Redefining Reason: The Story of the Twentieth Century “Primitive” Mentality Debate and the Politics of Hyperrationality

By Bradley W. Patterson

Throughout the twentieth century, Western thinkers engaged in a politically charged, often highly personal and acrimonious debate over the mental and rational capacity of people from traditional nonliterate societies. The issue was a question of whether or not humanity was, at bottom, psychologically and rationally unified and equal as a species. Redefining Reason offers the first in-depth, critical history of that debate and its repercussions in modern Western thought and society.

Divided into three sections, this book first sets the twentieth-century “primitive” mentality debate within its historical context so that it may be better understood. It then focuses on some of the highlights of the debate. The next section suggests that this debate was, in reality, a chapter itself in (or in an aspect of) a much larger story: the story of what may be appropriately referred to as the hyperrationalization of human society. To conclude, this book follows the debate into the twenty-first century and offers the clarification and resolutions developed in earlier chapters to contemporary students, scholars, and educated lay readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984563644

Bradley W. Patterson

Bradley W. Patterson is a Neuropsychologist in Colorado. He has a Ph.D. In Biological Psychology (with specialization in Neuropsychology and Behavioral Neuroscience). He also holds degrees in Anthropology and Clinical Psychology. He has taught in the Psychology Department at Colorado State University-Pueblo, published journal articles in clinical neuroscience and currently lives in southern Colorado with his family.

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Copyright © 2018 by Bradley W. Patterson.

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To Sherry

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Prologue:   A Crossing

Part I:   Context

Chapter 1:   An Inscrutable Foreign Other

•   Footsteps Going Up, or Footsteps Going Down?

•   Progressivism Prevails

Chapter 2:   An Invisible Familiar Self

•   Materialism and Secularization

•   The Lords of Humankind

•   Where Wickedness Flourished Unchecked

•   The Perplexities of the Great White Queen

Chapter 3:   The Savage and the Age of Reason

•   A Savage Encounter in Powell’s Bookstore

•   Of Cobblers, Kitchen Maids, and Savages

•   The Missing Link Mania

•   Concerning the Biggest Heads on the Planet

•   The Question of Human Psychic Unity

PART II:   Highlights

Chapter 4:   Freeing Reason from Race: Franz Boas

Chapter 5:   Linking Irrationality to Savages, Children,

and Neurotics: Freud

Chapter 6:   The Philosopher and the Prelogical Savage:

Levy-Bruhl

•   Enter the Philosophers

•   The Birth of the Prelogical Savage

•   The Anthropological Response

•   The Denouement of an Infamous Adjective

Chapter 7:   An Aristotelean Among the Azande: Evans-

Pritchard

•   The Erosion of Mystery

•   The Prelogical Savage Bites the Dust

•   Cross-Examination

•   Dreaming Spires and Cerebral Gods

•   A Rationality Debate in a Taxicab

Chapter 8:   Dismantling Reason and the Rational

Platform of the Rationality Debate: Sartre

•   The Celebrity

Chapter 9:   Reason Goes Underground: Claude Lévi-Strauss

•   The Codebreaker

•   Mixing Metaphors in the Interpretation of Myth

•   One Oedipal Complex after Another

Chapter 10:   The Politics of Reason: Sartre and Levi-

Strauss Ratifying "The Magna Carta of Race

Equality", circa 1962

•   Tête-à-Tête

Chapter 11:   The Debate Unwinds:

A Crisis of Representation and Maturation

•   An Uncertainty Principle: The Problem of Being There

•   Feenoman Sails Into Greek Conceptual Waters:

The Trials and Tribulations of Translation

•   The Couch Potato vs. The Big Man:

Where There’s No IQ to Turn To

•   Civilization and Its Technological Discontents:

Where’s the Real Rub?

Chapter 12:   Dimming the Lights and Deserting the Stage of the Debate

•   Anthropology’s Nervous Breakdown

PART III:   The Larger Picture

Chapter 13:   Hyperrationality and an Old Miscalculation

of the Human Equation

•   A Cultural Impact Crater and Its After Effects

Epilogue:   A New Century

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Foreword

While reason has been heavily criticized ever since it emerged in its essentially modern form during the Enlightenment, its role in Western (and perhaps especially American) political society has never, in modern memory, been in question more than it is now in the second decade of the twenty first century (an alleged post truth period of polarized tribal thinking, alternative facts, fake news and a growing indifference toward objectivity, empirical evidence, rational discourse, and critical thinking). Often now, we must make a case for the importance of a rationality that use to carry more weight and be taken largely for granted. Might we eventually lose much of this, if we don’t use it much anymore? May our increasingly irrational politics produce an increasingly irrational society? In his 2018 book "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker suggests that our hyperpolarized politics, (more than a dumbed down culture and innate mental biases) constitutes the principal enemy of reason in the public sphere today" (Pinker, 2018, p.371)

