The Anthropology of the Enlightenment

By Larry Wolff

The modern enterprise of anthropology, with all of its important implications for cross-cultural perceptions, perspectives, and self-consciousness emerged from the eighteenth-century intellectual context of the Enlightenment. If the Renaissance discovered perspective in art, it was the Enlightenment that articulated and explored the problem of perspective in viewing history, culture, and society. If the Renaissance was the age of oceanic discovery—most dramatically the discovery of the New World of America—the critical reflections of the Enlightenment brought about an intellectual rediscovery of the New World and thus laid the foundations for modern anthropology. The contributions that constitute this book present the multiple anthropological facets of the Enlightenment, and suggest that the character of its intellectual engagements—acknowledging global diversity, interpreting human societies, and bridging cultural difference—must be understood as a whole to be fundamentally anthropological.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2007
• ISBN: 9780804779432

Book preview

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In memory of Morton Klass, inspirational anthropologist, 1927–2001

Not to disclose to any nation the state of our religion, but to pass it over in silence, without any declaration of it, seeming to bear with such laws and rites, as the place hath, where you shall arrive.

—Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries, Ordinances for the Direction of the Intended Voyage for Cathay, 1553

Those who worshipped a bull never tried to compel those who worshipped a monkey to change their religion.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, Apis

But are they really superstitions?

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques

—Larry Wolff

Dedicated to the Bronco network, in the spirit of worldwide independence, friendship, and freedom.

Meanwhile the steamers which divide horizons prove Us lost . . .

—Derek Walcott, Prelude

but out of what is lost grows something stronger (. . .) strong as the wind, that through dividing canes brings those we love before us, as they were, with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

—Derek Walcott, Sea Canes

There were giants in those days.

In those days they made good cigars . . .

—Derek Walcott, Volcano

we can sit watching grey water,

and in a life awash

with mediocrity and trash

live rock-like . . .

—Derek Walcott, Winding Up

I had no nation now but the imagination.

—Derek Walcott, Shabine Leaves the Republic

—Marco Cipolloni

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The anthropology of the Enlightenment / edited by Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804779432

1. Anthropology—History—18th century. 2. Anthropology—Philosophy. 3. Enlightenment. I. Wolff, Larry. II. Cipolloni, Marco.

GN17.3.E85A58 2007

301.09’033—dc22

2007007298

Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 10/12 Sabon

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Dedication

Copyright Page

Preface

Contributors

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE - Discovering Cultural Perspective

PART ONE - Philosophical History and Enlightened Anthropology

CHAPTER TWO - Barbarians and the Redefinition of Europe

CHAPTER THREE - The Immobility of China

CHAPTER FOUR - ‘Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation’

CHAPTER FIVE - Adam Smith and the Anthropology of the Enlightenment

CHAPTER SIX - Beyond the Savage Character

CHAPTER SEVEN - Herder’s India

PART TWO - Ethnography and Enlightened Anthropology

CHAPTER EIGHT - The German Enlightenment and the Pacific

CHAPTER NINE - Persian Letters from Real People

CHAPTER TEN - Russia and Its Orient

CHAPTER ELEVEN - Love in the Time of Hierarchy

PART THREE - Human Nature and Enlightened Anthropology

CHAPTER TWELVE - The Dreaming Body

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - The Anthropology of Natural Law

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Animal Economy

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Metamorphosis and Settlement

CONCLUSION

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - The Old Wor(l)d and the New Wor(l)ds:

Notes

Index

Preface

Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni

The modern enterprise of anthropology, with all of its important implications for cross-cultural perceptions, perspectives, and self-consciousness emerged from the eighteenth-century intellectual context of the Enlightenment. If the Renaissance discovered perspective in art, it was the Enlightenment that articulated and explored the problem of perspective in viewing history, culture, and society. If the Renaissance was the age of oceanic discovery—most dramatically the discovery of the New World of America—the critical reflections of the Enlightenment brought about an intellectual rediscovery of the New World and thus laid the foundations for modern anthropology. The contributions that constitute this book present the multiple anthropological facets of the Enlightenment, and suggest that the character of its intellectual engagements—acknowledging global diversity, interpreting human societies, and bridging cultural difference—must be understood as a whole to be fundamentally anthropological.

The Enlightenment not only defined the word and conceived of the subject anthropology but also, in one of its most potent coinages, gave the lexicons of many European languages the new word and concept civilization. First used by the physiocrat economists as they sought to convey the benefits that society would find in economic growth and progress, the word civilization came to sum up the European identity of enlightened men and women who comparatively and self-confidently assumed the superiority of their own way of life. To this day civilization provides the motto and matter of Western identity, constituting the self-assumed Occidental mantle of Western civilization.

In the eighteenth century, when civilization was first named, the word’s most potent effect was in authorizing a perspective on the allegedly less civilized, even the utterly uncivilized: societies to be civilized, or to become more civilized. By the light of civilization, it was possible to discern a whole ordering of societies, around the globe and across the centuries: societies backward, primitive, savage, or barbarous. Indeed, the very concept of civilization presupposed a condition of uncivilized origins and more- or less-civilized stages on the path toward the ultimate Occidental goal. The philosophy of the Enlightenment was deeply preoccupied with discerning and describing the series of those stages, and the concept of civilization thus became indispensable for the articulation of any anthropological perspective.

