Geography and Ethnography

Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies

Kurt A. Raaflaub, Richard J. A. Talbert, Kurt A. Raaflaub, Richard J. A. Talbert

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118589847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This fascinating volume brings together leading specialists, who have analyzed the thoughts and records documenting the worldviews of a wide range of pre-modern societies.

• Presents evidence from across the ages; from antiquity through to the Age of Discovery
• Provides cross-cultural comparison of ancient societies around the globe, from the Chinese to the Incas and Aztecs, from the Greeks and Romans to the peoples of ancient India
• Explores newly discovered medieval Islamic materials
  

Chapter 1

Introduction

RICHARD J. A. TALBERT AND KURT A. RAAFLAUB

It is a sad opening, but an unavoidable one, to acknowledge that this volume remains lame. Its Introduction cannot be balanced by the corresponding Conclusion that Denis Cosgrove provided with his unrivalled range, flair and insight to a workshop on this volume’s topic at Brown University in March 2006. In planning this volume and the program of the workshop at which contributors had a chance to present and discuss first versions of their chapters, Kurt Raaflaub and I had been eager to include a capstone session at which some synthesis and reflection on themes in the individual contributions could be ventured, and broad lines of continuing enquiry identified for further discussion. Denis Cosgrove at the University of California, Los Angeles, seemed to us a scholar ideally suited to open such a session. We were delighted and honored when he accepted our invitation to do so, and he duly spoke with characteristic authority and enthusiasm. Tragically, however, he died two years later on March 21, 2008 from complications following cancer surgery, and in consequence he was never able to distill his words into writing for this volume.

Denis Cosgrove’s death is a major loss to us all. To quote David Lowenthal in his obituary for The Independent (April 8, 2008): “Cosgrove’s central mission was to illuminate the dynamic interplay between the world’s diverse material landscapes and equally diverse modes of imagining and exploring them.” At Brown, Denis formulated for us eight questions as potentially rewarding lines of comprehensive enquiry into worldview among premodern societies, and I reproduce them here as recorded in my imperfect notes scribbled on the occasion. The introductory overview which follows would hardly be the place for any attempt to do full justice to the eight, but a shared concern for many of the themes and issues raised should readily be apparent.

1 What counts as geographical knowledge, and how is it produced, coordinated, learned, represented?

2 How are the disjunctures of system and autopsy managed, if at all?

3 How universal/mobile/restrictive are our own contemporary metageographical concepts?

4 How useful, or restrictive, is our privileging of maps and our focus on vision?

5 How has ethnographic diversity been related to environmental diversity? And how far is the diversity of mankind related to the diversity of the environment?

6 How, when and where did world, earth and globe unite?

7 How do territorialized geographies or spatialities relate to geographies of mobility, either conceptually or representationally?

8 How are hybridity and diasporas, and the question of cosmopolitanism, dealt with within territorialized geographical schemes?

To determine the order in which the 19 contributions should appear in a volume as wide-ranging as this one presents a delicate fundamental challenge that its editors may postpone, but ultimately cannot evade. In the obvious absence of any natural order, we have followed our inclination not to privilege Europe, and indeed to place the most familiar theme last – that is, David Buisseret’s account of how from the fifteenth century onwards a combination of the Ptolemaic and Portolan chart traditions enabled European cartographers to record the expanding exploration of the world launched from their continent, and eventually to produce maps of all kinds according to the widely recognized norms still taken for granted today. Even in the 1570s, however (as Buisseret recounts), reliance upon any such standards was strikingly premature. Philip II of Spain had hoped that his cosmographer could be supplied with maps, or pinturas, by the various administrative divisions of his farflung empire, which would then form the basis for a detailed, comprehensive map of the whole. That ambition proved impossible to achieve, however, because the 200 or so pinturas sent adopted too wide a variety of styles, many of them reflecting not European cartographic norms, but rather those of such subject peoples as the Aztecs and the Maya.

