Religion (1996) 26, 297–309
Nothing Human is Alien to Me
J Z. S
I
On 29 August 1771, Benjamin Franklin, then resident in England for more than seven
years, published in a London newspaper an article entitled, A Plan for Benefiting Distant
Unprovided Countries. He had just heard of the condition of the Maoris of New Zealand
who lacked any of the ‘conveniences of life’, presumably an intelligence gathered from
some report of Captain Cook’s first voyage (1766–71), the published account did not
appear until 1773. Franklin proposed a subscription to enable an expedition to be
mounted to bring domestic animals and manufactured goods to them, noting shrewdly
that this would be not only an act of charity but an investment in support of future trade,
a combination that would appeal to the commercial and philanthropic interests of his
British Whig supporters. The proposal failed; a donation of five pounds is the only
recorded response. Nevertheless, there is much of interest here. The proposal is
cosigned by Alexander Dalrymple, a former official of the East India Company, who
was named by Franklin to be the leader of the expedition. Dalrymple was the author of
an Account of the Discoveries made in the South Pacifick Ocean Previous to 1764 (1767) in
which he argued for the existence of a vast Southern Continent ‘to counterpoise the
land to the North and to maintain the equilibrium necessary for the Earth’s motion’. He
calculated that all of the hitherto unchartered areas of the Pacific from the equator to 50
degrees south must be a large land mass ‘of greater extent than the whole civilized part
of Asia, from Turkey eastward to the extremity of China’, capable of supporting a
population of 50 million. Dalrymple had expected to lead the Royal Society’s
expedition to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus in June, 1769, as an occasion to
search for this Continent, but Captain James Cook had been chosen in his stead. Now,
as Cook was preparing to undertake his Second Voyage (1772–75), in part with the
explicit purpose of seeking this Southern Continent, for which the First Voyage had
provided no evidence, the Franklin proposal has all the air of a consolation prize for
Dalrymple. Frustrated in even this slim hope, Dalrymple would have to content himself
with publishing the narratives of others in his influential two-volume anthology,
Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean
(1770–71), which continued to maintain the necessary existence of the Southern
Continent (‘The Great South Land’—the name ultimately given to Australia).
What caught my eye in the Proposal was not these complicated politics of exploration
nor the geometric cosmology, but rather a small detail in the course of Franklin’s
argument for charity. He wrote that these people, although:
distant . . . are in truth related to us and whose interests do in some degree concern
every one who can say homo sum &c . . . (Smyth, 5: 343).
Homo sum &c, ‘I am a human, etc.’ is a remarkably abbreviated tag even by eighteenth
century standards where, as Dr Johnson remarked, ‘classical quotation is the parole
0048–721X/96/040297 + 13 $25.00/0  1996 Academic Press Limited
(‘speech’) of literary men all over the world’, (Hill, Boswell’s Life, 4: 102), and yet,
Franklin could be certain that his audience would instantly be able to ‘get’ the allusion and
complete the line, even though, as becomes typical of its later use in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, there is no reference to its originator. In a process which the French
philosopher of science, Bruno Latour, terms ‘negative modality’ it has become a general
maxim, shorn of specificity as to both its author and its context—the greatest sort of
success any phrase can have. For the full quotation, ‘I am a human being; nothing human
is foreign [or, alien] to me’ (Homo sum: Humani nihil a me alienum puto) served as a motto
of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, the latter a more accurate descriptive term than the
more recent (and tendentious) characterization of Enlightenment ‘universalism’.
If we restore authorial context, the initial results for a cosmopolitan understanding
appear quite promising. The line is from an opening scene of a play by Terence, an
author of problematic status in Christian Medieval and Renaissance criticism, but a
secure figure in the Enlightenment canon, as David Hume observes: ‘Aristotle, and
Plato, and Epicurus . . . may successively yield to each other: but Terence and Virgil
maintain a universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men’ (‘Taste’). This is, in
part, because Terence is a complex, multicultural figure: by origin a Carthaginian, ‘of
dark complexion’, whose native language was probably Punic, he was taken to Rome
as a slave where he became, along with Plautus, one of the two pre-eminent writers of
comedy in the Latin language, works consisting of adaptations of the Greek comedies
of Menander—a borrowing which fitted well with phil-Hellenic preoccupations of the
so-called Scipionic circle to which Terence belonged.
