Mackenzie Tudor--Week 2

Hodgen identifies Herodotus as an individual who was interested in studying the facts and the diversity of cultural groups around the greek civilization of the 5^th century. In his time the civilized greek culture was the exception and “barbarians” surrounded the island. There appeared to be a “day to day intercourse” between civilized and non-civilized people. Uncivilized were considered a member of the human family and the cultural differences Herodotus observed did did not change his opinion about that. For example on page 25, Hodgen writes that Herodotus “assumed though names might differ the gods of one race could be equated with the gods of another.” This indicates that he essentially believed that they all essentially shared the commonality of being man.

Hodgen explains that Herodotus refrained from making claims about a cultural when he did not believe he was able to get the exact facts. This “innate caution contrasts sharply with the attitude of the men of the middle ages who were eager to swallow whole both fact and legend.” The men of the middle ages would later take discoveries of Herodotus and twist them into fantasy and lore. Typical of a age of superstition, facts of different cultures turned into stories and legends, and only fragments of the original examinations were looked at.

It is interesting to take account that in the transition from Herodotus to the early modern period of the 16^th and 17^th centuries “it was chiefly the seafaring men and explorers, whose main interest as often as not was commercial profit, who gave thought to the savage.” On the contrary to Herodotus who explored to take detailed notes and learn about the different cultural groupings of the 5^th century Mediterranean, these explorers and seafaring men likely took note of the savages only in their aid or interference in their given economic mission.

Early modern Europeans had an almost always framed savages within an intensely anti-primitivism rhetoric. Hodgen's pointed out that this anti-primitive rhetoric could have existed because of the rationality of the late 17^th centuries, and influence of philosophers like Hobbes. Hobbes who described in his works that the society-less peoples were essentially “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.” This anti-primitivism applied to all types of 'uncivilized' cultures. For example, they would use the same terms to describe primitives in the northern Scotland, as natives in the Americas. This exemplified their overwhelming fear and dislike of any culture that did not fit their notion of civilized.

Early modern Europeans had to come to terms with an important question about the new groups of people they were being introduced to, are they men? A debate arose about whether these new cultures could be classified as men or as animals. And if they are classified as men should there be a hierarchy? A thought arose that there needed to be an “acceptable social or cultural hierarchy as an extension of the biological.” This resulted in the attempt to begin to classify and rank cultures. Hodgen describes Linnaeus's arrangement of man into two species, and these two species in turn become several varieties. The divisions were partly physical and partly cultural.

This attempt to classify and rank the different cultures was mostly a tool for early modern Europeans to cope with the incoming relations with new peoples within their narrow world scope. However, in comparison to Herodotus, and medieval people, scientists of the 16^th and 17^th centuries began to actually study human beings in comparison to each other. This would lay the ground roots for centuries of cultural hierarchical classification and become an essential part of early modern Europeans ability to grasp their expanding world.