McGrane on Hierarchy and Essences versus Homogeneity


In his short but ambitious 1989 book Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other, Bernard McGrane broadly characterizes the West's changing ways of understanding other peoples' difference from us. These selections are from his chapter on "The Other in the Renaissance", pp. 39-42 & 17-19.


   Within the Medieval cosmos, hierarchy (the ecclesiastical principle) was the omnipresent principle not only of ordering and specifying value but also of determining essence itself. The objects located in the immutable astronomical-theological heavens, as those located on the corruptible earth, assumed their nature from their place.
   The place they occupied was internal to them; it held an intrinsic, immanent, formative influence upon their being. The ordering, living heterogeneity of astronomical and cosmographical space determined in advance and with sufficiency the kind of face the objects found there would present to the astronomer and cosmographer. For the Aristotelean-Medieval cosmology:
Places have their nature and peculiar characteristics, the same as bodies--or, if not the same, at least in an analogous way.... The body is by no means indifferent to the place in which it is located and by which it is enclosed; rather it stands in a real and causal relation to it. Every physical element seeks "its" place, the place that belongs and corresponds to it, and flees from any other opposed to it. (Ernst Cassirer: Philosophy of Man in the Rennaissance)
After Copernicus and after Columbus this epistemic framework that provided for what is experienced and recognized as self-evident changed and henceforth the general relationship of any object to the place in which it is located became essentially a relationship of indifferent exteriority. Astronomical and cosmographical space became, for the first time, self-evidently uniform and homogeneous. With this the theoretical and practical geographical project of representationally and symbolically covering the earth's surface with homogeneous lines of longitude and latitude in complete indifference to the specific nature of the areas covered was made possible. At the heart of both the new astronomy and the new cosmography lay both the presupposition and the project, however remote its final realization, of the homogenization of space. This becomes selfconsciously manifested in Descartes....
   In post-Copernican astronomy, the earth becomes a planet, just as, after Columbus, Europe becomes a continent. When Europe becomes a "continent" there will be numerous "Europes" and therefore numerous non-European Others who are very different yet somehow the same. When the earth becomes a "planet" there will be six "earths" and numerous extraterrestrial earthlings. When the earth is thrust into the heavens the heavens collapse into the earth. "If the earth is a celestial body it must show the immutability of the heavens and the heavens in turn must participate in the corruption of the earth." (Thomas Kuhn: Copernican Revolution).
   What Copernicus initiated in revising, in altering, and, in some instances, collapsing the distance, the difference, and the otherness between the earth and the heavens, between the terrestrial and the celestial, Descartes and Newton, by way of Galileo and Kepler brought to full fruition. With Newton, with absolute Newtonian space, we may mark the radical and complete homogenization of the universe, the complete physical as well as moral and symbolical uniformization of the cosmos. On a broad, global basis, it was not until Descartes' and Newton's paradigmatic solidification of astronomical discourse that "the heavens," the celestial, were considered as essentially uniform with, and governed by the same laws as, the "earth," the terrestrial. The heavens become contiguous with the earth just as Europe becomes contiguous with (i.e., becomes a continent with) the other areas of the earth. Henceforth "Terrestrial experiments [for example the pendulum, the projectile] yield direct knowledge of the heavens, and celestial observations give information immediately applicable on earth" (Kuhn: Copernican Revolution). In the same way as the heavens, the earth's surface too is conquered by the Same. With the homogenization and uniformization of geographical space the Ocean Sea loses its unique being and becomes no longer limit to, but object in the world; as the terrestrial-celestial difference so also the terrestrial-aquatic difference is homogenized....

   Those who like to write about the "ethnography" of the sixteenth-century explorers, sailors, missionaries, and cosmographers overlook the small yet decisive fact that "ethnography" did not exist. The description of the "manners" and "customs" of foreign peoples, of aliens, of savages, did not exist. The "manners" and "customs" of these peoples were not experienced as being instances of primitive behavior or instances of different cultures, as in nineteenth-century anthropology. Rather their actions and behavior were experienced as being manifestations of barbarism and savage degeneracy--a hybrid composite of Christian "nature" and Christian "evil." The ethnographic description of "primitive peoples" embedded in nineteenth-century positivism presupposes the desire to literally transcribe and report the "reality" of the Other, to acquire "objective" knowledge (observations) of the Other. By contrast, Pigafetta, one of the few surviving sailors who successfully completed that grueling, heroic voyage around the world under Magellan, writes:

When the Captain demanded of him [the native king of the Pacific Island of Zubut] why all the idols on the island were not burnt according to his promise, he answered that they esteemed them no more as gods, but only made sacrifice to them for the Prince's brother who was very sick. . . . The Captain answered that if he would burn all his idols and believe faithfully in Christ and be baptized, he should be immediately restored to his health, and that he would else give them leave to strike off his head. By these words and persuasions of the Captain, he conceived such hope of health that after he was baptized he felt no more grief of his disease. And this was a manifest miracle wrought in our time whereby diverse infidels were converted to our faith and their idols destroyed and also their altars overthrown on the which they were accustomed to eat the sacrifical flesh.
What we have in sixteenth-century cosmography and travel literature is not the perception of "customs" on the horizon of the acquisition of positive knowledge, but rather perception of strategies on the horizon of the vanquishing of false faiths....
   Notice the peculiar consequence of this way of seeing the world. The barbarians' "customs" are not seen as "indigenous customs" in the ethnographic sense....
   This is why, only after the project and the experience of conversion could the alien be considered in relation to the acquisition of knowledge. Only then could "ethnography" as a positive discipline emerge: as signposted by Feuerbach, only after Christianity comes Anthropology.
   Further, the customs, especially the horrifying customs, of the savages were not seen as something requiring explanation. Insofar as these savages and their customs could be seen as instancing or signifying something other than themselves, they were seen as representing the "naturally" degenerate, the natural degeneracy of nature, rather than the historically primitive; they represented man in a Fallen rather than a primitive form.
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