Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

528 Pages·1998·18.58 MB·English

by  Margaret T. Hodgen

Early Anthropology in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Early Anthropology in
the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries
by
Margaret T. Hodgen
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 1964 University ofP ennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States ofA merica on acid-free paper
First paperback edition 1971
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Published by
University ofP ennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-1126.5
ISBN 0-8122-1014-X (paperback.: alk. paper)
To
M. A.

Foreword
I T HAS BECOME a convention in dealing with the historical
careers of the social studies to fix their birth dates somewhere
in the nint':teenth century, when the academic departmentaliz
ation of the study of man had its inception; and then, when
unfavorable comment is heard, to defend them singly or
jointly on the score of their youth and immaturity.
This is unfortunate. The study of man in the Western world
is not young. It is one of the oldest subjects of serious thought.
Neither sociology nor anthropology sprang de novo and fully
formed from the reflections of their presumptive "fathers,"
Auguste Comte and Sir Edward Burnett Tylor; and even those
bold spirits who have recently traced the antecedents of the
two disciplines as far back as the eighteenth century-to the
Encyclopedists and the Scottish moral philosophers-have
reached back only part of the way. To fix casually upon any
handful of recent scholars as "founders" or "originators" is
always a disservice to intellectual history. Only Professor A.
Irving Hallowell, in his new and searching study, The begin
nings of anthropology in America (1960), seems happily to
have avoided these pitfalls.
Though the present essay attempts to meet the situation in
some degree by relating the study of human cultures to other
man-centered themes, as well as to expose some of the evidence
of reliance upon an extremely ancient humanistic inheritance,
it should be clearly understood for what it is, namely, an
exploration and nothing more. All that the reader may expect
to find are a few broad strokes indicating the method or body
of organizing ideas by which problems and solutions of a
broadly anthropological nature have been set forth during one
small segment of the past, together with some of the reasoning
which supported them. Should any of these earlier ideas bear
7
8 Early Anthropology in the 16th and 17th Centuries
a family resemblance to procedures lately in use, it will not be
a mistake to regard them also as very old and very persistent.
Apart from a few introductory remarks upon Herodotus,
Pliny, Solinus, and the medieval encyclopedists, in what has
been called a medieval prologue - apart from discussions of
Platonism and other earlier systems of thought - this essay
deals with the organizing ideas employed by students of man
and culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During
these critical years curiosity concerning the strange customs of
mankind in faraway lands and times was immeasurably shar
pened. For one thing, the hobby of collecting curios was ex
tended to human manners. These were gathered not only from
among newly discovered tribes but also from the literatures
referring to antiquity. A massive volume of materials was soon
made available. This was given a more or less orderly presenta
tion in the "treasuries," "mirrors," and "fardels," which
paralleled in the humanities the better-known collections of
flora and fauna. A little later, the same type of material found
its way into popular geographies and cosmographies, the atten
tion of some scholars being focused upon certain larger con
stellations of ethnological traits, which may now be called social
institutions, such as religion, marriage, the family, and govern
ment or the state.
This sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, which
laid the foundation of modern anthropology, comparative
religions, anthropogeography, and many other related studies,
exhibits the emergence of what must now be regarded as
scientific method in the study of culture and society: first, in
a definite transition from the motive of entertainment to that
of organized inquiry; second, in the more or less clear state
ment of questions or problems of importance; and third, in the
choice of organizing ideas to be employed in dealing with the
problem of the origin of man, the diversity of cultures, the
significance of similarities, the sequence of high civilizations,
and the course of the process of cultural change.
Foreword 9
But while scientific inquiry aims at the presentation of things
as they are, things are not always seen as they are, even by
scientists. The mind of the inquirer is never a tabula rasa. Only
too often phenomena come to be viewed through the media of
old and congenial ideas: among early anthropologists, through
ideas of manners and customs, or by virtue of problems and
solutions already in being. Moreover, it is worth remembering
that the intellectual reservoir from which organizing principles
have usually been drawn has always been Europocentric. They
have been derived, almost without exception, from Western
philosophy or the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, never from
Asiatic, African, or native American sources. One example is
the theory of diffusion, so much in evidence during the
Renaissance and subsequent periods. Another is the principle
of order so often imposed on cultural materials-or that serial,
genealogical, hierarchical scheme for the spatial and temporal
arrangement of things which has entered so smoothly into
current theories of conjectural history or theories of social
evolution. The latter doctrine, to press it back no further,
is derived from scholasticism and neo-Platonism.
Any book is the fruit of many decisions, small and large.
Obviously this one might have been written by half a dozen
other authors, in half a dozen other ways, and for as many
purposes. For this reason several features require comment.
In discussions of the literature bearing on the cultures of
diverse peoples, many of whom may be unknown to the lay
reader, it has seemed necessary to preserve a few familiar land
marks, even though for the professional reader they have
already assumed the complexion of historical cliches. The
periodization of the book is a case in point. Granted that
"truer" or more representative divisions of intellectual history
are desirable to replace the hackneyed intervals marked by the
terminal dates of the conventionally numbered centuries, it will
be acknowledged that these are not discoverable all at oncf':.