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ILDIKÓ Sz. KRISTÓF
certain climates, plants and animals?, so do indigenous societies. Mexico and
Peru (the Aztec as well as the Inca states) could thus be considered nature¬
dependent centers of “highland civilization’; just like the Hungarian puszta
could and should be considered similar to the South American pampas and
other grasslands.?°
Humboldt seems to have made an important distinction in this way between
two (equally imagined) poles of indigenous social development. On one of
the poles were those “half-barbarians” who could get closer to “civilisation”
because they lived in a more favorable natural environment. They were thus
capable of developing agriculture, writing (such as pictograms and kipus),
and organizing themselves into states. On the other of the poles, however,
were those less fortunate miserables who — according to the ethnographically
and geographically informed stadial classification of Humboldt - remained
savages (“savage hordes of hunters”) because they were less favored by their
natural environment, could not manage to advance beyond gathering and
hunting, could not develop writing, and stay(ed) far from organized life and
state formation.
I would say in sum that it was a kind of early evolutionary cultural ecology
that Humboldt proposed in his works on America, and it had quite an
impact on the emerging sciences of ethnography and geography in 19'¬
century Hungary. The ways in which Hungarian, non-Hungarian, and non¬
European peoples and cultures have been represented in our schoolbooks and
handbooks, and their images testify to a considerable influence of such a pre¬
Darwinian imagination. It seems to have set the background for our scientific
and political, linguistic and ethnic, accepted and contested, attributed and
experienced identities; it provided one of the choices for our early social
scientists to orient themselves. More research is needed in this field, however.
Mine will be continued.
4 About the pre-Darwinian concept of foyer see Claude Blanckaert: Geographie et anthro¬
pologie: une rencontre nécessaire (XVIII°-XIX® siécle), Ethnologie frangaise 4 (Octobre¬
Décembre 2004), 665.
Alexander von Humboldt: Introduction, in: Vues des Cordilléres et monumens des peuples
indigenes de l’Amérique, Paris, 1810-1813. I used the edition of 1824: Alexander von
Humboldt: Vues des Cordillères, Vol I. (1824) [1813].
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