Enlightenment rationality has long been assailed from both ends of the political spectrum, with left and right jabs intensifying following the counter culture of the 1960’s, the subsequent culture wars, rationality wars, and the war on science from the religious right. Included in a counter culturally inspired linguistic critique from humanities’ scholars on the left, feeling marginalized by the growth of science, came the postmodernist credo that reason is largely a justification for the imposition of social power, that logic and even reality are primarily socially constructed, subjective and relative, and that …all statements are trapped in a web of self-reference and collapse into paradox (Ibid, p.351). Modern cognitive science, furthermore, has also shown that humans are actually consistently irrational in many ways, assessing probabilities on the basis of availability heuristics, or familiar rules of thumb, and the behavior of others via stereotypes. We note outcomes that confirm our beliefs, and ignore those that don’t. We see intention where there is none, and still think mystically.

For decades now, a prevailing take home message from liberal scholars in the humanities and social sciences has been that the Enlightenment Project (ie. belief in reason, science, and social progress) is dead, and that we’ve been left with fractious cultural cheerleading where no world view is more valid than any other, while outside of academia, conservative pundits, as Pinker suggests, have tended to dismiss any idea they don’ t like that comes out of a university, ideas seen to threaten the traditional religious social fabric (ibid p.374).

Our rational discourse, thus weakened by political polarization, is now, also, playing out in a less centralized and regulated media environment with fewer moral and veridical restraints. As Pinker notes, The media cover elections like horse races, and analyse issues by pitting ideological hacks against each other in screaming matches (ibid p.381). Most everyone of course, instinctively pays attention to screaming matches, just like school yard fights. Unlike teachers, however, much of the contemporary media doesn’t break it up to get on with the valuable business of learning something. Eyeballs, ratings, celebrity, and profits have morphed what use to be called news, into Jerry Springer style infotainment.

And yet, something about scientific rationality resists political extraction. Is it something more than just an ideology? Despite human politics, this cognitive approach to the world has spread globally, like no other system of ideas, technologically transforming human life on the planet. Is there something less quixotic about it than other world views? For example, intellectual attacks on reason typically end up using reason to make their case. They use reason to say that there can be no veridical reason, as all is subjective and relative, and that there is no objective world. Furthermore, if everything is a lie (as anti-rationalists claim), this statement is a lie. Yet, if this statement (everything is a lie) is a lie, something is true, and if something is true, not everything is a lie, and we’ve encountered a semantic paradox. Do we live in an objective (rather than purely subjective) world, and is rational science tapping into it, or merely a currently culturally privileged or superannuated point of view? The answer of course, is all around us.

This book was first published in 2011, when reason was not quite the hot topic it has become, especially since the 2016 American presidential election. In his 2018 book (noted above), Pinker suggested that a re-evaluation of reason (and the related Enlightenment values of science, humanism, and progress) has never been more needed and relevant than now. His generally optimistic reassessment of reason relies heavily on what modern data science can tell us about the concept, its validity and utility in human society.

Another powerful way to re-examine the nature and role of reason in human affairs, is to watch Western rationality encountering (and trying to comprehend) the rationality of the rest of the world, especially during the course of the 20th century, a time that proved to be the most cogent phase of what was, in reality, an ancient controversy in the Western World, concerning the mentality and rationality of people form traditional non-literate societies. This is the approach taken in this book. Such an historical examination suggests that reason is complex, and contains both biologically evolved aspects (which I’ve termed human neuropsychological rationality), and culturally developed ones (that I refer to as hyper-rationality). To more fully understand reason, we must, therefore, redefine it.

Bradley W. Patterson

10/5/18

Preface

This is the story of a rather unusual debate, one that was never formally announced, coordinated, or neatly staged. No rules or procedures here were ever clearly established. The debate followed no plan of development. No common language or terms of discussion were ever really agreed upon. The participants commonly talked past one another when they crossed disputational swords, and at times the whole thing assumed the character of a courtroom brawl; new fights over new and divergent topics broke out from time to time here and there. The very subject of debate often seemed debatable, so ill-defined, complex and dynamic was it. Nevertheless, we shall try to pin it down as much as possible and to follow it through the course of the twentieth century, as something important about both our species and human history seems to be involved here.

In many ways this debate is as old as humanity itself. Therefore, we must bracket what we do here, arbitrarily to some extent, by the more manageable, conventional boundaries of the century just past, as it is calculated in the West. In doing so, however, we will also be focusing upon the most thoughtful, interesting and cogent phase of this ancient controversy in the Western world.

