Aysha Bagchi - Week 2

As many have already noted, Hogden’s account of Herodotus is more positive than her characterization of historical and ethnographic thinking in the Middle Ages and even through the 18^th century, although she also emphasizes more positive strands of thinking beginning with Columbus’s arrival at the Americas. Below I give a summary of her more specific arguments in the three chapters and then suggest a possible account for why Herodotus’s historical and ethnographic approaches failed to gain prominence from the time of Columbus’s encounter of the Americas up until Linnaeus’s account of the hierarchical make-up of the world in 1735.

Hogden begins by describing Herodotus’s discussions of history and culture in the 5^th century B.C., suggesting that Herodotus demonstrated a realistic ethnography in comparison to the ideas the predominated in the Middle Ages. For example, she discusses how Herodotus established the “canon of the equivalence of the gods” in which he assumed that the gods of one race could be equated with those of another. (25) And unlike the churchmen and social scientists who came later, Herodotus did not assume his own culture was either the source or pinnacle of cultural achievement. Thus, he was able to view similarities between other cultures and his own as proving prior historical contact and to interpret Greek culture as itself an amalgam of gifts from many other cultures. (26) Hogden suggests that the common sense Herodotus employed in telling history was lost in the Middle Ages. (28)

Hogden argues that Columbus’s arrival at the Americas marked a transition in which so-called “savagery” came to be seen through “eyes unblurred by medieval fantasy”, finally being seen through a more “expressive realism”. (17) As the first modern voyager to praise a savage people, Columbus began a revival of the ancient formula from Herodotus in which “savagery” could be admired. (371). However, this attitude was countered by the more dominant view in the 16^th and 17^th centuries in which newly encountered peoples were regarded as either human monsters or a degraded form of humanity. (363) Hogden suggests that the Church, with its distaste for unconventional practices and non-Christian religions, may have exercised an overwhelming influence upon explorers. (362) Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the concept of the unimprovability of savagery was often employed in response to the problems of colonization or in defense of black slavery. (380)

Hogden suggests that no one appeared able to give to savage man a valid and incontrovertible place in the general scheme of things. (387) The whole universe was eventually envisaged as a series of hierarchies within hierarchies, stretching from one to another in rational chains of being. Hierarchical thought gave an architectonic principle for rationalizing relationships of man to man. (397) This thinking culminated in Linnaeus’s classification of minerals, animals, and man in The System of nature in 1735. Linnaeus not only included man in his arrangement of forms, but divided man as a genus into two species with several varieties within each based on physical and cultural criteria. Homo sapiens were taken to be divided into five categories: the wild man, the American, the European, the Asiatic, and the African. Each was distinguished by varying education, situation, and temperament. (425) In emphasizing fanstastical differences between Europeans and non-Europeans, Hogden suggests this 18^th century account illustrated an ultimate subservience to medieval ideas over Herodotus’s much earlier contributions.

In Hogden’s accounts of historical thinking from the 5^th century B.C. to the 18^th century, her overall suggestion appears to be that Herodotus’s more accurate and powerful historical and ethnographic approaches were largely abandoned. Hogden suggests that the great influence of the Church may have contributed to this, encouraging distaste for unconventional and non-Christian practices and religions. But this argument cuts both ways as it was Christian ideas of redemption that encouraged figures to believe in the equal capacities of all humans and the fundamental similitude between them in the eyes of God. In this sense, Christianity would have encouraged both differentiation and empathy. Perhaps a more fruitful explanation would rest in considering the effects that the encounter with the New World would have had on human psychology in the next decades and centuries. With unknown worlds and peoples being discovered, it was not merely advances in human reason that were challenging old systems of thought, but also encroachments by the world’s mysteries into the European world. Columbus sought India and found America. Unintended discoveries were forcing themselves upon the European world. In so doing, they made the universe seem fundamentally less certain. Perhaps the response was understandably reactionary: rather than letting newly discovered worlds challenge their self-understanding, Europeans clung to medieval fantasies in labeling these lands and peoples as what they already knew of, what was necessarily inferior, and what they had little to learn from. When the world’s mysteries forced themselves upon humankind, not waiting for human attempts to unlock them, Herodotus’s more accurate historical and ethnographic thinking was unlikely to gain quick prominence.