Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

8. Similarities and Their Documentary Properties

CHAPTER VIII Similarities and Their Documentary Properties "Man is an Object of greatest vicinity to himself, and hath thereby ... the best opportunity to know and understand himself with the greatest certainty and evidence."-SIR MATTHEW HALE. "Though man has alway~ been a problem to himself, modern man has aggravated that problem by his too simple and premature solutions."-REINHOLD NIEBUHR. IF DIVERSITIES IN CULTURE were puzzling to thoughtful men during the Renaissance, so also were similarities. For there are two types of mind among scholars. There are those who in their efforts to understand the world submit to the methodological principle of specification or particularization. When drawn into making comparisons, they resist assertions of likenes ..'l, similarity, analogy, unity. The phenomenon of differentness in culture prevails against even the most persuasive arguments from likeness. The other type adheres to the principle of homogeneity; to the fruitfulness in explanation of arguing from the similar, the corresponding, the parallel, or the identical. These latter inquirers, though their services to thought can scarcely be overpraised, have sometimes strained the facts in an effort to reduce divergent phenomena to some common denominator. In the study of man, rightly or wrongly, this common denominator has often taken the form of a 295 296 Early Anthropology in ~he 16th and 17th Centuries common or original human nature, a common or natural body of laws, an universal series of species, orders or classes, or a common and natural historical origin. Both habits of ratiocination were operative in Renaissance ethnological thought. Though the voyages of discovery and the travels of merchants and missionaries had brought the Europeans face to face with an astonishing and never-to-beforgotten array of cultural diversities, they were thought also to have revealed an equally astonishing assortment of cultural likenesses. When the usual Europocentric comparisons were made, variance, dissimilarity, and difference were observed, it is true, but cultural correspondences also made themselves known and, to some observers and for some purposes, seemed actually to predominate. With respect to time or history, the cultural similarities thus perceived fell generally into two categories. Some were contemporary . They were remarked between people such as living Europeans and living African Negroes; or between living Negroes and living American Indians; or between living East Indians and living Turks, the people of Cochin China and the desert nomads, living Christians and living pagans; or between innumerable other contemporary pairs and combinations. But this recognition of contemporary and coexisting correspondences failed to exhaust the matter. Bred upon the historism of Scripture and other forms of antique thought, accustomed to historicizing the whole range of natural and social phenomena, certain men of the Renaissance were even more conscious of historical parallels, or the similarity between some present peoples and some past peoples. The usual historical likenesses cited were those purportedly observable between contemporary Indian or African behavior and that of the Old Testament tribes; between the culture of contemporary savagery and that of the ancient Greeks or Romans; between contemporary savagety and the barbarism of northern Similarities and Their Documentary Properties 297 Europe in Roman or medieval times; between contemporary savagery and the rude, rustic peasantry of contemporary Europe, supposedly still untouched by civilizing influences.1 Such likenesses were thought to have historiographical significance . They were thought to confer documentary properties upon the contemporary member of each pair of parallels, to make of it a present and accessible reflection of the past of some very early and otherwise undocumented cultural condition . Comparison leading to the disclosure of similitudes was thus regarded as an highly illuminating procedure, not only with respect to the existing array of disparate peoples, but also when applied in a temporal dimension to the reconstruction of the cultures of peoples living early in time. This stress, this procedural reliance upon the observation of cultural correspondence, was far from new in European thought. It was a mental habit which was present, unquestioned and unexamined, in high antiquity and which persisted throughout the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and well into the twentieth century. Long before the discovery of the New World, correspondences were mentioned by nearly every seafarer , land-traveler, or hearth-bound savant, from Herodotus to Mandeville, from Marco Polo to Samuel Purchas. They were utilized in the construction of conjectural histories, socalled in the eighteenth century by Dugald Stewart. They formed the substance of the Comparative Method so christened by Auguste Comte. They have been discussed with...