Alice Avery - Week Two

For Hodgen, two characters more than a century apart stand out as the standard-bearers of ‘good’ ethnography: Herodotus and Christopher Columbus. Herodotus is an inquirer; he seems to set out with a list of questions to answer about each of the peoples he surveys in Histories. Hodgen finds that one of his greatest worths is that he details what is ‘normal’ about each culture, such as general eating habits, marriage patterns, and an objective take on religious practices. As opposed to the classical historians that followed – most notably Pliny – Herodotus sought to write as much as possible from objective first-hand knowledge, and to eschew comparisons or focus on the extreme and abnormal. Pliny, rather than inquiring, was a ‘collector’ and ‘epitomizer,’ taking some of the most fanciful elements of Herodotus and tidbits of hearsay about foreign cultures and amassing them into an ethnographic tome. With sound logic and a plethora of examples, Hodgen traces how this practice of focusing on the abnormal and epitomizing groups and cultures by barely more than one exotic or unusual defining trait laid the foundation for medieval ethnographic thought.

This “pre-Columbian system” was “composed of fragments of ancient learning and superstition, disfigured by careless repetition and invention” (34). For her, Columbus is the figure that breaks this medieval tradition, a fresh voice and “a modern, willing on occasion to make concessions to the legendary, but only under pressure of the circumstances, not because of ignorance or credulity” (33). But while Hodgen’s praise of Herodotus appears well-grounded and her contrast between the styles of Herodotus and Pliny insightful, her appraisal of Columbus comes off as somewhat too idealistic. In chapter ten she states that early modern travelers and seafarers were the first to see newly encountered peoples as savages, above animals but separate and below men and angels in the hierarchy of life. Thus the ‘pre-Columbian system’ she refers to in chapter one is overshadowed by this new assertion, and it seems that if Columbus was in fact modern-minded, his style of observation was not widely followed by successive travelers, and he functions most importantly to contrast with all contemporaries.

In her discussion of the ‘Problem of Savagery,’ Hodgen first raises the opinion that savagery has been divided into two views, ‘primitivistic,’ or favorable, and ‘anti-primitivistic.’ When she delves into the ‘anti-primitivistic’ view, she notes that it was really more of an attempt to make out all others as savage, a flat term and description applied commonly to those far away and those on near European borders, such as the Celts. On the flip side, the romantic view of the ‘noble savage’ raised questions about the moral evaluation of manhood, and with this Hodgen segues into “the larger problem of man’s place in nature, or, from a humanistic standpoint, the problem of philosophical anthropology” (376) made prevalent by the social revision and new philosophies of the Renaissance. Her discussion of this overarching problem faced by early modern anthropologists touches upon the theories and views of all major players, and skillfully traces the lineage of those differing viewpoints and their progression toward a culmination in the hierarchical system which placed savages as a separate species, below men for their lack of culture and mental faculties. She is right to regard this hierarchy of being as a thoroughly religious problem for many of those involved. For the scholars and scientists of the age, the two were often inseparable, and academic pursuits often intended to reinforce religious principles (or, conversely, passages from the Bible were manipulated to support scholarly statements and theories). In chapters nine and ten, Hodgen occasionally mentions that those of the early modern and Renassiance periods were far more likely to look behind them for intellectual structures and ideas than to form new ones. However, her denunciation of Linnaeus in the final paragraph of chapter ten as “subservient to unexamined medieval ideas” seems abrupt, and though it could be argued, needs much more than one sentence to fully support that opinion after a chapter discussing the new post-Renaissance ideas of the place of man.