Almost to its very end, therefore, this volume compels readers to engage with the unfamiliar. It is, as Christopher Minkowski aptly summarizes it in the opening contribution, “a project of recovering and understanding the uses of geographical and ethnographical knowledge and conceptions by the peoples who produced them, in their own times and places.” For twenty-first century Westerners, the difficulties are many and formidable. Particularly taxing for us are non-literate societies. Hence it takes special dedication and sensitivity on the part of Kathleen DuVal, Barbara Mundy and Catherine Julien to tease out the worldview of Mississippian peoples (whose own names we do not even know!), the Aztecs, and the Inca respectively. Archaeology and material objects can yield vital testimony, if only the relevant pictographs and other signs can be interpreted. Potentially valuable, too, but liable to mislead and frustrate at the same time, is the written record of Westerners whose own ingrained conceptions inevitably influenced their understanding. In the Inca case, as Julien explains, the territory of Tawantinsuyu (Peru) survived, but it was entirely reimagined by its Spanish conquerors; the original conceptualization of the name – which seems to have combined geography, political theory, and a statement of power – resists our full comprehension in the absence of accounts by native authors in local languages.

More generally, throughout the volume it is essential to distrust any presumption – so easily made on our part – that the societies under investigation approached the world at all as we do. Mundy warns: “the insistence in modern geographic practice on vision and verisimilitude as the basis for geographic representations does not always hold in the New World, where ‘ways of knowing’ are not always based on sight.” Julien offers reason to think that the Inca system of orientation may not have relied upon the cardinal points. John Henderson, in explicating nonary cosmography in ancient China – a long-lasting and highly influential ordering of space – articulates the risk inherent in tapping Chinese texts of this type for insight into matters of prime concern to us (the Chinese concept of the world, for example). Such matters may in fact have been of marginal interest at best to these ancient authors, giving rise to the danger that our preoccupations will not only prove largely fruitless, but will also lead us to overlook the authors’ own priorities. By the same token Michael Loewe, reviewing the various types of reports to survive in Chinese documents, concludes that it is not the norm to find there a sense of space, or recognition of long distances, or appreciation for the effect of natural conditions on the growth of a community, let alone on the characteristics of its culture. Our deep-rooted intellectual categories and periodizations, moreover, may act as a positive hindrance to appreciation of premodern cultures. As Henderson cautions, the Chinese division of space according to the pattern of the square divided equally 3 × 3 is an ordering that falls between modern geography, cartography, even cosmography. Adam Silverstein concludes from his discussion of “the medieval Islamic worldview” that the very notion is an oxymoron. The relevant body of writing in Arabic and Persian is uniquely large. However, it is hardly accurate to describe those geographers who did form a worldview – one very dependent upon Hellenistic, Iranian and Mesopotamian ideas in fact – as genuinely medieval or Islamic. On the other hand, the geographers who were Islamic and, in chronological terms “medieval,” hardly had a worldview; they felt obliged to draw upon only personal observation or the testimony of eye-witnesses, and so ignored non-Muslim lands as a result.

A further assumption to be avoided is that maps or map-like images occupied an important place, indeed any place, in the premodern societies discussed. In early Mesopotamia the symbolic literary imagery examined by Piotr Michalowski is paramount. In early Greek culture, too, discussed by Susan Cole and James Romm, maps were created as aids to philosophical and geographical speculation about the world. Literary records, including geographic catalogs in Greek epic poetry, as well as itineraries, predated maps and were never superseded by them. Division of the globe by continents, climates and cultures became a topic that engaged a long succession of Greek writers, who in turn later influenced Jewish, Roman and medieval thinking in East and West. Meantime the “colossal,” comprehensive work of narrative geography by the Greek author Strabo – the subject of Daniela Dueck’s contribution – confined itself to words and ideas, without maps. Even so, Strabo insisted that any geographer should be an experienced traveler who could claim autopsia, as he proudly did himself. As my own contribution recognizes, Roman culture likewise, despite its unwavering pride in territorial expansion, never enlarged the limited range of contexts and purposes for which it employed maps of various types; in part for this reason, cartographic norms failed to develop. Romans clearly came to share an extensive “mental map,” but this remains elusive, as does insight into the learning and cognitive processes underlying it. As Emilie Savage-Smith reveals, our perception of Islamic cartography in general, and of its mapping of the Mediterranean in particular, has been hugely enriched by the recovery of the Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes that only came to light in 2000. Its novel rendering of the Mediterranean forms a stark contrast to the vision conveyed by the earlier “Balkh

