Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas by Alexander Von Humboldt (review)

From 1799 through 1804 Alexander von Humboldt traveled through parts of South America with his companion Amié Bonpland. He carried a variety of scientific instruments to measure and record the natural forces that had shaped that continent in an endeavor he called terrestrial physics (“physique de la terre”). Though he was primarily interested in the natural world, his capacious curiosity absorbed much that was of interest about the indigenous peoples of the Americas as well. After his return he spent two decades in Paris writing what would be a 30-volume account of his explorations. Though much of that work was scientific in nature, he had much to say about the civilizations he had observed on his journey. His most significant ethnographic studies were assembled in this work, which first appeared in French in 1810, and in English, abridged, in 1813.

It was a self-styled “picturesque atlas”—a collection of illustrated essays of South America’s more noteworthy natural features alongside wide-ranging studies of pre-Columbian cultures: their art, artifacts, and structures. European readers thrilled at the magnificent height of Mount Chimborazo and read in amazement about a giant Aztec stone calendar. In between they learned much about the peoples of the Americas from Humboldt’s assessment of more quotidian artifacts, including, to choose but a few random examples, “Bust of an Aztec Priestess,” “Interior of the Inca’s House at Cañar,” and “Dress of the Indians of Michoacán.”

Humboldt was convinced that the “wild and gigantic nature” of the Americas inexorably affected the cultures that developed there. His conception of nature was also his explanation for the delayed progress of indigenous American civilizations: “Isolated perhaps at an early stage from the rest of humanity and roaming across a land where humans had to struggle … against a wild and forever restless natural realm, these peoples, left to their own devices, were able to develop only slowly” (p. 14). This he juxtaposed with the civilizations of the Old World whose cultures derived from a gentler clime, the fortunate result of “everything produced under the skies of Asia Minor and in the regions of southern Europe” (p. 13).

The editors of this critical edition nevertheless remind us of Humboldt’s sincere respect for those New World peoples and his larger project of challenging European self-conceptions of political and cultural primacy. “His objective,” they write, was “an understanding of global cultural phenomena that would take in the interrelations, homologies, and parallels among far-flung cultures” (p. xxx). Humboldt not only shed new light on the Americas for his contemporaries, but also “made it very clear that Western civilization … must remain acutely conscious of the provisionality and incompleteness of its civilizational processes and achievements” (p. xxxv). One might take exception to the editors’ occasional presentist reinterpretations of Humboldt’s work (for example, “multilayered image-text … a dynamic hypertext that continuously repositions the user,” p. xxx), but that is merely a quibble.

This is the second volume to appear from the University of Chicago Press’s Alexander von Humboldt in English series, and it is the first-ever complete translation into English of the original French version. That is reason enough to praise the appearance of this new edition, as it was one of the most significant books to shape European understanding of the civilizations of the Americas. But this is also a beautifully produced book: substantially bound and printed on thick paper, it contains all 69 of Humboldt’s original plates (many in color), with his own annotations and comments. It does justice not only to Humboldt’s original but also to his monumental labor in redefining the civilizations of the New World for the inhabitants of the Old.