I am calling this the story of a primitive mentality/rationality debate because that is what it was called most commonly by those who participated in it. As we will see, there was nothing uniquely primitive about the mentality of people from traditional oral societies, but to deprive the twentieth-century debate of its own terms and questions would be to lose sight of what it was. In retrospect, the debate was a sort of chain-reaction type of dispute over the mental and rational capacity of people from traditional nonliterate cultures, that aroused and drew in various (at first) Western thinkers—primarily anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists—over the course of the century. The fires of this often emotional debate subsided and flared in the political winds of the twentieth century. The whole controversy had actually been kindled during the second half of the nineteenth century by German ethnographers (such as Adolf Bastian) and the late Victorian anthropologists that they had influenced (like Edward Burnett Tylor and Franz Boas). These individuals had all suggested the then uncommon notion that humanity was fundamentally rationally homogeneous. Still, as a self confident new twentieth century opened in the West, there were just these few sparks here and only an incipient debate; the rational inferiority (to use the word most commonly employed at the time) of people from traditional nonliterate societies continued to be largely taken for granted by most non—anthropological Western scholars interested in the matter, and outside of such circles the subject was but a small cacophony of opinion and facile assumption within a larger sea of indifference. With the appearance of the twentieth century debate’s most volatile figure in 1910, the French philosopher/logician Lucien Levy-Bruhl and his theory of the pre-logical savage, however, matters exploded into reverberating resentment from anthropologists. The debate exploded again to new heights of indignation in the postcolonial period and into near incomprehensibility with the counterculture. Questions of basic human dignity and psychological unity often appeared to be involved and both considerable chauvinism and outrage were frequently on display here. Indeed, things will get very interesting before we are done with this story.

Such an unruly and complex tale is inherently hard to tell. Furthermore, the deeper historical and intellectual context in which it must be set to be understood is exceedingly capacious and unwieldy. Perhaps cautious contemporary writers have generally stayed away from this saga with good reason; but their absence here has left a big hole in our understanding of the big picture of human rationality, at a time when such an understanding may be sorely needed.

In this book, my intent was to try to comprehend and to intellectually engage the story of the twentieth-century primitive mentality/rationality debate as I attempted to tell it. The format that I have chosen is a series of related essays; and my limitations have made of this book, both a personal view and an extreme abridgement of the real events of the story, simply a selection of hopefully heuristic highlights from a debate which we must now all try to make sense of.

In the pages to follow, we will in general approach this untidy debate chronologically, to see it unfold as the story that I believe it was. From a journalistic perspective, it was an astonishing story with rather profound scientific, philosophical, social and practical import, fascination and newsworthiness. If we have not recognized this, perhaps it is in part because stories that unfold this slowly—over the course of a hundred years or more—seem not to be stories, their news value thus remains imperceptible, overlooked.

The debate represents cultural circumstances that most likely will occur only once in human history. Relatively soon, it may not be possible to examine so directly questions about the fundamental rationality of the human mind as it manifested and developed in relative isolation at various locals over the surface of the planet. An intellectual tradition that began two and a half millennia ago in the eastern Mediterranean—now refined and somewhat metamorphosed by heightened interaction with the rest of the world—may come to color heavily the conceptual waters of all of the other intellectual traditions that have come down to us historically.

This same intellectual tradition (not a group, gender, class, race, or culture) will in the pages to come also reveal itself as the principal actor in our drama. Indeed, I would suggest that it was not only the real mover and shaker upon the stage of the great twentieth-century primitive rationality debate, but that it sits at the center of a much larger scene of historical activity and continues to beat out many of the basic social rhythms emanating from the heart of our new century. Certainly this is a large story, but then we shall tell it one chapter at a time.

Prologue

A Crossing

He was a curious man, and on May 5, 1898, his curiosity had placed him on a crowded forty-seven-foot ketch, seasick and badly sunburned, near the Great Barrier Reef. His vessel, the Freya, was attempting to anchor in a storm, and he and his drenched companions often lay prostrate on the deck, too ill to move. For a while, things really did not look too good for this inquisitive fellow and his shipmates. It was an infamous stretch of water, discovered by Europeans in 1606, a channel between the Coral and Arafura Seas; under it, some say, lie the remnants of an ancient land bridge between Asia and Australia. The place was the Torres Straits, and the curious young Englishman whose name was William Rivers, had been planning to step ashore at a place called Murray Island.

He was also a Cambridge man trained in medicine and the physiology of the human nervous system. In 1903 he would conduct experiments in cutaneous sensation on a friend, the neurologist Henry Head, who had had two nerves on his left forearm intentionally severed for the purpose of such an inquiry. Now, as he and his small ship seemed headed for ruin, he was pondering the anodyne effect, when he wasn’t too sick to think, that such a fright seemed to have on his sunburn. So long as [some] danger was present, he recalled I moved about freely, quite oblivious to the state of my legs, and wholly free from pain" (Slobodin 1978: 23).