School” of cartography. But the contrast in turn raises questions of whether the eastern Mediterranean’s dominance (to the surprising exclusion of Muslim Spain and western Europe) merely reflects eccentricity on the part of the anonymous Egyptian mapmaker, or whether his perception was in fact one widely shared in early eleventh-century Egypt.

For early China, Agnes Hsu’s contribution makes the persuasive claim that the maps found at Mawangdui in 1973 – hitherto admired principally for their rendering of hydrology and topography – also convey a ritual and symbolic quality that should not be overlooked. The demarcation of Han-controlled territory in Changsha on one of these maps acts as a visual symbol signifying the separation between the civilized world and the landscapes of untamed peoples. In addition, once the set was placed in the tomb from which it has been recovered, the maps became a metaphor for a space that is preserved in perpetuity. In the same way, Hsu maintains, the Anping map-like mural of Eastern Han – with its axonometric, or characteristically Chinese “bird’s-eye view,” perspective – had a spiritual function in the tomb where it was painted; it, too, arrested time and space for ever.

Regardless of whether or not the societies under discussion developed maps, there emerges from the volume a persistent (and perhaps hardly surprising) tendency for them to situate themselves at the center of their world, to exaggerate the extent of their control, and at the same time to envisage one or more zones beyond. There their own exemplary level of civilization is missing, and indeed even their knowledge of the land and its peoples gradually fades – the “distance decay function,” as Cosgrove termed it. Akkad in Mesopotamia represents itself not so much as a center to be contrasted with a periphery, but more as a focal point for the whole world, with the kings of Akkad claiming to rule the four corners of the universe. Babylonian literature draws a basic distinction between “homeland” (kalam, further divided into cultivated and uncultivated areas) and “the Eastern mountains” (kur). In the Aztec empire, with its concentric spaces extending out from the island capital Tenochtitlan at the center, the equivalent contrast is between the nearby and intelligible (nahuac) and the distant unknown (huehca). Mississippian peoples had a keen sense of self-identity and of borders, yet were inclusivist in outlook, eager to learn from outsiders. Egyptians mirrored these attitudes in the first two respects, but (as Gerald Moers illustrates from an exceptional variety of texts and images) their rejection of most foreigners was extreme – peoples viewed as disgusting, unsettled, desperate to rob Egypt of vital resources. As the living incorporation of the god Horus, Pharaoh’s role in principle was to impose orderly rule upon the cosmos from its center Egypt; yet the foreigners’ zone was acknowledged to be uncontrollable in practice, and a constant threat to Egypt’s wellbeing unless confronted with unflinching violence. Greeks imagined three zones: themselves, with barbaroi beyond and, further still, horrific agrioi – cannibals, or lice-eaters, or people who turned into wolves once a year. The Chinese, like Egyptians and Greeks, were especially fearful of marauding nomads, above all the Xiongnu to the north; hence their “Great walls” were built as protection.

At the same time, flexibility in attitudes towards foreigners is unmistakable. Egyptians idealized the exotic, distant and near-mythical land of Punt. Once the Chinese realized the prospects for trade and settlement in such remote regions as Da Xia and Anxi (Bactria and Persia), they willingly developed friendly relations with the aliens there. Strabo, in his highly ethnographic Geography, remains inconsistent in his ranking of Romans. There are times when he groups them together with his fellow Greeks as “us” against “them,” the rest of the world. Elsewhere, however, he insists upon the overall superiority of Greeks on cultural grounds, but in recognition of the Romans’ achievement as empire-builders he is prepared to term them “refined barbarians.” What remains unique in Greek geographic and ethnographic writing is the remarkable attempt of the incomplete medical treatise Airs Waters Places – an anonymous late fifth century BCE work, discussed by Romm – to link the earth’s climates, continents and political structures into a single comprehensive system. Later Greek thinkers preferred to credit that both climate and culture were primarily determined by heat, cold and a mix of the two; none adopted the anonymous author’s more intricate climatic model, with its consideration for the effects of East and West winds together with the established opposition between North and South.

