The Anthropology of the Enlightenment

Larry Wolff, Marco Cipolloni

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780804779432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The modern enterprise of anthropology, with all of its important implications for cross-cultural perceptions, perspectives, and self-consciousness emerged from the eighteenth-century intellectual context of the Enlightenment. If the Renaissance discovered perspective in art, it was the Enlightenment that articulated and explored the problem of perspective in viewing history, culture, and society. If the Renaissance was the age of oceanic discovery—most dramatically the discovery of the New World of America—the critical reflections of the Enlightenment brought about an intellectual rediscovery of the New World and thus laid the foundations for modern anthropology. The contributions that constitute this book present the multiple anthropological facets of the Enlightenment, and suggest that the character of its intellectual engagements—acknowledging global diversity, interpreting human societies, and bridging cultural difference—must be understood as a whole to be fundamentally anthropological.

PART ONE

Philosophical History and Enlightened Anthropology

CHAPTER TWO

Barbarians and the Redefinition of Europe

A Study of Gibbon’s Third Volume

J. G. A. Pocock

We shall occasionally mention the Scythian or Sarmatian tribes, which, with their arms and horses, their flocks and herds, their wives and families, wandered over the immense plains which spread themselves from the Caspian Sea to the Vistula, from the confines of Persia to those of Germany. But the warlike Germans who first resisted, then invaded, and at length overturned, the western monarchy of Rome, will occupy a much more important place in this history, and possess a stronger, and, if we may use the expression, a more domestic, claim to our attention and regard. The most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany, and in the rude institutions of these barbarians we may still distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners.—Edward Gibbon¹

In these sentences, which introduce the ninth chapter of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon begins his presentation of “barbarism” in the sense that will dominate his history and lead him at last to summarize its theme as “the triumph of barbarism and religion.”² The preceding chapter deals with the Persians, a civilized people, “barbarian” in the classic sense that their native language is not Greek (the Greeks were the French of antiquity). They were “the barbarians of the east,” but here we have to deal with “the barbarians of the north,”³ a very different phenomenon, “barbarian” in another sense and playing a different role in history. They are defined primarily as Germans, and we are presented at the same time with a concept of “Europe,” as civilized and modern, but barbarian and German in its origins. This is a distinctive, if already far from new use of the term “Europe,” and the purpose of this chapter is to pursue the convergence of “barbarism” and “Europe” until both terms take on meanings cardinal, but not primordial, to our sense of history.

The northern barbarians are Germans and occupy a geographic space termed “Germany.” Behind them and beyond, however, are other peoples, here termed “Scythian” or “Sarmatian,” and occupying a further space, not given a single name but defined, from east to west, as spreading from the Caspian to the Vistula and from Persia to Germany. These peoples have no domestic claim to our attention; they play no formative role in our history, which is European, yet they will prove to have been of great if sterile importance. When considered together, the two spaces that the Germans and Scythians occupy will delimit the map of “Europe” as it is and has long been known to us: the map of a subcontinent or peninsula, protruding west from the Eurasian landmass into the northern Atlantic, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Baltic to the north, but lacking any coast or frontier on its eastern side, where the Scythians wander with their flocks and herds. This “Europe” is clearly not identical with the space comprising the two Mediterranean basins, the Nile and Euphrates river valleys, in which the Roman Empire has been established and in which the term “Europe” was much earlier invented. It had first denoted the lands lying west and north of the Hellespont and Bosphorus, and the expanding horizon of ancient geographers had realized that these opened out into unknown lands of great extent, to which a diversity of names had been given. This chapter draws attention to the complex process by which “Europe” migrates from the Hellespont to take on the meaning it has for us, and the meaning Gibbon had in mind when he wrote of “the most civilized nations of modern Europe” and their barbaric and German origins.