As the foul weather gradually relinquished its grip on the Freya, Rivers and his Cambridge companions were freed to complete the last steps in the northeasterly crossing from Thursday Island off the northern tip of the Cape York Peninsula out to the Murray Islands in the middle of the strait. Here he and his scientific comrades were to begin what is often called one of the Western world’s first large-scale, purely anthropological expeditions. Many more such endeavors were to take place over the course of the twentieth century. The Torres Straits expedition of 1898, however, would remain noted in the history of anthropology as a first of its kind and for its focus on the mental characteristics of people from traditional, nonliterate societies.

The leader of Rivers’s group, the Cambridge marine zoologist Alfred Court Haddon, had been to the straits before. In 1888, while cruising the region, studying the fauna of the coral reefs, Haddon had spent five months in the Murray Islands, where the native people helped him collect plankton. Of the islanders he had written, I found them a cheerful, friendly and intelligent folk and soon became friends with many of them (Haddon 1935: xi). Sometimes he asked the young men helping him about the history of their people and the islands and found that they knew extremely little about such things and referred him to the islands’ old men in such matters. Haddon already knew that practically none of the Europeans in the islands knew or cared anything about the customs of the natives or their former beliefs and that all that was known about them was contained in a few old accounts and often inaccurate notes. I therefore considered it my duty to record as much as was possible in the circumstances, so I induced the old men to come in the evenings and talk about the old times and tell me their folk tales, and in this way, without any previous experience or knowledge, I worked single-handed among the western islanders and amassed a fair amount of information (Haddon 1935: xi). It had been a constructive way he thought in which to fill the intervals of his zoological work, and to recoup himself for some of the expenses of the journey by collecting ‘curios’ for museums (Quiggen, 1942:82).

Haddon’s initial experiences with the Murray Islanders, however, had also changed him deeply, and by the mid-1890s, he had given up zoology for anthropology. By April 1898, he was back in the Straits, this time with Rivers and five other scientists, all ready to expand and finish the informal work Haddon had begun ten years earlier. Haddon had brought Sidney Ray, a linguist, soon to become the recognized authority on the languages of western Oceania, and three physician/psychologists—in addition to Rivers, two of Rivers’ students, Charles Myers and William McDougall. These three individuals constituted the contingent responsible for the expedition’s investigation of the mental characteristics of the Murray islanders. Other team members included the anthropological trainee and photographer Anthony Wilkin, who had had some archeological experience in Egypt and Algeria and who was to die young in Cairo in 1901, and a medical pathologist Charles Seligman, a friend of Myers, who overcame Haddon’s reservations concerning Seligman’s health and personality and the overall size of the troop to become the last minute unofficial seventh member of the team (Stocking 1995:109).

Before settling in at Cambridge, Rivers had taken his medical degree in London and worked at St. Bartholomew’s, one of the great teaching hospitals of the metropolis. Here he had grown accustomed to taking meticulous histories and to honing his powers of observation. In 1887 he had also gone to sea, serving as a ship’s surgeon on voyages to North America and Japan, and traveling widely to other destinations. The list of his mentors and colleagues is almost a who’s who of late-nineteenth-century clinical neuroscience; it included leading brain surgeon Victor Horsley; Charles Sherrington, the physiologist who coined the term synapse; Henry Head, cartographer of dermatomes, the areas of skin innervated by specific nerves; and one of the greatest medical theoreticians of the age, the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson.

Rivers had also spent time in Germany studying psychiatry and philosophy, and here in his Jena diary this introspective soul admitted that the desire for change and novelty . . . is one of the strongest elements in my mental makeup (Slobodin 1978:13). Therefore, while he reportedly fatigued quickly and stammered badly, was naturally shy and had no prior interest in anthropology, he was otherwise quite prepared for what he had come to do on Murray Island.

Intellectually speaking, evolutionary theory was very much in the late Victorian air and on the scientific minds of the entire expedition. (Rivers was to focus on evolutionary themes not only in neurology but also in his later psychiatric, social, and cultural investigations.) The nineteenth century’s great evolutionary anthropological theorists, Edward Burnett Tylor, Sir James George Frazer, and Louis Henry Morgan, were still in vogue, and the expedition’s leader, Haddon, had published something of an 1893 anthropological best-seller, Evolution in Art. Now after having spent nearly ten long and difficult years raising the support for this return venture, Haddon sensed that the psychologists on his team might be able to shed further light on such human evolutionary matters by identifying the distinguishing features or mental characteristics of primitive mentality in the amiable human denizens of the Torres Straits. Moreover, the mollusks of Melanesia would still be there for future scientists to recover, Sir James Frazer had told Haddon, but the primitive people might not be (Haddon 1935:19).