That perspective, however, could also be turned against the ideal of civilization. Rousseau, for instance, could conclude, without ever visiting the Caribbean, that the Carib was perhaps happier than a Frenchman; while Diderot, without ever visiting Tahiti, would compose brilliant fiction to address the question of whether the sexual customs of the Tahitians might be ultimately as conducive to contentment as those of Christian Europeans. The anthropology of the Enlightenment—discovering the primitive worlds of exotic savages in remote lands—was also capable of harvesting the insights of anthropological perspective, and bringing them to bear with critical intensity on the customs and values of society in Europe. For the philosophes of the eighteenth century, the anthropological agenda pointed the paradoxical path, through the barbarous domains of primitive peoples, to the sophisticated self-doubts of modernity and Europe.

In this book, we seek to excavate the origins of anthropology in the eighteenth century, the first modern intellectual efforts to observe, understand, and analyze other cultures or—in the language of contemporary cultural theory—the Other. An enormous share of cultural theory, in fact, focuses on this very issue of otherness. The Other came to the forefront of modern intellectual debate with the pioneering works of Orientalism by Edward Said in 1979 and The Conquest of America by Tzvetan Todorov in 1982, which theorized on European cultural encounters with Asia and America, the East and the West, respectively. The prominence and prevalence of this academic discussion, in the decades since then, makes it now seem all the more important to take scholarly stock of just how Europe came to confront intellectually, describe systematically, and analyze critically other cultures beyond Europe. This book on the anthropology of the Enlightenment proposes precisely that: to identify the intellectual and cultural foundations of the European encounter with peoples perceived as alien, exotic, primitive, savage, or barbarous—fundamentally different in ways that demanded critical analysis from enlightened observers. That discourse sought to understand those peoples in their own social and cultural contexts, that is, anthropologically.

This book is—indeed, must be—an interdisciplinary enterprise, and the contributors come from the diverse fields of history, literature, philosophy, and anthropology. We the editors have brought together our own two fields—the historical study of cultural relations and perceptions between Eastern Europe and Western Europe, and the cultural study of historical relations and perceptions between Spain and Spanish America—the better to pursue the anthropological perspective of the Enlightenment, looking eastward and looking westward. Our contributors have given the book a global range, reflecting the far-flung interests of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, when the comprehensive mapping and exploration of the Pacific Ocean in the age of Captain Cook made possible an appreciation of the global dimensions of geography and anthropology.

Larry Wolff’s introduction explores the intellectual history of anthropology in the Enlightenment, considering Montesquieu and Swift, Voltaire and Rousseau, Fortis and Cook, Herder and Sade, and analyzing the complementary principles of enlightened anthropology: the philosophical spirit of cultural perspective and the ethnographic endeavor of scientific description. Marco Cipolloni’s conclusion examines the relation between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, especially with regard to the New World of America: how the age of Renaissance discovery modulated culturally into the age of Enlightenment anthropology, and how Enlightenment anthropology bequeathed its legacy to the modern anthropology of the nineteenth century. He analyzes the anthropological significance of the discursive relation between the Old Wor(l)d and the New Wor(l)ds, in the crucial European encounter with the Americas.

The contributions to the volume are divided into three principal parts. The first part focuses on anthropology as a philosophical subject, used especially in writing philosophical history: Gibbon on the barbarians of the ancient world, the philosophes on China, Diderot on empire, Herder on India, William Robertson on the Aztecs and Incans, and Adam Smith on hunters and gatherers. In this mode, enlightened anthropology speculatively explored earlier and primitive stages of human development, and compared historical developments across different parts of the globe. The second part of the book focuses on direct ethnographic encounters between Europeans and the supposedly primitive peoples who became the objects of early anthropological observations: in the Pacific, in Greenland, in the Russian Empire, and in Haiti. The third part focuses on enlightened conceptions of human nature, considering how human nature came to be understood anthropologically in its various social and cultural contexts: the cultural meaning of dreams, the social context of law, the significance of environment for transplanted colonists, and the psychological implications of the eighteenth-century theory of animal economy.

These divisions of the volume thus highlight our principal arguments for understanding the Enlightenment as the crucial intellectual matrix for the emergence of the modern anthropological perspective on human society. The contributions suggest the rich variety of anthropological discourses and endeavors in the age of Enlightenment. Our book cannot offer a complete and comprehensive account of every anthropological aspect of the Enlightenment precisely because, as the book itself seeks to demonstrate, the Enlightenment was fundamentally anthropological in all of its aspects and preoccupations. The whole character of the Enlightenment was profoundly conditioned by the essential and pervasive importance of the anthropological impulse.

Contributors

Sunil Agnani is currently completing a book entitled Enlightenment Universalism, and Colonial Knowledge: Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, 1770–1800. He completed his doctorate at Columbia University, and then joined the Princeton Society of Fellows before starting as an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Michigan.

Jean-Philippe E. Belleau is an anthropologist who teaches Latin American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is also a researcher at the ERSIPAL (Équipe de Recherche: Société, Identité et Pouvoir en Amérique Latine), Institut des Hautes Etudes d’Amérique Latine, Université Paris-III Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Mary Baine Campbell teaches medieval and early modern literature and culture at Brandeis University. Her books include The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (1988) and Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (1999), as well as two volumes of poetry. She is currently at work on a book about early modern dreams.

Giulia Cecere has recently completed her Ph.D. in the School of History and Archives at University College Dublin thanks to an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholarship. Her Ph.D. thesis is entitled Maps, Frontiers, and Cultures: Defining Europe’s Eastern Boundaries in the Eighteenth Century. Her current research project is The Representation of the Characters of Populations in Early Modern Europe.