If, however, we consult the play, a quite different contextual understanding emerges.
The opening scene of The Self-Tormentor (Heautontimorumenos), composed c. 163..,
consists of a dialogue between a wealthy landowner and his neighbor, Chremes. The
neighbor inquires as to why the landowner is working like a slave in the fields. The
landowner retorts by asking how his neighbor has sufficient time to meddle in the affairs
of others. Chremes’s response is our line (77) which, in context, needs to be translated
not as a general imperative, but as a defense of gossip or mixing in others’ business.
Something like:
‘I am human and nothing human is foreign to my interests’ (P. Bovie et al.)
or better, with respect to both context and syntax:
‘I am a normal human; nobody’s business is no concern of mine’. (F. O. Copley)
If the line in Terence is an adaptation of one from Menander, by no means an
uncontroversial proposal in Terentian scholarship (see the debate between F. Dornseiff
and M. Pohlenz in Hermes, 78, 1943), then Terence has, in fact, stripped it of both its
generality and moral implications, as Menander fragment 475 reads: ‘No one is foreign
to me if he is upright’ (Korte, Menander Reliquiae).
As the Terentian line was deployed in later writers, it was taken to be a moral
imperative of concern for others, a sort of Roman version of the ‘Golden Rule’, so
much so that Augustine reports that the line would be enthusiastically applauded by
theatre audiences whenever the play was performed (Riley, 154). This understanding
emerged first in classical Roman Stoic and Stoic-influenced writers, was continued in
later European Humanist traditions, and remains in place for Enlightenment figures such
as Benjamin Franklin. Thus Cicero (c. 45..) argues:
298 J. Z. Smith
it is not easy to be concerned with other peoples problems, yet in Terence’s play, as
we know, Chremes thinks that ‘nothing that concerns any human is foreign to him’
(De Officiis I.9 [30]).
While Seneca, a century later, cites the line when urging that ones ‘hands be ready for
all that need help’ (Epistle 95.53).
At a very different juncture of European history, Giambattista Vico, the great Italian
philosopher of culture history, and professor of rhetoric, employs the line as part of a
moral argument that had as its ultimate aim a defense of the Humanist tradition against
the rise of Cartesian scientific ideals. In his sixth Inaugural Address, delivered to the
University of Naples at the beginning of the 1707 academic year, Vico insists that one
should never be:
regretful for having spoken without propriety or decorum. [Such a one] is without
doubt a true human whom the Terentian character describes neatly: ‘I am human and
nothing human is foreign to me’. Chremes, not for hope of gain, not out of necessity,
not out of indebtedness, but simply in a neighborly spirit asks . . . [the landowner] who
plays the part of a fool, tormenting and punishing himself, the reasons why he does this
. . . (Pinton-Shippee, 129–30).
The second tradition of citation is specifically associated with the French Enlightenment
and applies the maxim to disciplinary ideals. Its most influential use was in that
famous, anonymous essay, c. 1730, The Philosopher, now convincingly attributed to the
grammarian Dumarsais, and reedited and published by Diderot, twice by Voltaire, as
well as by Helvetius and Naigeon, giving rise to a complex textual tradition well studied
by Herbert Dieckmann in 1948. Here the quotation serves to identify the philosophe as
an individual of practice as well as theory, much as in the subtitle of Hume’s essay, ‘The
Stoic: or the Man of Action and Virtue’. The philosopher, Dumarsais argues in a passage
that remains constant through all the versions:
does not think that he lives in exile in this world . . . He is an honest man who wishes
to please others and render himself useful . . . He knows how to divide his time
between solitude and social intercourse [and is] full of humanity. He is like the
Chremes of Terence who feels that he is human and that humanity itself impels him
to take an interest in the good or bad fortune of his neighbors. Homo sum: a me nihil
alienum puto.
