Cameron Ormsby-- Week Two

Hodgen’s analysis of Herodotus’ Histories is largely positive. She notes his objective approach, the consistency with which he approaches certain categories, and the common sense that he uses when evaluating the reliability of sources. Here, Herodutus has a social advantage over his medieval counterparts. He has no religious or social agenda in his ethnographies. He does not need to prove that Greek society is the pinnacle of the world’s peoples. He does not need to emphasize a purity in Greek beliefs or customs, and he does not need to attach value judgments to the customs of other tribes. As a result, his surveys have a clarity that medieval ethnographies lack. Hodgen argues that medieval scholars are further limited by almost complete disinterest in their neighboring societies, a reliance on ancient scholarship that has been passed down in distorted and partial form, and a fixation on the monstrous and fanciful rather than the truth. Hodgen also notes that medieval scholars frequently assumed that the accounts that Herodutus and his contemporaries wrote still held true for the many Asian and African societies that they themselves had never encountered. This despite the fact that such accounts had been written some fifteen hundred years earlier.

Anthropologists of the 16^th and 17^th century, when confronted with actual tribes of ‘savages’, persisted in accusations of cannibalism and other ethnographic tropes. Hodgen argues that the Catholic Church’s hostility towards non-Christians can explain some of the anti-primitivism, but she also blames the early humanists who dismissed the savages as less than human. Later missionaries and romantics would idealize the ‘noble savage,’ but such idealism came side by side with assumptions of childlike inferiority. Hodgen suggests that European society’s ongoing fascination with savagery (and their lack of any objectivity comparable to that of Herodotus) is linked to the fundamental questions that savage people posed to Christianity. A growing body of knowledge was suggesting that Christians were a tiny minority of the world’s population. In addition, the gaps between Christianity and many native religious beliefs were so wide that it was hard for many to accept that they came from the same Old Testament source.