Marco Cipolloni is professor and chair of Spanish Language and Culture at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Bologna in 1993, and is the author of many books and articles on Spanish and Latin American intellectual history, theater, and cinema. His works include Il sovrano e la corte nelle cartas della conquista (1991), Tra memoria apostolica e racconto profetico: il compromesso etnografico francescano e le cosas della Nuova Spagna (1994), Ritratto dell’artista come gringo viejo (2000, on Saura’s cinematic portrait of Goya), and the critical edition of the Teatro completo of Miguel Angel Asturias (2004).

John Gascoigne is professor of history at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. His books include Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (1994), Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (1998), and The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (2002).

Nicholas A. Germana is a lecturer in history at Keene State College, New Hampshire. He received his Ph.D. in European history from Boston College in 2006. His dissertation was entitled The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity, 1760–1830.

Michael Harbsmeier studied anthropology and teaches history at the University of Roskilde in Denmark. His books include Wilde Völkerkunde: Andere Welten in deutschen Reiseberichten der frühen Neuzeit (Savage Anthropology: Other Worlds in Early Modern German Travel Accounts, 1994) and Stimmen aus dem äussersten Norden (Voices from Ultima Thule, 2001). He is currently working on a comparative study of accounts of Europe by travelers from other parts of the world.

Neil Hargraves is lecturer in history at Newbattle Abbey College, Scotland. He has published several articles on various aspects of eighteenth-century historiography, and is currently working on a book on the concept of character in eighteenth-century social and historical thought. He is also researching the idea of resentment in historical narrative.

Philippe Huneman is a philosopher of science at the IHPST (Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques), CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Paris. He is the author of Bichat: la vie et la mort (1998), and editor of Understanding Purpose: On Kant and Biology (forthcoming). He has published several papers on Kant and on philosophical problems of evolutionary biology. He currently works on causation, adaptation, and emergence.

Michael Kempe is an assistant in the History Department at the University of Gallen, Switzerland. He has coedited a special issue of Environment and History entitled Coping with the Unexpected: Natural Disasters and Their Perception (2003). His current postdoctoral research is a book project titled Curse of the Sea: Piracy and International Law in Early Modern Times. His research areas include history of science, legal history, and environmental history.

Jonathan Lamb is the Mellon professor of the humanities at Vanderbilt University. His books include The Rhetoric of Suffering: Reading the Book of Job in the Eighteenth Century (1995) and Preserving the Self in the South Seas (2001). He is currently at work on a book entitled The Things Things Say.

Christian Marouby is professor of French at Mills College. He has most recently published L’économie de la nature: essai sur Adam Smith et l’anthropologie de la croissance (2004). His current research centers on the question of limits in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Anthony Pagden is distinguished professor of political science and history at UCLA. His books include European Encounters with the New World (1993), Peoples and Empires (2001), and La ilustración y sus enemigos (2002), and, as editor, The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (2002). He is completing a study of the conflict between East and West in the European imagination from the Persian Wars until the present.

J. G. A. Pocock is professor emeritus of history at Johns Hopkins University. His books include The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), Barbarism and Religion, I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (1999), Barbarism and Religion, II: Narratives of Civil Government (1999), Barbarism and Religion, III: The First Decline and Fall (2003), Barbarism and Religion, IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires (2005), and The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (2005).

Larry Wolff is professor of history at New York University. His books include Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994) and Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (2001). His current research concerns Habsburg Galicia.

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

Discovering Cultural Perspective

The Intellectual History of Anthropological Thought in the Age of Enlightenment

Larry Wolff

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Montesquieu’s Persian Letters was published anonymously in 1721, and quickly attracted a readership in France. Though the work was later revealed to be fiction, it was initially received as a true account given by Persian travelers in France, comparing their own customs and beliefs to those of the French. Part of the book’s appeal lay in its Persian exoticism—especially the representation of Persian harem life—which fed a fashionable French fascination with the Middle Eastern world, already stimulated between 1704 and 1717 by the publication of Antoine Galland’s French translation of the Thousand and One Nights. The subtler part of the impact of the Persian Letters, however, lay in its airing of an allegedly objective, because external, critique of French society, as the Persians reported upon those aspects of life in France that seemed perverse, irrational, or repellent to them. It was this criticism of French, and more generally European, society that made the Persian Letters into one of the founding works of the Enlightenment.

Montesquieu’s Persians wrote their letters as anthropological observers of French customs, while their experience of France led them to become anthropologically perplexed about their own Persian assumptions. Usbek, as a visitor in the land of charcuterie, wondered in Letter 17 why pork was forbidden to Moslems, and concluded that things in themselves are neither pure nor impure. When he wrote in Letter 26 to Roxana in the harem of Isfahan, he reported on the immodesty of French women: If you were here, Roxana, you would certainly feel outraged by the dreadful ignominy into which your sex has fallen. You would flee from this hateful place, longing for the welcome seclusion which brings innocence.¹ Montesquieu was well aware that French women, reading his book, would be reciprocally outraged at the repressive seclusion of Persian women in the harem.

In the Persian Letters, Montesquieu established the principle of cultural relativism as one of the fundamental intellectual features of the Enlightenment. In Letter 59, addressed to Usbek by Rica, his fellow Persian, the principle was fully elaborated:

It seems to me, Usbek, that all our judgments are made with reference covertly to ourselves. I do not find it surprising that the negroes paint the devil sparkling white, and their gods black as coal, or that certain tribes have a Venus with her breasts hanging down to her thighs, or in brief that all the idolatrous peoples represent their gods with human faces, and endow them with all their own impulses. It has been well said that if triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.²

Here Montesquieu posed questions that anticipated the spirit of modern anthropology: concerning the religious worship of different peoples, of diverse races and tribes. He answered the questions with reference to the coherence of each cultural group, suggesting a correspondence between their gods and themselves. Affirming that all our judgments are made with reference covertly to ourselves, Rica proclaimed the principle of cultural relativism. Envisioning the three-sided god of the triangles, Montesquieu even adumbrated some of the patterned cultural analysis of structural anthropology. Above all, however, in outlining a philosophical schema of multiple cultures—each coherent in itself, with customs determined only by reference to itself—Montesquieu pointed the way toward an anthropological outlook in the Age of Enlightenment.