The narrower disciplinary use is with respect to the historian and occurs in Voltaire’s
New Reflections on History (1744). Here the issue is a criticism of historians for focusing
on the ‘grand’ events without including the small details of ordinary life, of economic
or social history.
None of these historians has taken for his motto Homo sum: a me nihil alienum puto. Yet
it seems to me that one must skillfully incorporate this useful kind of knowledge into
the tissue of events. (Oeuvres historiques 46–48).
It is not until, in the same year, Henry Home, Lord Kames, printed the Latin line as
the epigraph of his two-volume Sketches of the History of Man (1774) that the motto
became emblematic of the disciplinary ideal of the emerging science of anthropology.
Nothing Human is Alien to Me 299
The irony of its occurrence in Kames will have to wait until the conclusion of this
presentation to be appreciated.
From one perspective, tracing moments in the reception-history of the Terentian tag
may seem like some game of trivial pursuit. Why is the sentence, and the sentiment it
encodes, worthy of note in the first place? The various understandings we have
reviewed seem to range from truism to tautology. This becomes apparent if we subject
them to paraphrase.
1. It’s human nature to gossip.
2. One ought to respond to fellow human beings.
3. One ought to be interested in the least detail concerning fellow human beings.
4. No one that is human is not human.
5. No one that is human is not like me.
Beyond the original context in Terence (paraphrase 1), each sentence only becomes
problematic and, therefore, interesting, if the terms ‘human’ and ‘fellow human’ are
themselves problematic; if other human beings are not merely different, but in some
fundamental way ‘alien’ though nonetheless ‘human’.
It will be the burden of the remainder of this presentation to attempt to isolate the
occasion at which this sense of the problematic first emerged and to isolate its first strong
theoretical formulation. It is at this moment that the human sciences become
intellectually urgent. The occasion is the discovery of the Americas; the theoretical
formulation is that of race; it is the early theory of the races as separate species of the
genus Homo that gives rise to the agendum of the emerging human sciences. To bring
us to this point we must take the ‘long way round’, a detour that is necessarily historical,
an element in the complex histories of the western imaginations of difference.
II
It is a commonplace, and, therefore, both somewhat true and somewhat misleading, to
speak of western intellectual history as an interrelationship between Athens and
Jerusalem. Within the sphere of anthropological thought, at least through the sixteenth
century, it is undoubtedly true. The biblical account of human origins and subsequent
relations, especially the genealogical map of Genesis 10, was overlaid upon the rich
Greek ethnographic tradition, especially as categorized and transmitted by classical and
Christian encyclopaedists. It was a system that exhibited remarkable flexibility, ever
accommodating to new elements. For example, as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries new segments, that is to say, new grandchildren, were added to both Noachic
genealogies and migrations in order to explain the population of all of known Europe,
as well as Africa and Asia.
It was a system that, by its very elasticity, prevented surprise whenever similarities or
differences were encountered in the peoples mapped upon it. For the genealogies that
underlay the system, as well as the biblical narration of anthropogony, guaranteed the
essential unity of humankind. All were children of Adam and Eve, even though their
lineages must be traced through Noah’s three sons: Shem, Japhet and Ham. Differences
were, therefore, accidental. Drawing upon Greek and Roman theories, these were
explained by the effects of climate, especially for somatic characteristics, and of
migration/diffusion for cultural divergencies. Similarities and differences were perceived
as having ‘documentary properties’ (to use M. T. Hodgen’s useful formulation). They
300 J. Z. Smith
allowed the mapping of spatial as well as temporal relationships. Adopting the archaic
apologetic language of the relations with Christianity to classical culture, a notion of
anthropologically significant survivals was developed in which the scholar sought ‘seeds’,
‘sparks’, ‘traces’, ‘footprints’, ‘remains’ or ‘shadows’ of the original, essential unity of
humankind amidst its palpable diversity, and through which one could discern
placement and reconstruct historical relations.
