry knows almost nothing of the Ouetaca he first mentioned because, as readers discover, the Ouetaca does not interact with the Tupis and their allies (the French). De Léry is not immune to drawing general analogies when his experience is scant. However, when he begins describing the Tupinambas (chapter 8), de Léry no longer relies on simple analogies to equate the Tupis to Europeans. Instead, things become "non moins estrange que difficile à croire a ceux qui ne l'ont veu" (1994, 212–14) (no less strange than difficult to believe for those who have not seen it [trans. Whatley in de Léry 1990, 57]). This rapid change in tone, and the change in style it sparks, is clearly a result of direct experience overturning established modes of writing about alterity. The topographer risks going down the path of the analogical, comparative descriptions of cosmography if it weren't for his confrontation with a reality that could no longer be described by the kind of glosses deplored by Montaigne: analogies that create a semblance of similarity where very little exists. De Léry assumes the role of a topographer as soon as he relates his direct, visual experience. The author goes from a familiar place to an unfamiliar topos (and, eventually, back again). The process of deterritorialization — what Michel de Certeau sees as a temporal and spatial displacement toward exteriority (the other) and a subsequent return to interiority (sameness) — functions as a basic structure for the narrative (1988, 218–26).

Detailed narrativized descriptions become de Léry's main technique of writing about the Tupis. In one example, he attempts to explain to readers something quite foreign to them: the making and mounting of the penis sheath used by older Tupi men. De Léry considers the possibility that they wear the implement for modesty or to hide deformity but remains cautiously inconclusive.

Combien que je ne m'en sois point autrement enquis, j'ay plustot opinion que c'est pour cacher quelque infirmité qu'ils peuvent avoir en leur vieillesse en ceste partie-là. (1994, 216)

Although I have not made closer inquiry, I am still of the opinion that it is rather to hide infirmity that their old age may cause in that member. (translation by Whatley in de Léry 1990, 58)

His descriptions are often guided by a kind of functionalist logic that seeks to uncover the purpose of certain customs. A sense of utility guides de Léry in his choice of topics and the ensuing explanations (de Certeau 1988, 224). However, many of de Léry's observations are not offered from the perspective of utility. De Léry can surprise modern readers when he refuses to render judgment on matters that he deems aesthetic. The topographer allows for doubt and speculation when interpreting customs. One such case is the description of the lower lip piercing that Tupi men keep to wear a decorative jade piece:

Que si au reste quelques fois quand ces pierres sont ostées, nos Toüoupinambaoults pour leur plaisir font passer leurs langues par ceste fente de la levre, estans lors advis à ceux qui les regardent qu'ils ayent deux bouches: je vous laisse à penser, s'il fait bon voir de caste façon, et si cela les difforme ou non. (1994, 217)

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496208935
• ISBN 13: 9781496208934
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 282
• Editor: Darnell Regna, Gleach Frederic W.