RELATIVE PERSPECTIVE: MONTESQUIEU AND SWIFT

If one has to begin somewhere, or rather with someone, it must be with Montesquieu, wrote the anthropologist Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard in his lectures on the history of anthropology. Evans-Pritchard focused on the Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, to demonstrate Montesquieu’s anthropological interest in the idea of social structure and of dominant values which operate through the structure.³ The word anthropology only gradually acquired its modern meaning over the course of the eighteenth century, until in 1788 Alexandre-César Chavannes published his book, Anthropology, or the General Science of Man (Anthropologie ou science générale de l’homme). In fact, the original meaning of anthropology involved the attribution of human qualities to God, precisely as described by Rica in Letter 59 when he wrote about the black gods of black Africans. The discipline of anthropology would not fully emerge until the nineteenth century, with such figures as Lewis Henry Morgan, E. B. Tylor, James Frazer, and Franz Boas. The relevant writers of the eighteenth century were philosophes like Montesquieu, whose reflections on society articulated the intellectual premises of the still-inchoate anthropological discipline. The cultural relativism of Montesquieu in the Persian Letters in the 1720s would, in some sense, prepare the anthropological ground for Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa in the 1920s.

A sensational success in France, the Persian Letters were translated into English almost immediately, and published in London in 1722. Jonathan Swift published the English-language sensation Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, also articulating the principle of cultural relativism, and ready to be immediately translated into French. Gulliver’s Travels was the fictional account of a voyage of discovery, with Captain Gulliver as the anthropological guide to a variety of imaginary societies remote from Europe. Swift presented the contrasting cultures of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, each coherent and consistent as perceived from an outsider’s perspective, and all the more so by comparison with one another. Lilliput was shown on a fictive map as an island in the Indian Ocean southwest of Sumatra; Brobdingnag was attached to North America, somewhere in the neighborhood of Alaska. As measured from Gulliver’s perspective, Lilliputians were tiny creatures, living in a miniature society. The Brobdingnagians were giants, towering over Gulliver, just as he towered over the Lilliputians.

Roughly half a century later, Samuel Johnson, speaking to James Boswell, would dismiss as trivial the play of perspective in Gulliver’s Travels : When once you have thought of the big men and little men it is very easy to do all the rest.⁴ Johnson’s remark was perhaps a measure of how much the play of relative perspective had come to be taken for granted during the decades of the eighteenth century. When Voltaire composed the tale Micromegas in the 1750s, concerning interplanetary disparities in size and understanding, he did not consider the issue beneath his intellectual notice. Indeed, one might argue that once Swift had thought of the big men and the little men, and once Montesquieu had thought of the French and the Persians, then all the rest would dominate the intellectual agenda of the Enlightenment for the rest of the eighteenth century. All the rest was precisely the anthropological problem of how such differing groups of people viewed each other reciprocally from their different perspectives.

The mock geography of the maps included in Gulliver’s Travels was complemented by a mock anthropology that showed Swift attuned to issues of comparative culture. Lilliputian writing, for instance, was described as very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans; nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians; nor from up to down, like the Chinese; nor from down to up, like the Cascagians; but aslant from one corner of the paper to the other, like our ladies in England.⁵ Just as Lilliputians might seem small from the perspective of Captain Gulliver, so their writing might look peculiar from the perspective of a male Englishman. Swift was aware that the customs of culture could be the basis for comparing peoples worldwide, including completely invented peoples like the Lilliputians. When Swift described the militant enmity between the islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu, the comical point of discord was their irreconcilable customs for cracking eggs, whether at the larger or the smaller end. Swift surely intended this fierce dispute as a satire on the triviality of theological arguments in contemporary Europe, but by representing larger issues of belief in terms of everyday customary practices, he showed himself also sensitive to the anthropological implications of symbol, structure, custom, and ritual for the foundations of culture and identity.

The relative measure of big men and little men was thus by no means the only cultural counterpoint in Gulliver’s Travels, which confronted Captain Gulliver in the concluding voyage with the contrasting societies of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms were horses that inhabited an island off the coast of Australia, but horses of such philosophic intelligence, such social and political composure, that Gulliver could scarcely believe in their equine appearance: The behavior of these animals was so orderly and rational, so acute and judicious, that I at last concluded, they must needs be magicians, who had thus metamorphosed themselves upon some design. The rational qualities of the Houyhnhnms were all the more evident for the fact that the island also included inhabitants of another species with a contrasting culture, the Yahoos. Gulliver regarded them as disgusting savages, little better than beasts, but also had to recognize them as humans related to himself. When I thought of my family, my friends, my countrymen, or the human race in general, he remarked, I considered them as they really were, Yahoos in shape and disposition, perhaps a little more civilized.⁶ Gulliver, by his travels, had learned something about the human race in general, and something about the range and variety of more- and less-civilized societies.

