Oldal 405 [405]
OCR
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 naturedependent 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 nonEuropean peoples and cultures have been represented in our schoolbooks and handbooks, and their images testify to a considerable influence of such a preDarwinian 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 anthropologie: une rencontre nécessaire (XVIII°-XIX® siécle), Ethnologie frangaise 4 (OctobreDécembre 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]. 25 + 404 +