Take, for example, the ‘Mission to the Mongols’ (or Tartars) of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, the occasion for the first, new western ethnography since Roman
times. It would be impossible to overemphasize the difficulties and tensions which set
the context for the ‘Mission’. The great Mongolian ‘horde’ under Batu, nephew of the
Khan, had divided into two fronts. Batu conquered Hungary even as his chief general
penetrated into Poland and delivered a stunning defeat to the forces of Duke Henry II
of Silesia (9 April 1241). Pope Gregory IX proclaimed a crusade against these invaders,
but the antagonism between the papacy and Frederick II precluded any effective
military action. Contemporary propangandists, such as Matthew of Paris, fulminated
against this ‘detestable nation of Satan . . . who poured forth like devils from the
Tartarus, so they are rightly called Tartari or Tartarians . . . They are inhuman and
beastly, rather like monsters than humans’, while other pseudo-Sibylline oracles were
updated to place the Mongols/Tartars within the framework of a Christian apocalyptic
scenario that associated them with the Scythians (one of the borderlines of humanity on
the old Herodotean ethnographic map) and, through them, with the release of the
feared tribes of Gog and Magog, walled in by Alexander the Great in the Jewish and
Christian versions of the Alexander Romance. In support of this, a new version of the
pseudepigraphical Letter of Alexander to Aristotle Concerning the Wonders of India was
produced, proclaiming the presences of apocalyptic ‘trials’ and associating them with the
Mongols. Other initial reports of the Mongol incursion displayed similar biblical
placements: the first notice (J. de Vitry, 1221) identified Ghengis Khan with King
David; while the Hungarian Dominican, Julian, as well as the Alexander–Aristotle Letter,
declared the Mongols to be ‘sons of Ishmael’. An interpolation into a set of fourteenth
French manuscripts of Mandeville’s Travels confusing Khan and (C)ham, connected the
Mongols to the Noachic Hamitic lineage. The Mongols were hitherto unknown to the
west, but their presence constituted no surprise, they could be classified as another
‘remnant’ of biblical ethnography or, less commonly, as monsters. Even if monstrous,
they had a place on the biblical map: as descendants of Cain, or of the Fallen Angels, or,
generalizing the theory accounting for individual monstrous births, they could be
understood as people deformed by sin, usually of a sexual nature. The third option of
Augustine’s three, with respect to Greco-Roman reports of monstrous peoples, was
most frequently taken: either the reports were untrue; or, if true, such peoples were not
human; or, ‘if they are human, they are descended from Adam’.
The invasion was halted, neither by military action nor by prodigy, but by the death,
in December 1241, of the Great Khan, Ogodai. Pope Gregory died in the same year,
and was succeeded by Innocent IV. While relentless in his wars against excommunication
Frederick, Innocent, after proclaiming an ineffectual crusade, chose the course of
diplomacy in dealing with the Mongols.
Although there are indications of a prior effort, in March 1245, Innocent commissioned
the Franciscan friar, John of Pian del Carpini, as an emissary to the court of the
Khan, charged with persuading the Mongols to halt their invasions ‘for fear of divine
wrath’, and, if possible, with converting them to Christianity. John set forth on his
northward journey from Lyons on 16 April 1245, accompanied first by a Bohemian
Nothing Human is Alien to Me 301
monk, Stephen, and then by the Polish Friar Benedict, whose narrative of their travels
also survives. In February 1246, they reached the camp of Batu on the Volga. From
22 July through 13 November, they were with Kuyuk Khan near Kharakorum,
returning to Italy in the Autumn of 1247.
John’s ethnography, the Ystoria Mongalorum, exists in several recensions, an indication
of its wide readership, and was further disseminated through its inclusion, in epitomized
form, in medieval encyclopaedias. It is a remarkable work, systematically taking up the
classical ethnographic topoi (persistent from Herodotus to Poseidonius): geography,
appearance, costume, housing, marriage, religious beliefs and rituals, and miscellaneous
customs (Ystoria, chapters 1–4). The fifth through seventh chapters, perhaps, reveal the
true purpose of the journey; they are almost entirely preoccupied with military
espionage, introduced by an account of Mongolian history. The final chapter (8) is
John’s itinerary.