Gulliver could appreciate the supercivilized condition of the Houyhnhnms, just as he could appreciate the utterly savage conduct of the Yahoos, precisely because the contrast illuminated the importance of perspective for evaluating culture. Like the polarization of perspective between Europeans and Asians in the Persian Letters, so the comparative appreciation of more civilized and more savage societies in Gulliver’s Travels was fundamental for the emergence of anthropological analysis. If Swift did not use the abstract noun civilization to describe the society of the Houyhnhnms, it was only because in the 1720s that word had not yet been defined according to its modern meaning. By the 1750s, it would be already current, and profoundly implicated in the anthropology of the Enlightenment.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, returning to England in 1718 after years abroad, noted that the experience of other cultures would make her inevitably more critical of English customs:

After having seen part of Asia and Africa and almost made the tour of Europe I think the honest English squire more happy who verily believes the Greek wines less delicious than March beer, that the African fruits have not so fine a flavour as golden pippins . . . and that, in short, there is no perfect enjoyment of this life out of Old England. I pray God I may think so for the rest of my life, and since I must be contented with our scanty allowance of daylight, that I may forget the enlivening sun of Constantinople.⁷

The experience of travel in the Age of Enlightenment would increasingly become the stimulus to question cultural presumptions, and to place the traveler’s own native customs and satisfactions—whether narrowly English or more broadly European—in the critical context of multiple and various cultures. Captain Gulliver, returning to England around the same time, though in a fictional dimension, was even more emphatic:

Although since my unfortunate exile from the Houyhnhnm country, I had compelled myself to tolerate the sight of Yahoos . . . yet my memory and imagination were perpetually filled with the virtues and ideas of those exalted Houyhnhnms. And when I began to consider, that by copulating with one of the Yahoo species, I had become a parent of more, it struck me with the utmost shame, confusion, and horror.⁸

The relative comparison of cultures had destabilized Gulliver’s relation to his own, leaving him in a condition of anthropological ambivalence.

It has long been accepted that the discovery of artistic perspective was one of the hallmarks of the Renaissance. The representation of objects in relative and proportional size, depending upon their perceived three-dimensional depth in a two-dimensional painting or drawing, was more than just a matter of arranging big men and little men within a landscape, but involved a revolution in reflections on human perception and its relation to physical space. The Enlightenment may be correspondingly characterized by the discovery of cultural perspective, with its revolutionary destabilization of the eighteenth-century observer who found herself returning not to Old England, but rather to a new kind of anthropological space, globally demarcated by the principle of cultural relativity, imbued with the unfamiliar flavors of Greek wines, African fruits, and Houyhnhnm virtues.

The Renaissance age of oceanic discovery already made possible the comparison of the Old World and the New World, and permitted the first intimations of relative perspective. Perhaps the most famous Renaissance instance was Montaigne’s essay on cannibals in the New World and his own encounter in France with a native of Brazil: I do not believe from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.⁹ If such judgments were still rare and striking in the age of Montaigne, they became widespread, even fashionable, in the age of Montesquieu. The Pacific voyages of Captain Cook in the eighteenth century were conducted with the more or less purposeful intention of making anthropological comparisons in the study of human society.

Tzvetan Todorov has written about the cultural dynamics of these anthropological perspectives in France: Nous et les autres: la réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Us and the Others: French Reflection on Human Diversity), published in 1989. Todorov suggests that Montaigne’s argument concerning cannibals invoked an ethical and negative meaning of the term barbarian, rather than a culturally comprehensive and implicitly anthropological sense. For Todorov, Montesquieu in the Persian Letters articulated the fundamental problem of observing human society: The condition of successful knowing is thus non-belonging to the society described; that is to say, one can not at the same time fully live in a society and know it.¹⁰ Historiographical interest in the anthropology of the Enlightenment dates back at least to Peter Gay’s volume, The Enlightenment, An Interpretation: The Science of Freedom, which was published in 1969 and proposed that the social sciences in general had their origins in the eighteenth century: The prehistory of the social sciences had its beginning in the emergence of cultural relativism, the bittersweet fruit of travel.¹¹ While Gay focused on the development of sociology, political economy, and history among the social sciences, Michèle Duchet published a book in 1971 that specifically addressed anthropological thinking and focused on the French philosophes: Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (Anthropology and History in the Century of the Enlightenment). A 1992 symposium held in Wolfenbüttel resulted in an important German volume, published in 1994, on anthropology and literature in the eighteenth century.¹²

Todorov’s attention to us and the others, while related to Duchet’s project in its subject matter, was in its theoretical concerns also aligned with Edward Said’s Orientalism, which was published in 1979 and became an instant landmark in cultural theory with profound relevance for the history of anthropology.¹³ While Montesquieu, in Todorov’s analysis, may have intimated that it was impossible to know a society from within it (thus positing the need for an external anthropological observer), Said took the theoretical position that it might be no less difficult to try to study a society from the outside. In Said’s view, the West, over the course of several centuries, had sought knowledge of Asia and the Middle East in the compromised context of imperial ambition, and had therefore ended up fictively constructing the Orient rather than factually learning about Asia. The dynamics of Orientalism were such that the observer, in spite of the best empirical intentions, would find himself implicated in the attribution of otherness to the Orient as part of the vindication of imperial purposes. In a related spirit of cultural criticism, Todorov applied the concept of the Other to the New World in the age of discovery in his book, La conquête de l’Amérique: la question de l’autre (The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other), published in 1982.¹⁴ The paradigm of otherness—as formulated by Said, and as elaborated by Todorov—offers an interpretation of the intellectual processes of Western culture in the face of exotic and opaque lands and peoples. In Said’s cultural theory, the fantasist constructions of the Orientalist and the ultimate elusiveness of the Other implicitly suggest the virtual impossibility of meaningful anthropology.

