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ILDIKÓ Sz. KRISTÓF do not know much about how they actually came into their possession. Finally, written documents also constituted the sources of this “antiquarian ethnography”: books of history, handwritten manuscripts, all kind of archival material — even indigenous documents, such as the Aztec maps (Picture 5) which Humboldt himself analysed in Vues des Cordilleres. The methodology of “antiquarian ethnography” was comparative in the strictest sense of the term. Seemingly it compared everything to everything or anything to anything, such as comparing Finno-Ugric words to Aztec ones as I discussed in the first part of this essay. And the purpose of the comparison was to establish descendance, succession, migration: its goal was to reveal or unveil the mysterious ways and sequences of the past. The second idea that was communicated by the works of Humboldt to Hungary was a new human geography, a géographie humaine, as it emerged in France during the first half of the 19° century. Humboldt lived in France for twenty three years (from 1804 to 1827, the year that he was called back to Berlin by the emperor). He worked in close contact there with the French geographers of the age, who developed the methodology of géographie humaine under and after Napoleon I. We can think of geographers such as Conrad Malte-Brun (1775-1826), Charles Athanase Walckenaer (1771-1852), JeanBaptiste Eyriés (1767-1846), or Julien-Joseph Virey (1775-1846). The same group founded the first geographical society in France, the Société de Géographie in Paris (1821), a scientific institution which was sharply criticized by recent post-colonial scholarship (by Edward W. Said and others) as having had too explicit colonial ambitions and having supported Bonaparte’s imperial wars all too readily. The early relations of Humboldt to the Société should be studied more profoundly, since we know that he was not on very good terms with Napoleon. Later, however, he functioned indeed as an honorary president of the Société, and even acted as a co-editor of Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, the most important periodical publication representing the new French geography.” Picture 5 ?! Thad the opportunity to study the volumes of Nouvelles Annales des Voyages in Somogyi Library, Szeged. + 402 +
