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Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, Surekha Davies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2016)
Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2016) 1e2
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review
Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, Surekha Davies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2016). 355 pages, £74.99 hardcover Jonathan Swift's famous throwaway line from On Poetry (1733, p. 12)d‘So Geographers in Afric-Maps/With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps’dis oft-quoted in studies of cartography. In Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, Surekha Davies convincingly argues that we cannot afford to be so flippant about the ‘savages’ who filled the paratextual spaces of maps in the era 1450 to 1650. On the contrary, the cartographic depiction of the peoples of the newly-discovered Americas was both informed by conceptual debates about the boundaries between humans and monsters and was itself key to the promulgation of ideas about those boundaries to wider audiences. Davies opens by charting the complex debates about the limits of the human species in the Renaissance era. On her account, the key discourses related to humoral theory, the idea that the environment and latitude in which one was born was key to one's character and intellect. This set of ideas interacted in complex ways with desires to distinguish humans from hominid ‘monsters’. Were monsters different species or merely exceptional and odd singularities, the ‘sports of nature’ as contemporary philosophers described them? Likewise important was the Aristotelian category of the ‘natural slave’ as a link in the chain from the divine to the bestial in which humans were the key middle point. Above all, this bricolage of classical and Christian ideas formed the toolkit with which Renaissance Europeans encountered and cognitized the peoples of the Americas and allowed for the idea that races were not fixed biological entities, but instead were forged in situ: one's location determined one's identity. In a situation where character was presumed to vary geographically by latitude and location, how peoples were depicted mattered; pictorial iconography was a window onto personal and societal essence. It was in this conceptual context that the cartographers of the era worked and in which their marginal illustrations of the peoples of the Americas contributed to debates about the geographically variable characters being discovered in that area. Davies attends closely to the production of maps, arguing that they were drawn in cosmopolitan ateliers across Europe, the mobility of their draftsmen ensuring that iconographic conventions were shared across nations. The bulk of Davies's book takes these ideas forward in a series of exceptionally well crafted and scholarly studies of the cartographic representation of different peoples of the Americas. In each case, Davies attends to the ways in which a geographical arena was represented in the prose discourse of the age before
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2016.08.005 0305-7488
looking at which parts of this discourse were mobilized to form the iconographic essence of the people in their depiction on maps. As Davies shows, very different patterns of appropriation applied to different areas. In Brazil, for example, where travellers' accounts juxtaposed peaceful Arawak peoples with warlike and cannibalistic Caribs, maps honed in exclusively on the latter group as representing the peoples of the area as a whole. Maps traded in a gruesome iconography of butcherydthe drying and smoking of flesh and limbs protruding from cooking potsdthereby encouraging their European consumers to see Brazil as a land of cannibals in a way that no text substantiated. The only contradiction to this tendency came in the mid-sixteenth-century French maps from the Norman school which depicted a peaceable people of woodcutters in ways accordant with the colonizing propaganda of the era. If both imagesdsavage and peaceabledultimately encouraged a narrative of colonization of simpler peoples, not all American locations were thus depicted. In particular, Davies shows that the representation of Aztec and Inca civilizations focused on the wondrous nature of their cities where prose accounts had balanced their achievements with the brutality that underlay them. Here, then, cartographic iconography built a less brutal image of the peoples in these locations, the opposite manoeuver from that for Brazil. Davies shows that such images became sedimented in maps for decades and even centuries. Most notable in this respect, perhaps, was the representation of the peoples of the southernmost tip of the Americas. Initial reports by Antonio Pigafetta on Magellan's circumnavigation that the people of Patagonia were giants were soon rendered the iconic image of the people of this latitude in cartographic representations, and travellers would still be inquiring into this topic in the mid eighteenth century, long after the point at which Davies's narrative concludes. And yet such a sedimentation did not always occur: Walter Raleigh's account of the monstrous peoples of Guiana initially ramified into maps in the last decade of the sixteenth century, but within three decades it had been dropped from the margins of maps, the accounts of headless peoples and the like, despite their ancient warrant from Pliny, proving to lack credibility for cartographers. For Davies, the intellectual investment in cartographically imaging the peoples of the Americas collapsed in the mid seventeenth century. At this time, eyewitnessing came to trump the organizational logic of the mapmaker's atelier, and debates about humankind came to accept the uniformity of the species rather than seeing its essence as geographically variable. Increasingly it was argued that while costume and custom may vary across space, character was a constant. It was only from this time that images of humans on maps could be merely illustrative as opposed to build-
2
Review / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2016) 1e2
ing an argument about the nature of mankind: the decorative chaps who filled the gaps in Swift's maps were unimaginable until the collapse of the geographically and latitudinally predicated humoral theory of humankind. Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human is a powerful, erudite, and elegant contribution to our knowledge of the interweaving of cartography, colonialism, and cultural encounter in the century and a half after Columbus set sail. Placing
