ETHNOGRAPHY

ETHNOGRAPHY. Derived from the Greek ethnos ('nation or people') + graphia ('writing'), "ethnography" refers to the empirical and descriptive study of humanity in such large groups as communities or nations. Before about 1750, "anthropology" ('the study of man') referred to the study of human nature, that is, of the abstract individual. In the second half of the eighteenth century, philosophical speculation about human nature was replaced by the empirical study of particular historical nations, that is, anthropology became specific and collective, as the modern discipline of anthropology is today. The empirical study of specific historical nations did exist throughout the early modern era, but it is not called anthropology. The heading "ethnography" on this article indicates that early modern studies of nations are generally not recognized by modern anthropologists as sufficiently scientific. Most studies that we would call ethnographic were ad hoc reports of world travelers, missionaries, and explorers that encompassed far more than simply the various peoples encountered on the journey. Navigation, natural history, descriptions of climate, minerals, plants, and animals could all be included in a piece of travel writing.

The term "ethnography" came into use in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary 's first citation of the term is from the 1834 Penny Cyclopedia (II, 97) which adopted it from German: "The term ethnography (nation-description) is sometimes used by German writers in the sense which we have given to anthropography." The first OED citation of "ethnology" comes from Pritchard's Natural History of Man (1842). Had the term been used in the early modern period, it would have been pejorative. From the fourteenth century to about the mid-eighteenth, "ethnic" (from Greek ethnikos 'heathen') referred to specifically foreign nations that were neither Christian nor Jewish, rather, pagan, heathen, or, by implication, "the other." Ethnography, therefore, was discourse about "Them" as opposed to "Us."

Attempts by Europeans to describe what they were seeing are as old as the voyages of discovery, even older. In antiquity, there were basically two ways of describing primitive human societies. Human history represented either a steady degeneration from a primitive golden age or progress from an initial rude and uncultivated condition. In the former case, primitives were portrayed as noble, free, and virtuous, as in the Greek geographer Strabo's descriptions of the Scythians; in the latter case, primitives were presented as cruel, ignorant, and evil, as in Book 7 of Pliny the Elder's Natural History.

When Europeans sailed off toward Elysium, the Islands of the Blessed, and the lands of the Hyperboreans (who were believed to live in a land of perpetual sunshine and abundance), they may not have expected to find monstrous people like the "blemmyes," whose heads were located below their shoulders, or incredible wealth in China as described by John Mandeville (d. 1372) and Marco Polo (c. 1254–1324). But when they encountered the apparently primitive inhabitants of Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands, what could they do but cast them in the classical terms they brought with them? Bartolomé de Las Casas reported that Columbus had carefully read and annotated Ptolemy's Geography and more recent geographic textbooks by Pope Pius II (reigned 1458–1464) and Pierre d'Ailly (1350–1420). Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) alternated between the Greek modes of golden age and savagery, here describing indigenous Americans as living naked in the forest with neither law nor religion and winning all they needed from the hand of nature, there describing a cannibal he met who had partaken of more than two hundred people. In his New World Chronicles, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera (1457–1526) compared parrots he had seen in the New World with descriptions by Pliny, and his account of society on Hispaniola resembled the golden age of Hesiod (fl. eighth century b.c.e.) and Virgil (70–19 b.c.e.). Thus it comes as little surprise that early modern Europeans described what they saw in terms similar to ancient Greeks and Romans, even when such language was misleading or prejudicial. Indeed, it was the only language they had.

As natural history emerged as a recognized genre of philosophical writing, ethnography was frequently appended to accounts of climate, topography, minerals, flora, and fauna, as if peoples and their cultures were just another feature of the natural landscape. Here human beings could be studied on three levels. On the physical level, one might report on a people's relative size, shape, and color and also its material culture and food, which were determined by the natural environment. On the social level, the author described customs, manners, and political organization. And on the intellectual or cultural level, the author could address a nation's achievements in the arts and sciences and in religion or philosophy.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, enough descriptive accounts of New World peoples had come in that ethnographers could offer detailed comparisons of New World peoples with the ancients. Joseph-François Lafitau's (1670–1740) comparison of the ancient Romans and Persians to the Americans of Louisiana is the most prominent example, and Lafitau represents the universalizing of an essential human nature. In the course of the eighteenth century, comparison gave way to classification, and classification meant the study of particulars and the drawing of distinctions. At this point we begin to see an ethnography that resembles modern anthropology, with each nation thoroughly unique and separate from the others. Naturalists could classify nations just as they classified minerals, plants, and animals. Humanity acquired its scientific designation as Homo sapiens in the eighteenth century from Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), but that designation of humanity as "wise" did not come easily. In moral and theological terms it was clear enough which creatures were human and which animal. But when one tried to draw the line between the seldom-seen orangutan and the wild man of Borneo, things became murky. Linnaeus himself wrote that he could find no quantitative difference between ape and human. Nor was the Linnean system universally accepted as eternal truth. It was simply a system, formed in the process of international debate, and over the first ten editions of Linnaeus's Systema Natura, he experimented with different classifications of humanity, dividing the genus Homo into several species. Linnaeus's French rival, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–1788), also divided humanity into two species—black and white.

