"Anthropology at Chicago" by George W. Stocking, Jr.

Case 1: The Savage and the Civilized

Although an interest in the causes of the physical, linguistic, and cultural differences among men can be traced to antiquity, practitioners of the modern discipline of anthropology usually find their ancestors in the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment. A more secular view of man provided a new context in which to interpret the information about human variety generated by the experience of European expansion. New views of human history charged the confrontation of European and non-Western man with ambiguity and ambivalence. The notion of Enlightenment implied a self-congratulatory sense of the historical development of European "civilization" (a term which assumed its modern meaning only about 1760); on the other hand, the cultural self-criticism which Enlightenment made possible contributed to the vogue of the "Noble Savage" free from civilization's corrupting influences. The episodes which provided data for "anthropological" speculation were themselves both experienced and represented in terms of these cultural ideologies - as witnessed by two versions of the same encounter between "civilized" and "savage" man: Captain James Cook's published account of the landing at Tonga ("The Friendly Isles') in 1777, and a pictorial representation of the same event in the Noble Savage mode.

"Anthropology" in the modern sense of the word was still a century in the future. Nevertheless, by Cook's time there were already emerging two frameworks of discourse in which to incorporate information about non-European man. By mid-century, the taxonomic impulse of "natural history" was moving beyond the classification of plants and animals to encompass also human variety. But when the genus homo was included in Linnaeus' great systematization of the natural world, there was no clear differentiation between physical and cultural taxonomy. Furthermore, Linnaeus' essentially static creationist view of plant and animal species did not yet permit natural variety to be viewed in evolutionary terms.

A developmental view of man was first applied not to his physical form but to the products of his cultural capacities. After 1750 social theorists attempted to place European progress into a broader historical framework by comparing the subsistence modes, social institutions, and religions of existing human groups, and arranging them in presumed sequences of development from the savage to the civilized state. Henry Home, Lord Karnes, departed from most of his contemporaries in adopting the heterodox view that the American Indians had been separately created, but his Sketches of the History of Man is in other respects a characteristic example of later eighteenth-century "conjectural history."

In general, the anthropological thought of the Enlightenment treated the variety of human cultural forms as expressions in historical sequence of all the capacities of "The Human Mind." Despite Linnaeus' correlation of government and color, "race' was not yet a major anthropological category. One can, however, distinguish egalitarian and inegalitarian trends, the one associated with eighteenthcentury social theory, the other with the emerging systematic interest in the physical differences among men. The frontispiece of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, with the naked savage being welcomed back among his civilized equals, contrasts dramatically with the hierarchical representation of primate facial anatomy in Peter Campers Treatise on the Natural Difference of Features in Persons of Different Countries. By the end of the century, the political reaction against the French Revolution, the development of more differentiated biological classifications, and the tendency of Romantic thought to emphasize the uniqueness of national cultural forms had laid the basis for a heightened concern with differences among groups which were later indiscriminately called "races." While the revival of Christian religious orthodoxy discouraged the idea of any radical plurality within the human species, it also inhibited a tolerant view of the cultural forms of non-Western man. Savages, no longer noble, were regarded as degenerate offshoots of the human race who could not be civilized without being reclaimed for Christianity.

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