Oldal 404 [404]
ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT AND HUNGARY
At this point it seems worth considering in what sense this geography —
and also Humboldt’s geography — can be considered new. It admittedly set
itself against the discourse of Enlightenment “world histories”, that is, the late
18'-century genre of geographia mundi:
Geography, as it is conceived today [...] — to quote Nouvelles Annales des Voyages
from 1839 - is not restricted any more to a brief and dry description of places; to
some paragraphs on the rivers and the mountains; to an approximative survey
of the products of a region, its natural and artificial frontiers: ... [It] has a wider
scope: it aims at giving an exact account of not only what exists, but also the events
that affected it, and the events that could modify it; it aims also at showing the
manners (moeurs) of a people, so it tells what successive variations these manners
have undergone through time, it reveals the appropriate reasons for it, it teaches
us which were the most glorious days [of the people concerned] and which the
most miserable ones, how the population has increased, or how and why it has
decreased, which period has made its wealth grow, and how its sources have been
used up [...]
[This] geography [...] is universal, because it draws on religion, history, the arts
(les arts) and manners of a nation, and so in this way nothing is alien to it...”
Probably the most important aspect of the new geography was that it was
proposed as the science of something social and collective, something which
was held to be different from the sphere of the natural environment, but which
was treated - and this is very important - as included in it, as embedded in
it. (A similar idea of “social geography” was taken up later by Paul Vidal de
la Blache (1845-1918) and through him, the historians of the Annales-circle
themselves in France at the beginning of the 20" century.)
Finally, the third idea which was communicated by Humboldt’s works
to Hungary was his concept of history. In general, Humboldt relied on the
stadial concept of the Enlightenment: he conceived history as a universal
and also unilinear development advancing from the stade of savages to, the
stage of barbarians, to that of half-barbarians, and finally to that of so-called
civilizations. However, another of his scientific obsessions modified the general
idea of development and made it less linear, less straight, and altogether less
rigid. This was the role that Nature could play in the formation of human
societies. As regards the American Indians, for example, Humboldt argued
that just as Nature provides multiple centers (or foyers) for the distribution of
2 A. E.: Statistique de l’industrie française. Exposition des produits de 1839, 63-64. The
citation is the first paragraph of the article; the English translation is mine: I. Sz. K.
23 See Claude Blanckaert: Geographie et anthropologie: une rencontre necessaire (XVIII*¬
XIX® siécle), Ethnologie française No. 4, (Octobre-Décembre), 2004, 661-670.
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