The most striking feature of John’s report, thoroughly predictable, however, from our
previous discussion, is its utter lack of surprise. While we are told at the outset that ‘in
appearance the Tartars are quite different from all other men’, in the very same sentence
John goes on to observe that, on the tops of their heads, ‘they have a tonsure like [our]
clerics’ (Ystoria, 2). In the fourth chapter, John even-handedly presents a catalogue of the
Mongols’ virtues and vices, nine of the former, eight of the latter, each of a perfectly
ordinary nature. With respect to religion, while, from one perspective, their traditions
are to be understood as ‘idolatory’ (3), in the full biblical anthropological model, the
result of degeneration, from another perspective, John reports, ‘they believe in one God
and they believe that he is the maker of all things visible’ (ibid.), in the full model, the
presence of a ‘trace’ which guarantees their Adamic/Noachic pedigree.
While the literature of the ‘Tartar Relations’ multiplied during the thirteenth century,
the lengthiest, and, from our perspective, the most interesting is that of the Franciscan,
William of Rubruck, reporting on a journey undertaken in 1253–55, eight years after
John. His report is in a different format, an itinerary rather than an ethnography, and his
function was more that of a missionary than that of an envoy. Although his narrative was
not widely circulated until the sixteenth century, when it was published by Richard
Hakluyt, William did meet with Marco Polo upon his return, and William‘s Itinerarium
ad partes orientales served as the basis for Roger Bacon’s important treatment of the
Mongols in the Opus Maius.
As with John’s Ystoria, William’s Itinerarium exhibits a mixture of motifs of strangeness
relativized by the traveller’s recognition of analogies. He twice declares that, upon
entering the lands of the Mongols, ‘it seemed to me as if I were stepping into some other
world’ (Itinerarium, 1 and 9). Nevertheless, their horsemeat sausages are ‘better than’ ours
(6); their drink, brewed from rice, millet, wheat and honey is ‘clear like [our] wine’ (2).
Perhaps because of his missionary purpose, William spends far more time on their
religious practices. Indeed, his is a far more complex picture of the Mongols’ religion,
recognizing (often with surprising accuracy) native components as well as the presence
among them of Muslims, Buddhists, Nestorians and other forms of Eastern Christians.
Even here, the parallels, that is to say, the ‘traces’, persist: the Buddhist priests ‘shave
their heads all over’ and ‘observe chastity’ as do ours; they wear ‘mitres’; they carry
beads on which they recite prayers ‘just as we carry our rosaries’ (25). The Mongols use
a chest ‘in place of an altar’ which sometimes has on it ‘a statue with wings like St.
Michael and others which look like statues of bishops holding their fingers as if in
blessing’ (24). ‘They also have large bells like us’ (24). The Uigur priests ‘have a cloak
on their left shoulders . . . as the [Christian] deacon wears a chasuble in Lent’ (25).
302 J. Z. Smith
Where there is palpable surprise in William’s account is not with respect to the
Buddhists or Mongols, with whom he recounts civil religious discussions, but rather
with the Nestorians and other sorts of Eastern Christians. They do not have a cross with
the figure of Jesus upon it, this must be ‘owing to a doctrinal error’ (24) and gives the
impression that they are ‘ashamed’ of the crucifixion (15). They refuse to drink
fermented beverages, ‘they do not consider themselves Christians after they have drunk
it’, (10, 11), by contrast, William is happy to imbibe. They wash their genitals, like the
Muslims, before entering church. They eat meat on Fridays. Again, like the Muslims,
they fast on Saturdays. Their priests are ordained while still infants, and are married when
they come of age (26). This surprise reminds us of an important feature of the discourse
of alterity, that similarity can pose as great a set of intellectual problems as difference.
That, at times, it is the differences of those who claim to be like us or to be us—the
‘near’, that prompts a more distancing language than those perceived as ‘far’ for whom
we are delighted to decipher hidden relationships. The Mongols were the different who,
nevertheless, could be constructed as the same. The Nestorians presented themselves as
the same, but turned out to be, in important respects, significantly different.