When the Freya arrived on May 5 after the rough weeklong crossing in the eastern Murray Islands, Rivers and the linguist Ray were still too sick to go ashore, and when Rivers finally began his examination of his Murray Island subjects for color vision, he had to do so while lying on his side in bed. Despite this inauspicious entrance, the team persevered. Rivers, Myers, and McDougall, soon inundated with patients and scientific subjects, stayed at their camp on the largest of the Murray Islands from May to September 1898, pursuing their investigations of the indigenes with the numerous medical, anthropometric, and psychometric tests and apparatus Rivers had used at Cambridge in his course on experimental psychology.

As one of the first orders of business, there were some stereotypes for the team to test. A prevailing Victorian expectation was that compared to themselves, savages had superior sensory discrimination powers but smaller heads and inferior intellects. Such common biases concerning the senses had typically been based on travelers’ tales of primitive people who were for example, in terms of hearing, Myers’s area of investigation, said to be able to distinguish very accurately sounds which are heard from a great distance and at once recognized their nature and directions (Haddon 1935:143). Myers rather quickly laid this idea to rest by noting that there were just as many other anecdotal travelers’ reports that said there were no differences here, and that the whole thing could be explained by people’s cultivated discriminative sensitivities to their familiar environments. As we will see, however, a part of the stereotype, the inferior intellect part, would prove harder for the team to shake entirely as its members wrote up their findings.

Myers’s admirable scientific efforts unfortunately ran into very formidable methodological problems from the outset in assessing the basic auditory acuity of the Murray Islanders. For example, as it turned out, few islanders apparently could hear very well. Many it seemed, suffered from permanent auditory acuity impairment, due to the lucrative but often fatal practice of diving deep after pearl shells. Myers wrote,

Of twelve Murray Island boys, only five could hear as far or nearly as far as I could, the remaining seven being clearly inferior in auditory acuity. Of five Murray Island adults with whom I compared myself, all save one had remarkably low auditory acuity. The hearing of three Murray Island girls was about the same as that of Dr. Rivers, while the hearing of three others was distinctly better. Dr. Rivers, however, was certainly suffering from partial deafness when these estimations were made. (Haddon 1935:148)

There are many questions of basic scientific method, as Myers himself noted, that raise their ugly heads here. Can the auditory acuity of Myers, and the clearly partially deaf Rivers, for example, be taken as representative of the hearing of Europeans in general? (They were the only Europeans to be tested under the same conditions as the Murray Islanders). For scientific purposes, one would also have to assume that the auditory acuity of the two English doctors would have been the same in the Torres Straits and in England. However Myers writes, In Murray Island certainly our general health was more or less ‘below par’. Dr. Rivers, as I have just said, knows that he had temporary subnormal hearing, and I have reason to believe that my own hearing was slightly affected in Murray Island (Haddon 1935:148). Finally, using neurologically impaired populations (both the doctors and the natives it seems) as representative of non-neurologically impaired populations (healthy Melanesians and Europeans) makes little sense in the first place.

Despite all of the rather fatal methodological difficulties noted above and more, Myers still somewhat strangely concluded his report on the auditory acuity of the Murray Islanders with the following phrase: One is forced to conclude that the general auditory acuity of the islanders in the Torres Straits is inferior to that of Europeans (Haddon 1935:148). Perhaps this conclusion reflects his empirical findings but what does that tell us; nothing really about the veracity of the old stereotype.

When one begins to ponder the full range of potential scientific methodological problems that might arise in psychologically testing people who have auditory acuity problems in order to draw conclusions about neurologically normal populations, one might indeed begin to wish one were working on a different island. Perhaps the expedition would have had smoother scientific sailing had it headed south once it got to Thursday Island, into regions less frequented by the sounds of wind and surf (their Murray Island research hut was near the beach), and where there were no deep waters to burst eardrums; but Haddon knew the Murrays, and that is where he had told everyone he was going.

Within the visual realm, Rivers, too, had some old and basically similar stereotypes and travelers’ tales to test:

The men of San Christoval in the Salomon Islands had ‘eyes like lynxes’ and could discover from a great distance though the day was anything but clear, the pigeons which were in the trees hidden by leaves . . . the natives of New Ireland . . . could discover land which we (Europeans) were unable to make out with good glasses, and they would find out small boats 6 or 7 miles off in bad weather which we were unable to do with binoculars or telescopes. (Cole 1996:41)