Said dates the origins of Orientalism to the eighteenth century, and in particular to the Sanskrit studies of William Jones and Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron. It is perhaps noteworthy that Said never mentions Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, an interesting silence inasmuch as the fictive nature of the work so perfectly fits the argument of Orientalism, concerning the Occidental construction of the Orient as fantasy. Yet, Said’s arguments also assume a high degree of ingenuousness on the part of the Western observers, the Orientalists, who allegedly did not understand that they were participating in a project of cultural construction and imperial domination, and who never suspected that their claims to know the Orient were epistemologically hopeless. In this regard, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, though in some sense a work of Orientalist invention, may be interpreted as inconsistent with Said’s argument. In the Persian Letters, the problem of perspective was never naively evaded. Montesquieu was self-consciously concerned with the intricacies of perspective and the obstacles and opacities that complicate an observer’s appreciation of an alien culture. It is precisely this attention to the problem of cultural perspective that also makes it possible to interpret the Persian Letters, and the Enlightenment more generally, as incipiently anthropological.

FROM ORIGINAL MAN TO CIVILIZED MAN: VOLTAIRE AND ROUSSEAU

In the 1750s, the French physiocrats, particularly Victor Riquetti, the Marquis de Mirabeau, began to use the brand new word civilisation in economic discussions about the increase of commerce and wealth. At the same time, as Norbert Elias has proposed in his History of Manners, the term civilisation began to be associated with the refinement of manners pertaining to a civilized man (civilisé or policé) and accompanying the increase of wealth. From that time on, the word civilisation—spelled with an s in France and Britain and with a z in America—has maintained an extraordinary ideological weight as the standard for measuring and comparing societies and cultures around the globe. While the modern conception of civilization recognizes its plurality, as in Samuel Huntington’s account of the clash of civilizations, the Enlightenment coined the term in the singular mode, as a standard that could be applied to all human societies according to its relative degree of presence or absence: in the words of the Marquis de Salaberry in Constantinople in 1790, the more or less of civilization (le plus ou moins de civilisation). This relative concept of civilization was used to order intellectually the relation among the different parts of Europe in the eighteenth century, namely in the differentiation between Eastern Europe and Western Europe, but also to establish hierarchically Europe’s cultural priority with respect to the rest of the world.¹⁵

This evaluation of societies according to a standard of civilization was essential for the emergence of anthropology. The advent of the neologism civilisation in the 1750s also coincided with the publications in 1754 of Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs (Essay on Customs) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality); Voltaire’s essay made customs or manners (moeurs) into the central issue of historical progress, while Rousseau’s discourse called into question the whole notion of historical progress, speculatively posing the anthropological issue of the state of nature and the origins of human society. Rousseau’s discourse, in particular, would become a touchstone for social, political, and anthropological reflection in the modern world.

The Encyclopédie, one of the great philosophical projects of the Enlightenment, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, began to be published in 1751, and the first volume, starting with the letter A, included a very brief article on Anthropologie. It was classified as a theological term, and was supposed to signify the attribution of human qualities to God—an attribution testifying to the weakness of our intelligence. The article thus offered a bit of anticlerical humor at the expense of religion, which was mocked for encouraging people to believe that God operates as if he had hands, eyes, et cetera. Yet, the Encyclopédie noted that the term anthropologie was also being used to signify the study of man in writings about animal economy, which sought to provide an integrated human physiology that included the cognitive aspects of being.¹⁶ Thus, in the 1750s, there was already a hint in the first volume of the Encyclopédie that the meaning of the word anthropology was being revised in the context of the Enlightenment.

In the article on Culture, however, the Encyclopédie revealed that the eighteenth-century meaning of the word was still very remote from its modern significance: culture was culture de la terre, in other words, agriculture. In English, Samuel Johnson’s celebrated dictionary of 1755 was entirely consistent with the French Encyclopédie: CULTURE: The act of cultivation; the act of tilling the ground; tillage. A secondary meaning contained perhaps the seeds of future lexicography: Art of improvement and melioration. The principal reference might be to the improvement of the soil, but the word was theoretically applicable to other arenas of amelioration. The verb to culture was so absolutely agricultural that one of its definitions was to manure.¹⁷ In the 1730s, however, Voltaire allowed for the possibility of another meaning in his Century of Louis XIV. He wrote, to be sure, about culture de la terre, but also about culture de l’esprit, culture of the mind or spirit. In fact, he used the term in a notably modern sense: "The extreme ease which has been introduced into social intercourse, affability, simplicity, and the culture of the mind (culture de l’esprit) have turned Paris into a town which is probably far superior, as regards civilized living (la douceur de la vie), to Rome and Athens in the days of their splendor.¹⁸ The eighteenth-century lexicon thus witnessed the gradual emergence of such terms as anthropology, culture, and civilization," in some resemblance to their modern meanings.

In Micromegas, in 1752, Voltaire presented his parable of relative size, big creatures and little creatures, in uncertain correlation to greater or lesser degrees of culture of the mind. The giant Micromegas came from another solar system, while a relatively smaller dwarf came from the planet Saturn and himself appeared as a giant on earth, by comparison with humans. Micromegas reflected anthropologically on the universe’s profusion of varieties with a sort of wonderful uniformity, meaning that all thinking beings are different, and at bottom they are all alike by the gift of thought and of desires. As travelers from outer space, Micromegas and the Saturnian dwarf were in a position as objective outsiders to pursue the anthropological study of human beings: We must try to examine these insects, we will reason about them afterward.¹⁹ Empirical observation would form the basis of this alien study of mankind, this anthropology.