The ‘Tartar Relations’, taken as a whole, demonstrate the power of the amalgamation
of the Greco-Roman ethnographic tradition and the biblical. Even in times of extreme
distress and conflict, the flexibility of the system proved able to assimilate new elements
while holding the map intact. Differences remained in the realm of accident; similarities
in that of essence.
I know of no serious challenge to this interpretative system until the post-Columbian
debates over the nature of the Americas. It is here, for the first time, that surprise, that a
strong language of alterity emerges. America is an other world, a new world. I shall not
take time here to review the slow and difficult history of this perception, but pause only
to note that, as such, the American continent was a world wholly unknown to either the
Greco-Roman or the biblical authors. In that sense, both sets of writings were
irrevocably impeached. True, the Noachic model was re-examined and altered, including
the suggestion, most likely based on an observation of the effects of interweaving the
‘J’ and ‘P’ flood narratives which, among other doublets, results in Noah, his family and
the animals entering the Ark twice (Gen 7.7–9 [J]/Gen 7.13–15 [P]), that there were
two Arks, one that repopulated the familiar three-lobed world island of Africa, Europe
and Asia; a second that sailed, with a cargo of different species, to the new world.
Other authorities sought to expand the migratory model. In Gregorio Garcia’s
enormous encyclopaedic work, The Origin of the Indians of the New World and the West
Indies (1st edition, 1607), theories that the Americas were populated by: Jews,
Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Africans, Ethiopians, French,
Cambrians, Finns, Frisians or Scythians are reviewed. As an appendix to this naval,
Noachic, transatlantic catalogue, another possibility is raised, returning to the original
Columbian misidentification of the Native Americans as ‘Indians’, but, in fact, now, a
correct understanding: the Americas were populated by an overland migration of
Chinese or, more likely, of Tartars. Once this theory was isolated and disseminated,
most famously by Edward Brerewood’s, Enquiries touching the diversity of Languages, and
Religions through the chiefe parts of the World (1614) and by John Ogilby’s America, Being
the Latest, and most Accurate Description of the New World (1671), the old genealogical
enterprise was resumed with new debates as to the Noachic genealogy of the Tartars,
with descent from Japhet now being the most frequently argued connection.
Despite such intellectual efforts, the haunting and shattering conclusion could not be
long avoided; the elasticity of the old system proved insufficiently flexible. The
Nothing Human is Alien to Me 303
Americas were a novelty that resisted absorption. The Americans lack ‘traces’, they were
genealogically untraceable. The ‘new world’ was not merely ‘new’ merely different; it
was ‘other’ per essentiam—a radical conclusion first (and more readily) made with respect
to its flora and fauna which appeared to entail less consequence for the biblical view.
Thus Acosta (c. 1580), in a passage much discussed in seventeenth century works on the
implications of America for biblicist anthropology:
What I say of the guanacos and pacos I will say of a thousand varieties of birds and fowls
[in the Americas] that have never been known [previously] by either name or
appearance, nor is there any memory of them in the Latins or Greeks, nor in any
nations of our [European] world over here . . . It is well to ask whether these animals
differ in kind and essence from all others, or if this difference be accidental . . . But, to
speak bluntly, any one who in this way would focus only on the accidental differences,
seeking thereby to explain [away] the propagation of the animals of the Indies and to
reduce them [to variants] of the European will be undertaking a task that he will not
be able to fulfill. For, if we are to judge the species of animals [in the Americas] by their
[essential] properties, they are so different that to seek to reduce them to species known
in Europe will mean having to call an egg a chestnut.
This radical botanical and zoological conclusion foreshadowed the even more
revolutionary anthropological revision. The novelty of the Americas introduced
surprise.
III
It is in the context of this disarray with respect to the centuries old amalgam that a
previously refused resource within the theories associated with Greco-Roman ethnography
was recovered and resituated at the center of the anthropological enterprise.