Rivers wasted no time in getting out his eye chart on Murray Island and calculating visual acuity scores. He tested 115 Murray Islanders and 55 from other neighboring regions. Unfortunately he faced almost as much trouble in interpreting his findings in vision as Myers had encountered with his data in the auditory realm. For example, it turned out that there were too many elderly men (with predictably poorer eyesight) in River’s sample because most of the young men were away pearl diving; Rivers also noted that the true European normal, the average vision of Europeans with normal eyes, has not yet been satisfactorily determined . . . nor was there a single accepted technique for measuring visual acuity. Many important studies of visual acuity in Europeans, in other words, had not used the same method (the E chart) and had not been conducted under the same conditions as those on Murray Island. Rivers, therefore, was facing the old and scientifically lethal apples and oranges problem here. However, expensive and highly publicized expeditions must bring back something interesting, probably something more than Sorry, we’re not sure what we found. Rivers, therefore, did his best to make the most of what he had. In searching for what he called a European racial population with which to more broadly compare his Murray Island data (somewhere in Europe where at least the E chart had been used), he settled on Heligoland, an island off the coast of Germany, full of fishermen who were not highly educated. Rivers saw these Heligolanders as half civilized people. After comparing his Torres Straits material with the Heligoland visual data and other findings on the visual acuity of Europeans, he wrote: The general conclusion which may be drawn . . . is that the visual acuity of savage and half civilized people, though superior to that of the normal European, is not so in any marked degree . . . the races which have so far been examined do not exhibit that degree of superiority over the Europeans in visual acuity proper which the accounts of travelers might have led one to expect (Cole 1996:43).

The statistical differences here (for whatever they were worth) between savage and civilized and half civilized Rivers decided were simply unimpressive; most of the tall tales about the vision of primitive people had just been tall tales after all, physiologically speaking; in the sense that they were true (most all people are better at detecting subtle changes in their own environment as compared to outsiders) they were but a commonplace observation.

Certainly considering all of the methodological problems encountered by the Torres Straits team, one might rightfully ask (playing the devil’s advocate here) for a rematch of this battle of the senses somewhere else, somewhere where more of the scientific kinks could be worked out. After all, despite their relatively advanced age and basic auditory acuity handicaps, the Murray Islanders in the study in general appeared to be holding their own quite well on most sensory measures against the three young British doctors at least, the standard bearers of European civilization, who had come to pit themselves against the natives, and in the end the total sensory tally on Murray Island seemed more of a wash than a trend. (The natives reportedly exhibited diminished sensitivity to pain and the color blue but they were thought to have superior tactile discrimination and they were less susceptible to certain angular visual illusions such as the Muller-Lyar illusion, because they didn’t live in carpentered environments.) Perhaps on a more medically even playing field, the indigenes would have bested their guests more soundly and given substance to the old stories (probably not, but we could never know on the basis of such a study). The psychological side of the Torres Straits expedition, however, must remain what it is, a beginning, a landmark and deeply flawed scientific study in the more elementary aspects of cross-cultural cognition.

In spending so much time testing basic sensory acuity and traveler’s tales, we now know that Rivers and his colleagues lost quite a bit of time asking the wrong scientific questions. In 1996 while reflecting on the 1898 Torres Strait project, cultural psychologist Michael Cole wrote that at a general level, almost a century of subsequent research (following the Torres Straits expedition) has generally sustained the conclusion that cultural differences in the sensory acuity are either minimal or absent (Cole 1996:46). Such differences, he notes, are more apparent in thought processes that are more complex than basic sensory acuity.

While it is sometimes difficult to sustain a working scientific separation between the so-called elementary psychological functions (such as sensation) and psychological functions that are conceived of as more complex (such as attention, memory, reasoning and intellect), it is still imprudent, nevertheless, to build a theory of the latter solely upon evidence of the former. Such a theory would have to be rudely projected into a scientific terrain where there were no real tools of exploration, and constructed upon very rigid preexisting certainties. Such conditions, however, did indeed exist in 1901 when Rivers published his own conclusions concerning the expedition and what he had discovered concerning the primitive mentality he had set out to explore:

We know that the growth of intellect depends on material which is furnished by the senses, and it therefore at first sight may appear strange that elaboration of the sensory side of mental life should be a hindrance to intellectual development. But on further consideration I think there is nothing unnatural in such a fact. If too much energy is expended on the sensory foundations, it is natural that the intellectual superstructure should suffer. (Rivers 1901:44-45)

Over the course of his career, which was cut short by his unexpected death at the age of fifty-eight, Rivers’s intellectual interests evolved, and he wore many professional hats. Beginning as a physician, he became a neurologist, a psychiatrist who treated shell shock patients during World War I, and an influential pioneer in anthropology, famous for the genealogical method he almost inadvertently discovered while taking meticulous family histories relevant to his study of color vision in Murray Islanders. His view of primitive mentality also evolved over time, and by 1910, he found himself defending the intellectual superstructure of people from traditional oral societies against the new claims of a French philosopher, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, who seemed to Rivers to be saying that the action of savage men was determined by motives having (a) vague and lawless character, and that such men had not yet reached the logical stage of thought (Rivers 1924:49). By now, Rivers had come to know many such men and women and he felt otherwise. They may reason from inaccurate premises, Rivers said, but when it came down to the basic machinery of the mind, they were as rational as himself.