We must return to the two zones of barbarism mentioned by Gibbon. The eastern Scythians and Sarmatians are pastoral nomads wandering over an immense plain. The Germans, however, to whom Gibbon is about to devote a chapter, are forest transhumants pasturing their cattle in clearings they have made for themselves in the equally immense woodlands watered by the rivers flowing from the Alps into the Rhine, Elbe, and Danube valleys. Into this terrain the true nomads of the steppe seldom venture and do not long remain; but the cattle-herding Germans have not yet become agriculturalists and lack the sense of law, sociability, and even individuality that only the neighborhood of cultivators can provide.⁴ It is here, rather significantly, that we may place Gibbon’s remark that ancient and barbaric Germany, east of the provinces subject to Rome, “extended itself over a third part of Europe.”⁵ If, as the accompanying language can be made to suggest, the remaining two thirds lie west of the Rhine to the Atlantic and south of the Danube to the Mediterranean, then the “immense plain” as far as Persia is excluded from Europe, and that term is confined to the lands in which modern civility has taken shape. Where, then, can we place the eastern borders of ancient or modern Germany?

To understand why there has never been a clear answer to the latter question, we may return to Gibbon’s language and observe how it became transformed as his chapters succeeded one another, especially as the themes of chapter 9 were taken up again in chapter 26, published five years later. By that point, the account of “Scythian and Sarmatian” nomadism had been extended by two major theses. Joseph de Guignes’s great Histoire des Huns, Turcs et Mogols (1756–58)⁶ had set up the image of a chain of nomad peoples extending as far as the inner Asian frontiers of China, in such a way that conflicts as far away as Shansi and Kansu could set off snowball effects whose repercussions would be felt on the Oxus frontier of Persia or the Danubian frontier of Rome. Adam Smith’s Glasgow lectures, still unpublished in 1776, and his Wealth of Nations, published almost simultaneously with Gibbon’s first volume, had given the “shepherd stage” in “the progress of society” a dynamic importance ⁷ that lent force to the equation of shepherd, nomad, and barbarian. Gibbon admired de Guignes and counted Smith a friend; it is noteworthy, however, that he did not follow Smith in making the shepherd the original appropriator who had moved mankind out of the “savagery” of the hunter-gatherer. The Decline and Fall does not distinguish between “barbarian” and “savage,” but uses the terms interchangeably—following earlier schemes of the progress of society⁸—as denoting a stage of vagrancy preceding stationary cultivation, social space, and the exchange of goods, words, and ideas. Scythians and Huns, Germans and Goths were alike “savages,” and the latter might owe their origin to “wandering savages of the Hercynian woods,” engaged in hunting and beginning to clear the forests of woodland Europe, supposed in the generation preceding Gibbon’s to have grown up after the Great Flood and been resettled by the posterity of Noah moving west—Gomer, the son of Japhet, being the ancestor of agricultural peoples, and his brother, Magog, the ancestor of herdsmen and shepherds. Gibbon had abandoned the Noachic genealogies, but there was only Scottish historical sociology to put in their place, and the two were in fact compatible.

If Gibbon’s scheme lacked the theoretical depth of Smith’s, it furnished a comprehensive historical narrative. In chapter 10, he allowed for an eastward movement of Germanic peoples, settling the Goths in Ukraine, where they became a pastoral culture of the open plains.⁹ Here he was situating them in a historical geography, connected with the great rivers from the Vistula to the Volga, which almost link the Baltic and Black Seas and almost provide Europe with the water frontier every continent should have, on its eastern side. This geography furnishes a means of linking the Gothic invaders of Rome’s eastern provinces with the Franks, Burgundians, Saxons, and Vandals who had crossed the Rhine and assailed Gaul and Britain. As far back as Snorri Sturluson in the thirteenth century, Odin had been a Trojan leading his Asian Aesir to the Baltic,¹⁰ and Gibbon long kept in mind a humanist version of the same story, in which Odin was a Dacian migrant who had founded a Gothic kingdom in faraway Sweden.¹¹ He never came to believe this, but there was a need to reconcile an ancient vision of the “Goths” as northern invaders, and Scandinavia as the womb of nations, with the more authentic history of their emergence from Ukraine to invade the Danubian provinces. By chapter 26, he had that story in hand.