The biblical narrative, and, therefore, western ethnologic theory was, up to this point,
relentlessly monogenetic. There was a single ancestral pair from which all humankind
descended; there was a single locus, most usually thought of as somewhere in the
Armenian mountains, from which all the diversities of humankind ultimately diffused.
But, such an account could not be sustained if, as the novelty of the Americas suggested,
difference was an affair of essence rather than accident.
Deep within the Greco-Roman theories of migration and diffusion, mixture and
borrowing as the explanation for cultural similarities and differences was a second,
oppositional structure which emphasized immobility and originality: that of autochthony,
the spontaneous generation of a people from their native earth. While most frequently
an Athenian political topos (autochthony equals autonomy), the notion, more widely
applied, as in emergence mythologies, suggested not only that some peoples were
sprung from the very soil they inhabit, but implied, as well, a plurality of places of
origination. Rejected by the monogenetic presuppositions of the biblically oriented
Christian anthropology, autochthony was a theory of polygenesis.
Its explanatory power can be seen in the very vehemence with which autochthony is
criticized in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature defending the biblical model.
For example, Jean Bodin, in his influential Method for the Easy Comprehension of History
(1565), devotes the final, ninth book, to ridiculing the ‘arrogant pretensions’ of those
peoples who call themselves ‘sprung from the parent land, that is autochthonous and
earthborn’:
304 J. Z. Smith
What more stupid, shall I say, or more impious can be imagined than this? The
ancients, of course, in a certain sense deserve indulgence, but modern people [who
propose autochthony as an explanation] are guilty either of great error or sin, both
because they openly contradict statements made by Moses about primitive times in
Holy Scriptures . . . and because they [thus] separate those races altogether from
association and friendship with others by assuming for them no source other than the
ancestral soil. By divine will many things led Moses to write about origins, and I think
especially this reason, that all whom his story might reach should understand clearly
that they are of the same blood and allied by the same bond of race [i.e. common
descent]. I know of no conviction more powerful than that of consanguinity for
developing and maintaining the good will and friendship of humankind . . . The word
indigenous [or autochthonous] must be abandoned and the origins of all peoples must
be sought in the Chaldaeans since, in their country, or certainly near to it, came to rest
that ship [of Noah] which served as nursery of the human race. From there men
scattered hither and thither and propagated their kind in the way in which Moses and
the teachers of the Jews have most truthfully and accurately described.
While Sir Thomas Browne, the English physician, antiquarian and religious writer,
devoted a section to autochthony in his book popularly known as Browne’s Vulgar Errors
(1646) reviewing the claims, in relation to Genesis 2.7, and concluding: ‘There was,
therefore, never any autochthon, or man emerging from the earth, except for Adam’
[Pseudodoxia Epidemica: 274].
Even at the present time, when we have returned to a Darwinian rather than a biblical
notion of monogenesis (mythically represented in the figure of ‘Lucy’), the concept
of autochthony persists in some of our common ethnic designations: occasionally, as
in the British philosopher, Ian Hacking, in the London Review of Books, 7 September
1995, ‘autochthonous societies’ will be employed as a euphemism for ‘primitives’;
more commonly, aborigine (classically understood as the Latin equivalent of the
Greek autochthony), a people who has been in this or that place from their beginning;
indigenous, creole and native, a people first born (or created) in the place they now
inhabit—terminology which, ironically, in colonial discourse, was shifted from expressing
their firstness to ours, becoming a designation of the inhabitants found in a place
when we first ‘discovered’ it.
While some scholars find anticipations of polygenetic theory in the Renaissance
Hermetists, especially Paracelsus and Bruno, the scattered references are far from clear.
By the seventeenth century, these hints will be fully developed. One of the earliest,
unambiguous, polygenetic accounts of the Americas is by an anonymous author, L.P.,
Master of Arts, in Two Essays, Sent in a Letter from Oxford to a Nobleman in London (1695).