In the pages to come, we will see many other people in the Western world changing their minds about the mind of the foreign other. Still others, however, never changed their minds at all on the matter, and some seemed to lose their minds, somewhat during the course of the colorful debate which we are about to examine. I chose Rivers to open our story because in a way, he inaugurated the twentieth-century chapter of what in reality is an ancient debate by publishing his Torres Straits findings in 1901. What began on Murray Island, however, must be seen within a much deeper historical context in order to be understood. Since the debate was largely a Western debate, let us go back now, at least briefly, to Rome.

PART I

Context

Chapter 1

An Inscrutable Foreign Other

Many Westerners may have first glimpsed people from traditional nonliterate societies within the pages of Greek and Roman bestiaries. Pliny the Elder, a central figure of Roman science, attempting to survey nothing less than the universe and all the material objects that populate it, included such a bestiary of monstrous races in his most famous work, Natural History. These exotic races of semihuman monsters who inhabited remote lands, included the Arimaspi, a monocular cyclopean race; the Llyrians, who were able to slay with a glance; the Monocholi, who possessed only one leg but were capable of rapid hopping; the Amyetyrae, a race of unsociable souls who ate raw meat and used their enormous lower lips as parasols to protect themselves from the sun; and the Cynocephali, people with the heads of dogs who conversed through barking and lived in caves (Lindberg 1992:141-144). As the Roman Empire fell, some Westerners speculated that the invading foreign barbarians might be the children of the Antipodes, those who lived on the other side of the earth. European trading and crusading during the medieval period and the discovery of the New World gradually accomplished the deprovincialization of Europe; however, the human inhabitants of distant shores continued to be described with only moderately less exaggerated imagination for hundreds of years in the return tales of peregrinating Westerners.

During the nineteenth century, a consensual voice of Western sensibility often characterized the appearance and behavior of those from indigenous tribal cultures with the single and singularly expressive adjective shocking. Initial close encounters of the imperial kind (between Westerners and aboriginal tribal culture groups) were often tempered by some degree of prior contact between the respective groups and sometimes an incipient pidgin language. However, even when such partial cultural decompression was available, the first face-to-face contacts were often, nevertheless, at least startling to the uninitiated on both sides.

For example, even in the twentieth century, in New Guinea, Europeans encountered ceremonial male transvestism and mock copulation with fruit, endemic ritualized intertribal murder and cannibalism, and ceremonies where young males were ushered in succession to have sexual intercourse in public with the same young girl. The final couple was then crushed to death, cooked, and eaten on the spot. Accounts of the initial encounter from the other side of the table (the preliterate tribal perspective) are not surprisingly few. One can only guess at the astonishment and horror of a New Guinea highlander who had had no experience with the West, familiar only with his own people and rival neighbors, encountering pale men emerging from the belly of a roaring gigantic silver flying beast, with their sticks that slay at a great distance, their bizarre possessions and the witchcraft that follows them, sickening and killing. In the early sixteenth century, the Aztec ruler Montezuma perceived Cortez to be the returning god, Quetzalcoatl (the plumed or feathered serpent). Europeans arriving upon foreign shores by ship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at times seemed to be emerging out of the sea, as the mast would appear on the horizon first, gradually followed by the rest of the ship.

As the initial period of pounding hearts subsided, it often did not take long for Westerners to notice dramatic differences between themselves and many aboriginal peoples in basic interpersonal comportment, modes of communication, focus of interest and areas of seemingly unique perception or skill, as well as areas of salient apparent ineptitude. In the 1830’s, Charles Darwin was struck by what seemed to him to be notably deficient verbal language but highly developed body language and mimicry skills in the natives of Tierra del Fuego.

Concerning the naked savages of the West Indies, anthropologist Ruth Bunzel (1960) noted, So strange were they that it is not surprising that Europeans wondered whether they were members of the human race, or some different and lower species. This question was promptly settled by the church, which decreed (via papal bull in 1537) that they were indeed human and might receive the sacraments. In truth, however, many Europeans had been less than fully persuaded by the papal bull of 1537. Indeed, the authority of the papacy by this time in European history had been significantly weakened in comparison to its unassailable medieval prestige. The theoretical stance, assumed by some European scholars, which suggested that savages were a different and lower species was called the harder argument by Stephen Jay Gould (1996), a position also known as polygenism, or origin from several sources. The apparent global, racial, cultural, and mental fractionation of the family Hominidae was said to be the result of descent from different Adams. The softer argument (monogenism, or origin from a single source) of this general racial and cultural prejudice outlined by Gould was consistent with the biblical story of Adam, and the church’s decree, admitting savages to the human species; however, the shocking differences still seemed to require explanation, and again, explanation was proffered by way of thematic variation upon scripture. It was suggested that after the fall in the garden, as all of humanity sank into sin and decline, the nonwhite races simply degenerated to a greater degree, usually it was thought due to hybridization, disease, climatic and dietary factors.