It is vital to appreciate that many premodern societies attached the greatest importance to situating themselves not merely within the immediately perceived world, but also within a vaster universe, as already noted of Akkad and Egypt. To them, moreover, the teaching of sacred scripture may be held superior to scientific knowledge. India’s Sanskrit texts, the Pur

as, present an outstanding instance, not merely defining geography but also thereby justifying a hierarchical ordering of Aryan society by castes. This vast assemblage of mythology, legend and history is discussed by both Christopher Minkowski and Kim Plofker. In the latter’s words:

It represents the earth as a flat circular disk resting in the middle of the brahm

nda or “cosmic egg” surrounded by the primal elements. Above the disk of the earth are stacked the layers of the various heavens; below the earth are corresponding layers of the various pat

las or underworlds, and beneath those in turn successive narakas or hells. All the dimensions involved are immense: for example, the diameter of the earth’s disk is said to extend for five hundred million of the units called yojanas, which would be approximately on the order of five billion kilometers. The great mountain Meru in the middle of the earth’s disk reaches to the pole-star in the heavens, and the other stars and planets wheel around it, appearing to rise or set as they are revealed or hidden by its massive form. All the locations in this vast expanse are teeming with beings of elaborately diverse sorts. [pp. 35–6]

Despite the revered status of this Pur

nic vision, both Minkowski and Plofker are particularly concerned to show how attention was also still paid to real-world geography and astronomy in India, and how intersection of the two types of vision occurred. A comparable amalgam treated by James Scott is to be found in the Hebrew Book of Jubilees. This neglected apocalyptic text (surviving complete only in an Ethiopic translation) skillfully exploits both biblical and Hellenistic Greek conceptions of geography in order to establish the prominent place of Israel and the Jews in the world, both now and in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Where the Black Antelope Roam: Dharma and Human Geography in India
• Chapter 3: Humans, Demons, Gods, and Their Worlds: The Sacred and Scientific Cosmologies of India
• Chapter 4: Structured Perceptions of Real and Imagined Landscapes in Early China
• Chapter 5: Nonary Cosmography in Ancient China
• Chapter 6: Knowledge of Other Cultures in China’s Early Empires
• Chapter 7: The Mississippian Peoples’ Worldview
• Chapter 8: Aztec Geography and Spatial Imagination
• Chapter 9: Inca Worldview
• Chapter 10: Masters of the Four Corners of the Heavens: Views of the Universe in Early Mesopotamian Writings
• Chapter 11: The World and the Geography of Otherness in Pharaonic Egypt
• Chapter 12: On Earth as in Heaven: The Apocalyptic Vision of World Geography from Urzeit to Endzeit according to the Book of Jubilees
• Chapter 13: “I Know the Number of the Sand and the Measure of the Sea”: Geography and Difference in the Early Greek World
• Chapter 14: Continents, Climates, and Cultures: Greek Theories of Global Structure
• Chapter 15: The Geographical Narrative of Strabo of Amasia
• Chapter 16: The Roman Worldview: Beyond Recovery?
• Chapter 17: The Medieval Islamic Worldview: Arabic Geography in Its Historical Context
• Chapter 18: The Book of Curiosities: An Eleventh-Century Egyptian View of the Lands of the Infidels
• Chapter 19: Geography and Ethnography in Medieval Europe: Classical Traditions and Contemporary Concerns
• Chapter 20: Europeans Plot the Wider World, 1500–1750
• Index