maps at the core of debates about the nature of humankind, this book is essential reading for Renaissance historians and cartographic historians alike. Robert J. Mayhew University of Bristol, UK
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review
Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, Surekha Davies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2016). 355 pages, £74.99 hardcover Jonathan Swift's famous throwaway line from On Poetry (1733, p. 12)d‘So Geographers in Afric-Maps/With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps’dis oft-quoted in studies of cartography. In Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, Surekha Davies convincingly argues that we cannot afford to be so flippant about the ‘savages’ who filled the paratextual spaces of maps in the era 1450 to 1650. On the contrary, the cartographic depiction of the peoples of the newly-discovered Americas was both informed by conceptual debates about the boundaries between humans and monsters and was itself key to the promulgation of ideas about those boundaries to wider audiences. Davies opens by charting the complex debates about the limits of the human species in the Renaissance era. On her account, the key discourses related to humoral theory, the idea that the environment and latitude in which one was born was key to one's character and intellect. This set of ideas interacted in complex ways with desires to distinguish humans from hominid ‘monsters’. Were monsters different species or merely exceptional and odd singularities, the ‘sports of nature’ as contemporary philosophers described them? Likewise important was the Aristotelian category of the ‘natural slave’ as a link in the chain from the divine to the bestial in which humans were the key middle point. Above all, this bricolage of classical and Christian ideas formed the toolkit with which Renaissance Europeans encountered and cognitized the peoples of the Americas and allowed for the idea that races were not fixed biological entities, but instead were forged in situ: one's location determined one's identity. In a situation where character was presumed to vary geographically by latitude and location, how peoples were depicted mattered; pictorial iconography was a window onto personal and societal essence. It was in this conceptual context that the cartographers of the era worked and in which their marginal illustrations of the peoples of the Americas contributed to debates about the geographically variable characters being discovered in that area. Davies attends closely to the production of maps, arguing that they were drawn in cosmopolitan ateliers across Europe, the mobility of their draftsmen ensuring that iconographic conventions were shared across nations. The bulk of Davies's book takes these ideas forward in a series of exceptionally well crafted and scholarly studies of the cartographic representation of different peoples of the Americas. In each case, Davies attends to the ways in which a geographical arena was represented in the prose discourse of the age before
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2016.08.005 0305-7488
looking at which parts of this discourse were mobilized to form the iconographic essence of the people in their depiction on maps. As Davies shows, very different patterns of appropriation applied to different areas. In Brazil, for example, where travellers' accounts juxtaposed peaceful Arawak peoples with warlike and cannibalistic Caribs, maps honed in exclusively on the latter group as representing the peoples of the area as a whole. Maps traded in a gruesome iconography of butcherydthe drying and smoking of flesh and limbs protruding from cooking potsdthereby encouraging their European consumers to see Brazil as a land of cannibals in a way that no text substantiated. The only contradiction to this tendency came in the mid-sixteenth-century French maps from the Norman school which depicted a peaceable people of woodcutters in ways accordant with the colonizing propaganda of the era. If both imagesdsavage and peaceabledultimately encouraged a narrative of colonization of simpler peoples, not all American locations were thus depicted. In particular, Davies shows that the representation of Aztec and Inca civilizations focused on the wondrous nature of their cities where prose accounts had balanced their achievements with the brutality that underlay them. Here, then, cartographic iconography built a less brutal image of the peoples in these locations, the opposite manoeuver from that for Brazil. Davies shows that such images became sedimented in maps for decades and even centuries. Most notable in this respect, perhaps, was the representation of the peoples of the southernmost tip of the Americas. Initial reports by Antonio Pigafetta on Magellan's circumnavigation that the people of Patagonia were giants were soon rendered the iconic image of the people of this latitude in cartographic representations, and travellers would still be inquiring into this topic in the mid eighteenth century, long after the point at which Davies's narrative concludes. And yet such a sedimentation did not always occur: Walter Raleigh's account of the monstrous peoples of Guiana initially ramified into maps in the last decade of the sixteenth century, but within three decades it had been dropped from the margins of maps, the accounts of headless peoples and the like, despite their ancient warrant from Pliny, proving to lack credibility for cartographers. For Davies, the intellectual investment in cartographically imaging the peoples of the Americas collapsed in the mid seventeenth century. At this time, eyewitnessing came to trump the organizational logic of the mapmaker's atelier, and debates about humankind came to accept the uniformity of the species rather than seeing its essence as geographically variable. Increasingly it was argued that while costume and custom may vary across space, character was a constant. It was only from this time that images of humans on maps could be merely illustrative as opposed to build-
2
Review / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2016) 1e2
ing an argument about the nature of mankind: the decorative chaps who filled the gaps in Swift's maps were unimaginable until the collapse of the geographically and latitudinally predicated humoral theory of humankind. Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human is a powerful, erudite, and elegant contribution to our knowledge of the interweaving of cartography, colonialism, and cultural encounter in the century and a half after Columbus set sail. Placing
maps at the core of debates about the nature of humankind, this book is essential reading for Renaissance historians and cartographic historians alike. Robert J. Mayhew University of Bristol, UK