An Unlettered People and the Pulitzer Prize

The Native Americans, in an indirect way, rewrote history.

Europe has left its marks all over the world.  The reach of European languages illustrates the influence of European cultures.  In Australia, for instance, which lies 8,500 miles away from England, the predominant language is English.  In Brazil, which lies 3,500 miles away from Portugal, the predominant language is Portuguese.  Inhabitants of Quebec speak French, even though France is 3,500 miles away, and Mexicans speak Spanish, notwithstanding the 4,750 miles that separate Mexico and Spain.  South Africans speak English, despite 5,500 intervening miles, and of course I speak English, although 4,000 miles lie between England and Georgia.  Beyond doubt, Europe has had a disproportionate impact on the world.

A natural question is: why?

For a long time, a common answer was that Europeans, who tended to be fair-skinned, had biological advantages that others did not.  Some believed that European whites were smarter than anyone else, others believed that whites had more drive, and others believed that white people were more virtuous and had thus been granted global domination by a deity who sought to reward their good conduct.  Some, like 19th century historian Francis Parkman, would conflate the theories and simply describe races in terms of their “merits”: in the American west of the 1800s, Parkman wrote, “[t]he human race . . . is separated into three divisions, arranged in the order of their merits: white men, Indians, and Mexicans.”

But an anthropological revolution was coming.  In the early 1900s, well after Parkman ranked the races, Franz Boaz was teaching anthropology in New York City.  His first great innovation was to stress fieldwork.  Instead of hypothesizing about foreign cultures from armchairs, or relying on secondhand reports of cultures by other people whose business brought them into incidental contact with foreign peoples (e.g., fur trappers), Boaz believed that an anthropologist should interact directly with the culture about which he wrote.  This was a new idea and, as it turned out, an influential one.  But it was easier for Boaz to encourage his students to do fieldwork than it had been for European anthropologists – for Boaz and his students, relatively intact Native American cultures were only a train ride away.  Without this access to Native Americans, the “fieldwork revolution” might not have occurred when it did.

Franz Boaz.  If consulted, he probably would not have chosen this picture.

The fieldwork revolution spawned another new and widely influential theory: cultural relativism.  Boaz concluded that human beings were basically the same in terms of their biological merits.  White people were not inherently smarter than Mexicans, and no more inherently virtuous than Indians.  He explained differences in the conduct of different races as results of cultural differences, not as reflections of the races’ underlying biological capabilities.  Boaz further emphasized that all cultures had value, and that none was inherently superior to another.

This new theory of cultural relativism undermined the theoretical basis for the United States’s westward expansion.  Previously, for Americans who sought an intellectual rationale for having taken the Indians’ land (and personally, I suspect such people were a minority), the doctrine of Manifest Destiny provided a justification.  Because the United States had been a more enlightened, advanced, and righteous society than the societies of the Indians, the theory went, it had been the duty of the United States to displace the natives.  But the ideas of manifest destiny and cultural relativism ran smack into each other.  How could we justify having displaced North America’s indigenous people if we weren’t any better than them?  And how to justify the suppression of their cultures if we were to believe that all cultures have value?  These were difficult questions to answer.

The theory of cultural relativism also left us with a conspicuous void in our understanding of history.  If Europeans weren’t biologically superior to other people, why had they dominated the globe?  If Europeans didn’t have inherent advantages, why did Australians speak English, Brazilians speak Portuguese, and Quebecers speak French?  Why didn’t, for instance, the Apaches build boats and take over Paris?  It was another difficult question.  Anthropologists are still fighting over the answer, but we’ve come a long way.  In 1997, Jared Diamond answered the question, at least to my satisfaction, in Guns, Germs and Steel.  The fullness of his answer is way beyond the scope of this weblog, but in sum, Diamond explained European global dominance by pointing to unique geographical advantages that Europe enjoyed over any other continent in terms of domesticable plants, domesticable animals, and readily available trade routes.  Diamond’s efforts went a long way toward filling the void of understanding surrounding European global dominance, and they won him the Pulitzer Prize.

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Diamond couldn’t have won that Pulitzer if his work hadn’t filled a historical void.  That historical void wouldn’t have existed if cultural relativism hadn’t undermined manifest destiny as an explanation for European dominance.  Cultural relativism wouldn’t have undermined manifest destiny if Franz Boaz hadn’t made his anthropology students do fieldwork, and Franz Boaz couldn’t have made his students do fieldwork if intact Native American cultures hadn’t existed nearby.  In sum, I hope Jared Diamond put in a good word for the Indians in his acceptance speech.