The Transformation of the World (177 page)

It does not follow, however, that geography as such should be blamed for collaborating with the suppression of foreign peoples. It found a place in the university at only a very late date—not before 1900 in Britain and in the last third of the century in Germany, France, and Russia. For a long time it trailed behind the more respected discipline of history, although in the nineteenth century, under the philosophical aegis of “historicism” (
Historismus
), historiography distanced itself from anything that looked like a natural determination of human freedom. The physical and cultural aspects of geography, still united in Humboldt, later moved apart from each other, without abandoning the common academic umbrella; it was a necessary separation, but it created an insoluble identity problem and caused geography to fall somewhere between natural science (strictly geared to physics) and the “true” human sciences. Furthermore, with the exception of specialist colonial geographers, few representatives of the discipline were directly serving the imperial project. Many saw their main task as being to describe the territory of their own nation.

The close link between expansion and exploration went back a long time. Ever since the days of Columbus, overseas voyages and the urge to occupy and colonize new lands had been two sides of the same coin. Discoverers and conquerors came from the same cultural backgrounds in Europe; their education and goals in life were similar, as was their conception of the global position and mission of their own country, Christendom, or Europe as a whole. In the eighteenth century, it was taken for granted that major powers should use the resources of the state to help in unveiling the world. Britain and France sent out lavishly equipped scientific expeditions to circumnavigate the world. Tsarist Russia staked its claim to equal imperial and scientific status by following on the same path (the Kruzenstren mission of 1803–6). The first crossing of North America from east to west during the same years, initiated by President Thomas Jefferson and led by Meriwether Lewis
and William Clark, may be seen as the US equivalent of these maritime operations. Even the details of its scientific tasks were similar to those of the great sea voyages since the time of Captain James Cook.

The “discoverer” type was compromised from the beginning. Columbus and Vasco da Gama already made use of violence. But over the next four hundred years there were at least as many examples of peaceful research trips; the most important were those of Alexander von Humboldt, Heinrich Barth, and David Livingstone. The age of high imperialism did, however, witness a final blossoming of the conquistador traveler. Bismarck, King Leopold II of Belgium, and the French Republic used the services of research explorers (widely varying in scientific competence) to register ownership claims to territory in Africa or Southeast Asia. Henry Morton Stanley, a reporter by training whom Leopold chose as his man in Africa, embodied this type in the eyes of the media of several continents (three Africa expeditions between 1870 and 1889). In the subsequent generation, Sven Hedin, having started his long career in 1894 with a research trip to Central Asia, became the most famous Swede of his age, with unfettered access to monarchs and heads of government in both West and East and adorned with countless decorations, gold medals, and honorary doctorates. Hedin's life encapsulates the contradictions of Europe's relationship with Asia. Convinced of the general superiority of the West over the East, Hedin was an excellent linguist and scholar and at the same time a Swedish (and, from personal choice, German) nationalist and militarist, a man of the political Right, who enjoyed taking part in geopolitical fantasizing about a “power vacuum” in the heart of Asia. But he was also one of the first Westerners to take contemporary Chinese science seriously and to cooperate with Chinese experts. He is held in high esteem in China today: a not atypical posthumous reputation, since quite a few European explorers, despite their activity in the service of empire, have been integrated into the collective memory of postimperial countries.
¹²³

Folklore and the Discovery of Country Life

Last but not least of the “alien” groups that became the object of scientific study in the nineteenth century were those living in the same country as the learned professors. Rationalist elites during the Age of Revolution had regarded the lifestyle and thinking of the peasantry, urban lower classes, and vagabonds as an obstacle to social modernization and relics of a superstitious mind-set. Military and civilian administrators in the Napoleonic Empire had as little time for Catholic popular beliefs in Italy or Spain as supporters of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham within the East India Company had for the Hindu or Muslim traditions of India. Attitudes and procedures toward Europe's “internal savages” did not differ essentially from the situation in the colonies. In both cases, the authorities preached and practiced “education for work.”
¹²⁴
The reliance on government action or naked coercion varied, but the aim was much the same: to make human capital more effective, in association with a genuine,
often Christian-inspired effort to raise the “level of civilization” among the lower orders. The Salvation Army, founded in London in 1865 and gradually spreading internationally, was an expression of such a charitable vision, and the overseas “mission to the pagans” was paralleled in Protestant Europe by an “internal mission” to assist the weaker members of society. Apart from such early social policies, whether philanthropic or bureaucratic in inspiration, there was sometimes a reverence for popular ways of life that bordered on glorification. Johann Gottfried Herder had been the original intellectual force behind such attitudes. Linguists, legal historians, and collectors of “popular verse” strengthened them in the early nineteenth century.

Social romanticism was linked to very different points in the political spectrum. In the great French historian Jules Michelet, it signified a radical admiration for the creators of the nation and the revolution, whereas in Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl—who published a four-volume social history of the German people (1851–69)—there was an underlying mistrust of the socially destructive consequences of urbanization and industry. Both men, writing at almost the same time but with quite different premises, described the life of poor and simple folk, including women, both past and present with a sympathy and accuracy rarely seen before. Riehl became a founder of what was called
Volkskunde
, a study of the “spirit” and customs of peoples rooted in conservative Romanticism.
¹²⁵
He found admirers above all in Russia, who saw his work as confirmation of their own (politically opposite) leanings. The newly emancipated peasantry and its age-old communes were glorified by upper-class urban intellectuals as the natural agents of an impending revolution. These “friends of the people,” the
narodniki
, opened a new chapter in the history of Russian radicalism.
¹²⁶