Ultimately, human classification came down to the question of human origins. Did humanity originate in a single pair, male and female, either as told by the accounts in the Book of Genesis or by some other more naturalistic (perhaps evolutionary) process? Or did humanity represent several different and independent origins? If the former, then how could one account for the wide variety of color, stature, shape, and strength among global humanity, to say nothing of the differences in social organization, customs, manners, morals, and religion? Climate was one explanation. Montesquieu's explanation in Book 14 of L'esprit des lois (1748; The spirit of laws) is the most famous account of the effects of climate, but many others offered similar explanations. Like characterizations of primitives, the climate thesis reached back to antiquity in Polybius (204–123 b.c.e.) and Strabo. On its face, climate was convincing. It was known that plants and animals could be markedly transformed by their local environment, as when tropical plants were placed in European botanical gardens, or goldfish are kept in a ten-gallon tank. Europeans turned brown when exposed to the sun, and even within Europe there were degrees of color ranging from pale, blond Scandinavians to dark-haired, olive-skinned Spaniards.

Others noted that climate was not as effective as it was frequently taken to be. The short, dark-skinned Lapps neighbored the tall, fair Swedes. After four generations in Massachusetts, Africans were just as dark as they were in Africa. And Jews living on India's Malabar coast, supposedly since the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century b.c.e., were reported to look just like European Jews. Clearly some other force affected the physical attributes of human beings. If that force (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach [1752–1840] spoke of a teleological force contained in "genital liquid") was so persistent, and if it was assumed that all of humanity descended from a single human pair, then how could one account for human diversity? Polygenesis was tempting, but because of its obvious moral implications, few Europeans dared to hold that position before the second half of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, morality has been a major issue in ethnography ever since the first voyages of discovery. What impressed Europeans about the New World was not that it was inhabited by human societies but that those societies were so different from their own. Not only were they different, but they were understood to be inferior. It was Europeans who circumnavigated the globe to reach Tahiti, not Tahitians who, for all their navigational prowess, sailed to Europe. What should the relationship be between Europeans and their less-developed brethren? Certainly they had to be evangelized, and almost from the beginning Spaniards set out to convert Central, South, and North Americans to Christianity. But what means were appropriate? Could they be evangelized forcibly, as Charlemagne had converted the Saxons eight hundred years earlier? Could one justify purchasing enslaved individuals in Africa and forcing them to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, provided one treated them with restraint and attempted to care for their souls? All of these questions were explored in an ad hoc manner in accounts of the New World written by missionaries, traders, explorers, and planters in the early modern period.

There was unanimous agreement that, in technological terms, the ethnoi of the globe had not achieved what Europeans had. Less clear was whether that technological progress had been translated into any moral progress among Europeans themselves. Here was another use for ethnography. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) could point out that, despite accounts of human sacrifices and cannibalism in Central America, the real barbarians were the Europeans. That sentiment was echoed two centuries later by Georg Forster, one of Captain Cook's fellow travelers on his 1772–1775 voyage around the world, in a graphic account of cannibalism in New Zealand. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) famously argued in his two Discourses that social inequalities were European constructs and that the progress of the arts and sciences had brought not any moral improvement but the contrary. Both of Rousseau's arguments were supported by a selective reading of travel narratives.

Rousseau, of course, never left Europe. Neither did Montaigne. Both, however, considered themselves authorities on non-European peoples purely on the basis of their reading of others' travel reports. Real travelers, like Georg Forster, did not believe one could come to an adequate understanding of the ethnoi unless one visited them personally. On the other hand, scholars like Forster's nemesis Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), who disagreed with Forster on every level from the credibility of witnesses to the interpretation of evidence to the politics of the French Revolution, believed that visiting one or two places was insufficient for understanding humanity as a whole. Such knowledge one could only acquire through the comparative reading of others' travel accounts; no one could acquire firsthand knowledge of all the peoples of the globe. Thus began a debate over library research versus field research that persists in anthropology to the present day.

See also Class, Status, and Order ; Colonialism ; Exploration ; Linnaeus, Carl ; Montaigne, Michel de ; Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de ; Noble Savage ; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez. Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. Translated by Cyclone Covey. Albuquerque, 1983. Originally published 1542.

Casas, Bartolomé de las. The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account. Translated by Herma Briffault. Baltimore, 1992. Originally published 1552.

Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de. History and General Description of New France. Translated by J. G. Shea. 6 vols. New York, 1866–1872. Originally published 1744.

Forster, Georg. A Voyage Round the World. Edited by Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof. 2 vols. Honolulu, 2000. Originally published 1777.

Lafitau, Joseph François. Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times. Translated by William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore. 2 vols. Toronto, 1974–1977. Originally published 1724.

Meiners, Christoph. Grundriβ der Geschichte der Menschheit. 2nd ed. Lemgo, 1793.

Secondary Sources

Elliott, J. H. The Old World and the New 1492–1650. Cambridge, U.K., 1970.

Grafton, Anthony, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, Mass., 1992.

Pagden, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge, U.K., 1982.

Rowe, J. H. "Ethnography and Ethnology in the Sixteenth Century." Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 30 (Spring 1964): 1–19.

Michael Carhart