Despite their theological differences, proponents of both the hard and soft arguments were typically in agreement concerning the general nature of the intellect or mentality of individuals from traditional nonliterate cultures. In a word, it was seen as defective or inferior. By the nineteenth century, the most common characterizations included terms such as arrested development, childlike, brutish, and atavistic. In the late 1800s, the German zoologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) proffered the popular theory of recapitulation (ontogeny repeats, or recapitulates phylogeny), which suggested that the evolutionary history of any organism is seen in the stages of embryological development of that organism (for instance, the gill slits and tails that appear at certain points in the development of human embryos reflect the evolutionary history of humanity). Roughly applied to the intellect of savages, Haeckel’s idea was taken to suggest that savages represented an older evolutionary stage of mental development that in Europeans is still seen only in the mentality of their children. In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) added, as we will see, that savages had much in common with abnormal neurotic European patients, both in mental and emotional development. In general, Victorian science suggested that savages were unable to conceptualize abstractly or reason dispassionately. Their thinking was described as illogical, superstitious, overly emotional, or focused only on the most basic pragmatic concerns of subsistence and procreation. The pervasiveness of this pejorative view of what came to be called primitive mentality in eighteenth—and nineteenth-century Westerners is hard to overstate. Gould’s (1996) listing of prominent American and European political and intellectual icons expressing these views is a veritable who’s who of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A word or two about the etymology of the word savage is appropriate here. It is derived from the Latin word silvaticus, which originally referred to something that was of the woods or forest (this is also the derivation of the word sylvan) and came to take on connotations of wildness and untamability. Anthropological historian William Y. Adams (1998) notes that during the Renaissance Westerners largely regarded aboriginal people as exotic human fauna. During the eighteenth century, the savage was envisaged as childlike. It was not until the nineteenth century that the word savage came to mean a greedy, vicious, and amoral brute. Adams adds, It was not coincidentally in the nineteenth century that that word savage acquired its present pejorative connotation, where earlier it had merely been another word for primitive. Perhaps this connotational change in the word savage reflected, more than anything, the globally expanding political hegemony and growing severity of moral constraint of Victorian Westerners.

Denigrating connotations of the term savage have also always coexisted with what Adams refers to as one of the most enduring and endearing inventions of the human imagination, the noble savage. Adams reminds us that, as a literary figure, the noble savage is as old as Herodotus and as modern as Dances with Wolves. The noble savage rose to great popularity in ancient Greece, but pretty much went into hiding during the middle ages when non-Christians were seen as either unconverted pagans or worse, as infidel heathens; both of whom were condemned to damnation. He adds, The noble savage made a somewhat hesitant reappearance during the Renaissance, and then rose to his fullest glory after the discovery of America. Within a century of the discovery, the Native American emerged in the European imagination as the quintessential noble savage, the hero, not only of philosophical musings, but of countless plays, novels, poems, and even operas extolling his pure, uncorrupted virtues. In the twentieth century, the noble savage would turn out to be a British aristocrat with superhuman powers named Tarzan. Contrary to popular belief, cultural historian Jacques Barzun notes that Rousseau did not cherish this imaginary figure (Barzun 2000:108). The real Romantic ideal of Rousseau’s imagination was more like a noble farmer.

Overall, there has been a great deal of variability in Western accounts of indigenous tribal peoples since the sixteenth century. For example, the Spanish and English in general held different attitudes toward Native Americans, as the predominant Spanish policy of conquest was to convert and enculturate, while the English rules of engagement more often favored simple displacement or eviction. Since the French needed Indians as allies against the English, their descriptions of Indian culture were among the most sympathetic of these three European superpowers. Characterization of Native Americans also varied in that different stories were written for different prospective audiences. As Adams notes, the reports of conquistadors and missionaries were generally written to inform and influence secular and religious public opinion, while the reports of frontiersmen were designed primarily to entertain, titillate, or horrify a popular audience. Popular accounts dwelt on the bizarre and sensational, as exotica writing always has. Tales of whites held captive by Indians became best-sellers and developed into a clear literary genre. The portrayal of the Indian captors varied according to the expectations of the captives. As Adams relates, earlier explorers knew that capture was possible; therefore, there was less indignation in their accounts of the Indians. Somewhat later settlers, however, were convinced of their right