One of the most original features of Stuurmans bo Essays

One of the most original features of Stuurman's book is his account of "the anthropological turn," which isn't a single turn in time but a recurrent turning of travelers and ethnographers toward the outside and the "other." Stuurman begins with the Greek historian Herodotus and the much less well-known Sima Qian , who lived in China three centuries after Herodotus and wrote about the Han empire and the surrounding lands. Both Herodotus and Sima Qian traveled widely, crossing the political and cultural frontiers that separated Greeks and Chinese from the people they called "barbarians." And both suggested that the separation wasn't as great as their compatriots thought. Again and again, the anthropological turn has produced reports similar to theirs: The natives of this or that foreign country, for all their strange customs and beliefs, are remarkably like us. Here, according to Stuurman , is a critical moment in the "invention" of humanity. But one wonders whether what he is describing isn't more a matter of discovery than invention. When Herodotus writes that the Egyptians call people who don't speak their language "barbarians," exactly as the Greeks do, is this an act of inventing or discovering humanity? Herodotus's aim is to unsettle his Greek readers and force them to recognize their fellowship with the Egyptians. Similarly, when Sima Qian visits the nomads who live north of the Great Wall and reports that their way of life is remarkably and intelligently well-adapted to their environment, this is again a discovery meant to challenge the complacent self-regard of his fellow Chinese: They are not alone in their human ingenuity. Nothing like invention is going on here. Perhaps the most engaging, and also the most disturbing, of the travelers and ethnographers in Stuurman's account are the Dominican and Franciscan priests or friars who went to Central America in the wake of the Spanish conquest. Writers like Bartoleme de Las Casas and Bernardino de Sahagun described the high civilization of the indigenous peoples (another discovery), and Las Casas conducted a years-long campaign against the greed and brutality of the Spanish colonizers. With Sahagun's help, a number of Aztec writers "drafted an account of the siege and destruction of the magnificent city of Tenochtitlan by Cortez." So the colonized were given a voicethough Sahagun later wrote his own account, presenting the conquest as "providential." Las Casas and Sahagun were hardly in full possession of the ideas of humanity and equality. But they portrayed the Spaniards as far less civilized than these indigenous peoplesand so they took a stand against the pr evailing Spanish belief in their own racial and cultural superiority. The anthropological turn continues with modern academic anthropology. Stuurman writes about the critique of "scientific racism" by Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu, both of whom would certainly deny that their defense of human equality was an invention; they meant to tell it like it is. But when it comes to the big philosophical and theological systems within which the ideas of humanity and equality have sometimes been defended, Stuurman is correct: These are indeed designed and constructed. Here we can see a long series of historical inventions of our shared humanityStoicism, Catholic natural law, Kantian idealism. Consider one of the earliest examples: From a secular standpoint, the God of biblical theology, in whose image all human beings are created, is an invention. The common image, however, is discovered again and againby Las Casas, for example, and centuries later by Boas.