When Micromegas was published in 1752, it appeared together with the plan for a history of the human spirit. In 1754 that work was published as a universal history, and in 1756 as the history of the "customs (moeurs) and spirit of nations": Essai sur les moeurs. The emphasis on human variety would endow the work with an anthropological sensibility, evident from the beginning, as Voltaire addressed the issue of racial difference: What is most interesting for us is the perceptible difference in the species of men who inhabit the four known parts of our world. Only a blind man could doubt that the Whites, the Negroes, the Albinos, the Hottentots, the Lapps, the Chinese, the Americans, are entirely different races.²⁰ Voltaire had no firsthand knowledge of any part of the world except Europe, so his were the anthropological observations of a relatively blind observer.

In spite of the differences that he supposed to exist, Voltaire was equally confident that the varieties of mankind were also alike in uniformity. In his discussion of savages, he affirmed that all men live in society, and that every savage—a Morlaque, an Icelander, a Lapp, a Hottentot—lived in the social context of the family. Voltaire furthermore polemically offered an image of savages in society—gathering on certain days in a sort of barn to celebrate ceremonies of which they understand nothing, listening to a man dressed differently from them whom they don’t understand at all—such that the terms would also describe churchgoing Catholic Europeans.²¹ Indeed, for Voltaire, with his anticlerical temperament, there were no cultural customs or values that seemed more savagely barbarous than those of Roman Catholicism, as practiced on his own continent in his own times. Reviewing the role of Christianity in European history, he reminded his readers: You have seen among these ridiculous barbarisms, the bloody barbarism of the wars of religion. ²² As in Micromegas, there could be a triple play of perspective, the Hottentot seeming savage from the perspective of a Christian European, but the Christian seeming no less savage from the perspective of the enlightened philosophe.

Yet, in spite of the barbarism of Christianity and the fact that this whole history is a heap of crimes, follies, and misfortunes, Voltaire permitted himself some small degree of cultural appreciation for his own society: It must be that our part of Europe has possessed a character in its customs and genius that is not to be found in Thrace, where the Turks established the seat of their empire, or in Tartary, out of which they once emerged. This constituted a frank affirmation of European priority, compared to the Ottoman Empire, and was even more specific in its designation of our part of Europe, that is, Western Europe. The Orient, more generally, served as a foil for Voltaire in his attempts to generalize about European customs: The greatest difference between us and the Orientals is the manner in which we treat women.²³ Voltaire had never traveled east of Berlin, and his Oriental erudition was no more empirical than that of Montesquieu, but both Frenchmen agreed that social customs concerning the relations of the sexes were fundamental for defining the characters of different societies. Like Montesquieu, Voltaire also mentioned the presence of eunuchs accompanying women in the seraglios of the Orient. For Voltaire, this was one mark of the anthropological difference between Europe and the Orient, though Montesquieu, even more sensitive to the play of perspective, had permitted his Persians to suggest that European priests, as celibate men monitoring female morality, were the counterparts of Persian eunuchs.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in Tristes tropiques, declared that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the most anthropological of the philosophes: although he never traveled to distant lands.²⁴ Lévi-Strauss thus offered a fundamental affirmation of the importance of the Enlightenment for the discipline of anthropology. Rousseau, in fact, was not just the most anthropological of philosophes, but also the most philosophical of anthropologists, for the very reason that he did not travel to distant lands. His reflections were almost purely philosophical, untempered by empirical observation. At the center of his famous discourse concerning inequality stood the figure of the savage, endlessly fascinating to Rousseau. Sometimes the savage was described as a Carib, though Rousseau never sailed to the Caribbean except in his philosophical imagination. Like Voltaire, who wrote speculatively about the customs of the Orient to better appreciate the culture of Europe, Rousseau imaginatively discovered man in the state of nature as the chronologically remote point of perspective from which to evaluate and condemn modern society with its cruel inequalities. Rousseau’s philosophical construction of the Caribbean Other provided the analytical instrument that he needed in order to study contemporary social structure, with its character of egregious inequality.

"Oh man (O homme), wrote Rousseau, apostrophizing his enlightened public, but also denominating his anthropological subject. The times of which I am going to speak are very remote—how much you have changed from what you were! It is, so to say, the life of your species (espèce ) that I am going to describe (décrire)."²⁵ In fact, description might seem a strange way to denominate Rousseau’s peculiar clairvoyance, by which he confidently claimed to intuit the social structure of a remote prehistoric age, in order to trace, intuitively, the various stages of human development toward the inequalities of modern society. The empirical aspect of anthropology was altogether alien to Rousseau, whose crucial anthropological contributions as a philosophe were altogether matters of theory.

In contrast to Hobbes, Rousseau believed that the state of nature was fundamentally peaceful. He proposed, for instance, that savages were not necessarily violent in the venting of their sexual passions: The Caribs, who of all people existing today have least departed from the state of nature, are precisely the most peaceful in their loves, and the least subject to jealousy, despite their living in the kind of hot climate which always seems to inflame those passions.²⁶ Caribbean society, decimated by disease in the aftermath of Columbus and transformed by more than two centuries of Spanish imperial rule, remained almost pristine in Rousseau’s anthropological imagination. Thus, he could elaborate his theory of the state of nature, and designate the Caribs as a peaceful point of reference for analyzing the contrasting violence of modern European society. What a spectacle for a Carib would be the arduous and envied labours of a European minister! Rousseau exclaimed. How many cruel deaths would not that indolent savage prefer to the horrors of such a life, which often is not even sweetened by the satisfaction of doing good?²⁷ Just as Montesquieu had envisioned the Persian perspective on France, so Rousseau imagined the Caribbean perspective on Europe.