Folk elements also attracted fresh attention in the arts, as the internal exoticism of folklore traditions within Europe ran almost exactly parallel to the external exoticism of Orientalist persuasion. A search for inspiration in the anonymous music of ordinary people and for characteristic national styles soon resulted in a versatile melodic idiom. A kind of musical exoticism developed within Europe itself. French composers conjured up Spanish color (Georges Bizet:
Carmen
, 1875; Edouard Lalo:
Symphonie espagnole
, 1874); and “typically Hungarian” Gypsy touches, which the cosmopolitan Franz Liszt (born in Austria's hilly Burgenland) turned into a national trademark in 1851 with his
Hungarian Rhapsodies
for piano, slipped easily into the tone language of the native Hamburger and Viennese resident Johannes Brahms. In 1904, dissatisfied with the kitsch of national Romantic clichés, the young Hungarian Béla Bartók and his compatriot Zoltán Kodály went in search of authentic music among the Hungarian rural population, as well as non-Magyar minorities in the Habsburg kingdom of Hungary. The new methods of ethnomusicology were then applied in the same way to musical production outside Europe. Bartók, a composer who had moved beyond Romanticism,
¹²⁷
proved it was possible to engage in top-class research on ethnic subjects without succumbing to the ideology of
völkisch
nationalism.

_________________

In the nineteenth century, writing gave many people in the world greater scope for extensive communication, thanks to the spread of literacy and the growing availability of print media. Distribution of the ability to read and write was extremely uneven, depending on levels of prosperity, political objectives, missionary goals, and the educational ambition of individuals and groups. Usually it required a local impetus, which then had to be translated into some kind of sustainable institutional form, with compulsory schooling as the logical
terminus ad quem
. The spread of world languages further widened communicative spaces, at least for those who took the opportunity to learn one or several of them. As a rule, Europe's expanding languages did not obliterate and replace existing linguistic worlds but were superimposed on them.

Access to knowledge became easier. But it had to be acquired—or rather, worked for—with considerable effort. Reading is a cultural technique that demands a lot from individuals: an illiterate person can much more easily install a radio or television set and follow the readymade programs. In this respect, twentieth-century technologies reduced the level of cultural effort, but also the threshold for at least passive participation in communication. But what kind of knowledge became more accessible? Little can be said that applies worldwide. Structured knowledge outside the realm of everyday life—what people were generally beginning to call “science”—certainly increased in the nineteenth century on an unprecedented scale; and there were more and more scientists who produced it. This happened within institutions, universities above all, which not only created a loose framework for the scholarly activity of individuals (as academies had in the early modern period) but systematically endeavored to acquire new knowledge and provided means to that end. Science expanded also because whole areas of social discourse were put on a scientific footing: the literary and textual criticism that had been blossoming in Europe became the discipline of literary studies (at the end of the century), while the collection of words and grammatical elements became a methodical, historically based search for laws and eventually, in Ferdinand de Saussure (
Cours de linguistique générale
, 1916), a science that postulated deep structures of language. Before 1800 the human and social “sciences,” in the sense of established disciplines, had not existed in Europe. By 1910 the matrix of disciplines and the range of academic institutions that we know today had taken shape—first in several European countries, then a little later in the United States, but in a process that was increasingly internationalized, not locally disparate.

By 1910 a number of cross-border scientific communities had come into being, where information circulated at great speed, academics competed to take the lead, and procedures were in place for quality assessment and the allocation of prestige. These circles were entirely male dominated; non-Westerners gradually gained entry to them—first a number of Japanese scientists, joined after the First World War by colleagues from India and China. Transnational standards
operated in the natural sciences. This made interwar attempts to establish a special “German,” “Japanese,” or (in the Soviet Union) “socialist” science seem regressive and ridiculous. It was another matter that scientists often felt an urge to ensure that their work was of benefit to the nation. However transnational the communicative infrastructures and scientific standards, scientists everywhere felt under an obligation to their national institutions (never more than during the First World War), and arts scholars—the inheritors of ancient rhetoric—operated first and foremost in the public arena of their own country. As far as science was concerned, internationalization and nationalization stood in a tense and contradictory relationship to each other.

CHAPTER XVII

 

Civilization and Exclusion

 

1 The “Civilized World” and Its “Mission”

For thousands of years, some human groups have considered themselves superior to their neighbors.
¹
City dwellers looked down on villagers, settled populations on nomads, literate on illiterate, pastoralists on hunters, rich on poor, practitioners of complex religions on “pagans” and animists. The idea of different degrees of refined living and thought is widespread across regions and epochs. In many languages it is expressed in words that roughly correspond to “civilization” in European usage—a term that has meaning only in a relationship of tension with its negative twin. Civilization prevails where “barbarism” or “savagery” lie defeated; it needs its opposite to remain knowable as such. Were barbarism to disappear altogether from the world, there would no longer be a foil for “civilized” people to measure themselves against, either taking the offensive in a spirit of self-satisfaction, or bemoaning the fate of superior humanity amid crudeness and decline. The less civilized are a necessary audience for this grand theater, for the civilized need the recognition of others, preferably in the form of admiration, reverence, and peaceful gratitude. They can live with envy and resentment if they have to; any civilization must arm itself against the hatred and aggressiveness of barbarians. The sense of worth felt by civilized people arises from an interplay between self-observation and attention to the various ways in which others react to them, with an awareness that their own attainments are constantly at risk. A barbarian attack or a revolt by plebeian “internal barbarians” might bring ruin at any moment, but an even greater danger, and one harder to discern, is the slackening of moral endeavor, cultural ambition, and realistic tough-mindedness. In China, Europe, and elsewhere this has traditionally been denoted by “corruption” in the broad sense of the term;
fortuna
enters a downward spiral when the power to stick to high ideals begins to wane.