Forces not exerted by Chinese power, but originating on its western frontier—Gibbon has little to say about its history following the disintegration of the Han—lead to a Hun assault that drives the Goths from Ukraine across the Danube, with catastrophic results for Rome. There is now a recurrent pattern of steppe disturbances driving pastoral peoples, first into forest Europe and then into the civilized provinces, but this pattern must be set among other, sometimes contrary, developments. Much earlier in history, Augustus’s attempt to move the German frontier eastward is less significant for the disaster of the Teutoburgerwald than for his establishment of provinces on the Danube, from its source near the Alps to its mouths on the Black Sea.¹² Collectively known as the Illyrian provinces, these are crucial both to Roman history and to Gibbon’s conception of Europe. Their strategic role is to provide a defensible frontier for the provinces growing out of the original “Europe”; their strategic weakness is that they cover the passes of the eastern Alps, through which usurpers or barbarians may descend into Italy itself. After a crisis in the third century—occasioned partly by usurpers, partly by a rather improbable invasion by seaborne Goths, whose light craft infest both the Black Sea and the Aegean¹³—a chain of emperors, Illyrian in either their origin or their power, inaugurate a momentous eastward movement of the centers of Roman empire, which encounters the westward movement of barbarism in a pattern of reflux. As the energies of the Italian city are at last exhausted, the capital migrates from Rome to Constantinople. Gibbon does not accept the argument that Constantinople neglected the western provinces and helped cause their loss, but he does rather significantly remark that “the boundary in Europe,” between Illyrian provinces under western and eastern military control, “was not very different from the line which now separates the Germans and the Turks.”¹⁴ The frontiers of European history are being drawn for the future.

The Danube valley is an important key to Gibbon’s concepts of both Roman Empire and Europe (two terms never interchangeable). When organized into provinces under military control, it protects the northern frontier of the eastern half of the empire, but if that control lapses into either civil war or barbarian invasion, it offers a route into either Greece or Italy. The Huns drive the Goths across the lower Danube; seeking settlement and even Romanization, the latter are badly handled and defeat the emperor Valens, killing him at Adrianople in A.D. 379. This is a disaster but not a collapse; Theodosius contains the Goths as armed allies of the empire, but when they are again mismanaged under his sons, Alaric leads them to plunder Greece and loot Athens before setting out on the road to the Alpine passes and Rome. “A Christian and a soldier,” to quote Gibbon, ¹⁵ Alaric is more a warlord within the empire than a barbarian invading it. His invasion of Italy is the product of a complex power struggle involving the western emperor and his warlord general, Stilicho, and the Gothic sack of Rome in A.D. 410 draws its vast significance from things happening independently of it. Another chain of pressure originating on the Chinese borders—Gibbon says he cannot trace it through all its links¹⁶—produces a formidable buildup of barbarians including Vandals on the southern shores of the Baltic, and the locus of eastern pressure shifts north of the Danube. One group of these peoples invades Italy, and under their leader, Radagaisus—“a savage,” says Gibbon¹⁷ (unlike Alaric)—is destroyed at Florence, but other forces of the same origin cross the Rhine at the end of A.D. 405, nearly five years before Alaric’s sack of Rome, which derives much of its significance from what has happened already. The collapse of the Rhine frontier, Gibbon says, “may be considered as the fall of the Roman empire in the countries beyond the Alps,”¹⁸ Britain and Gaul, Spain and Africa; and we shall need to consider a reshaping of the concept of Europe in consequence of it. This is an achievement of barbarians, notably Vandals; and it is important to note that the Goths are caught up in it, while the Franks resist it as allies of Rome.¹⁹ The imperial system is disintegrating, but the various barbarians are still to be distinguished by their relations to it as successor states; and after A.D. 405–410, the history of this process moves perceptibly to the farther west, a circumstance important in the historiography of “Europe.”

There is an anomaly here in the history of vocabulary. Because Goths are recurrently central to the story—at Adrianople in A.D. 379 and at Rome in A.D. 410—the adjective “Gothic” has been used for wester...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Contributors
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE - Philosophical History and Enlightened Anthropology
• PART TWO - Ethnography and Enlightened Anthropology
• PART THREE - Human Nature and Enlightened Anthropology
• CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Index