The problem of cultural perspective for Rousseau thus acquired a chronological dimension as he gazed across the wide ocean and into the remote depths of time in order to discover his anthropological subjects. The project of discovering and tracing the lost and forgotten paths which must have led men from the natural state to the civil state depended upon the gaze of the philosophe and his capacity to recognize the condition of men in the state of nature: "since original man (l’homme originel) has disappeared by degrees, society no longer offers to the eyes of philosophers anything more than an assemblage of artificial men."²⁸ Thus, the empirical method of the eye would never reveal the lost and forgotten state of nature, which could only be reconstructed by the philosophical gaze, focusing on the original man who had been disappearing by degrees over the course of centuries. If the anthropology of the Enlightenment concerned the discovery of cultural perspective, then Rousseau’s original man—the savage, the Carib—represented the vanishing point of perspective in its representational dynamics.

Though Rousseau never left Europe himself, he believed that traveling to observe primitive peoples might enable the modern observer to obtain a better glimpse of the prehistoric past, and the human stages of development between savagery and modernity. Yet, he emphasized that the empirical observations of the traveler would be worthless unless assisted by the philosophical perspective of the Age of Enlightenment:

In the two or three centuries since the inhabitants of Europe have been flooding into other parts of the world, endlessly publishing new collections of voyages and travels, I am persuaded that we have come to know no other men except Europeans; moreover it appears from the ridiculous prejudices, which have not died out even among men of letters, that every author produces under the pompous name of the study of man nothing much more than a study of the men of his own country.²⁹

Rousseau’s reference to the pompous name of the study of man suggested that the word anthropology was ready to be coined and adopted, as indeed it was over the course of the next generation.

The study of man was already clearly recognized as a branch of knowledge in itself, and Rousseau reflected upon the problems of perspective that complicated and vitiated its pursuit. The traveler reporting upon alien peoples could rarely rise above his own prejudices to produce a philosophically acceptable account of another society. In fact, Rousseau’s concerns anticipated the methodological challenge of modern anthropology, and even perhaps the paradoxical dilemma of Orientalism that was identified by Said, who found the Occidental observer scarcely capable of extricating himself from his own cultural complex of Oriental fantasies. Rousseau’s frank recognition of the problem of perspective suggested the seriousness of the Enlightenment’s engagement with anthropological concerns. The philosophe understood that only the most critical sensitivity to the prejudices of the Self could allow for any meaningful observation and representation of the Other.

The problem, as Rousseau saw it, was that philosophy does not travel, and he himself—no traveler—relied upon his own philosophical insight when it came to comprehending the Caribs. Even so, he proposed the ideal of the traveling philosopher as the key to anthropological knowledge:

Suppose a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot, a Duclos, a D’Alembert, a Condillac, and other men of that stamp were to travel to instruct their compatriots, observing and describing as only they know how, Turkey, Egypt, Barbary, the Empire of Morocco, Guinea, the land of the Kaffirs, the interior and the East coast of Africa, the Malabars, China, Tartary and above all Japan, and then in the other hemisphere, Mexico, Peru, Chile, and Magellan lands, not forgetting the Patagonias true and false, Tucamen, Paraguay if possible, Brazil. Finally the Caribbean islands, Florida and all the savage countries—the most important voyage of all, and the one that would have to be undertaken with the greatest possible care.³⁰

For Rousseau, a man of many philosophical fantasies, this was among the most fantastic: to imagine Montesquieu in Africa or Diderot in Mexico. The last and most important mission—Florida and the Caribbean—Rousseau might even have been reserving for himself, as his own fantasy voyage, since the savages, he supposed, would offer the most precious insights into the state of nature. Rousseau’s extraordinary program of dispatching philosophers from Europe to Asia, Africa, and America demonstrated his readiness to contemplate an anthropological approach to the study of human society, based on empirical observation and philosophical perspective.

Rousseau’s project of rediscovering lost and forgotten paths in order to understand the human passage from the natural state to the civil state was pursued in greater detail, and with more studious empiricism, within the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, all attempted to trace the stages of development of human society from savagery to civilization. In 1766 Ferguson published An Essay on the History of Civil Society, attempting to delineate the stages of primitive human society from hunting and fishing to pastoral herding to agriculture, with emphasis on the idea of progress from one stage to the next. Evans-Pritchard notes that Ferguson’s book illustrates many of the basic assumptions we find in modern social anthropology. ³¹ Peter Gay emphasizes rather Ferguson’s contribution to modern sociological thinking, and notes his explicit rejection of conjecture and speculation as practiced by Rousseau in the discourse on inequality. ³² Similarly important for classifying and evaluating the stages of human development were Millar, whose Origin of the Distinction of Ranks was published in 1771, and Kames, whose Sketches of the History of Man appeared in 1774. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, was similarly imbued with this same Scottish interest in the stages of human society.³³

George Stocking, evaluating Kames’s place in the history of anthropology, has noted his ambivalence about savagery and also about progress, both of which suggested positive as well as negative aspects. Stocking stresses the Scottish background of the Scottish philosophes: There was the ambiguity of Kames’ own experience—the sense of loss as well as profit involved in the progress Scotland had experienced in Kames’ lifetime. This was stronger perhaps in Ferguson, who had a Highland background and still spoke Erse as well as the Scottish English vernacular.³⁴ Thus, while the Scottish philosophes explored the stages of progress in human society from savagery to civilization, they also preserved an element of critical philosophical perspective in the evaluation of those terms. David Spadafora, writing about The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain, has noted that, among the Scots,