The West Indies and the vast regions lately discovered towards the South abound with
such a variety of inhabitants and new animals not known or even seen in Asia, Africa
or Europe that the origin of them doth not appear so clear . . . especially seeing that
there are no records or monuments of their migrations out of Asia or any other known
parts of the world either before or after the Flood; and their differences from all the rest
of the Globe, in manners, languages, habits, religions, diets, arts and customs as well as
in their quadrupeds, birds, serpents and insects, render their derivation very obscure
and their origin uncertain, especially in the common [biblical] way and according to
the vulgar opinion of planting all the earth from one little spot. [In their] great zeal to
maintain a Jewish tradition . . . every corner is searched to find out a word, a rite, or
a custom in order to derive from thence many millions of different peoples . . . [But]
all nations agree in some words and some customs, therefore a resemblance in a few of
them is no proof . . . I can see no way at present to solve this new face of nature by
old arguments fetched from Eastern rubbish or rabbinical weeds . . . Let them all [i.e.
the new world humans, flora and fauna] be aborigines.
Nothing Human is Alien to Me 305
Although L.P.’s essay was not widely circulated, it contains, in nuce, the logical
paradigm of the polygenetic argument: (1) given the utter novelty of the Americas, (2)
the biblical account must be rejected (here the rejection contains an anti-Semitic
element), (3) as must be the quest for ‘traces’. (4) The solution is that the life forms of
the Americas are autochthonous. ‘Let them all be aborigines’.
The logic will be fully elaborated in one of the most controversial and widely known
works of the seventeenth century, Isaac la Peyre`re’s books, collectively known as
Preadamites (1655, English translation, Men Before Adam, 1656).
In a sense, Peyre`re represents that longstanding fear of Catholicism, the lay Bible
reader. He tells us that he has spent twenty years pondering Romans 5.12–14, the classic
Augustinian/Reformation prooftext for ‘original sin’ (a monogenetic notion, itself based
on a Latin misreading of Paul’s Greek text). On the basis of the phrases, ‘sin was not
imputed when the Law was not’, and ‘even over those whose sin was not like the
transgression of Adam’, he concluded that ‘sin was in the world before Adam’, although
it ‘was not imputed until Adam’. Therefore, there were many sorts of humans before
Adam. Adam was not the ancestor of humankind.
With this established, he turns to an exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis.
Genesis 1.26–27 shows that God created, by the power of the word, vast numbers of
humans (that is to say, gentiles) just as the deity created all of the different sorts of
animals and plants. Genesis 2 records the special, subsequent creation of Adam, the first
Jew, out of clay. The Cain and Abel story indicates the presence of other peoples. If the
brothers were farmers and shepherds, who made the knife that killed Abel? Where did
Cain’s wife come from? Who are the ‘others’ that would seek to kill him? Who
inhabited the cities that ‘covered’ the world?
More generally, he asserts, the Jewish–Biblical chronology is strictly limited. It
comprises no more than some 5000 years. But he knows of older histories: the
Chaldaeans record 470 000 years of history, the Mexicans and Peruvians write of
thousands of suns, Chinese history extends back 880 000 years. Drawing upon the
biblical criticism of his friend, Richard Simon, Peyre`re next argues that Moses wrote an
epitome of earlier records at a comparatively late date. In Genesis 1–11, he compressed
a series of long works into several ‘little chapters’, being far more interested in his own
time than in prehistory. Thus Moses was being no more than hyperbolic when he
declares Adam to be the first human; the Flood was a limited phenomenon, confined to
parts of Palestine, which was easily repopulated by Noah’s three sons. Hence, all parallels
between the biblical account and that of other cultures are merely superficial.
The polygenetic accounts of Peyre`re and L.P. in principle freed anthropology from its
biblical framework. The Bible was reduced to a parochial document, the history of the
Jews of a relatively early period, no longer to be understood as the universal history of
humankind. Human diversity now became an urgent intellectual problem. While these
conclusions would be debated throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
they contributed to the formation of the first, new, western theory for explaining
human similarities and differences: the theory of race, the possibility that the genus homo
might be divided into separate species of different lineages, a possibility first realized by
Francois Bernier in an article in the Journal des Savants, 24 April 1684. It was neither
Orientals nor Blacks, who had long been mapped on the old Greco-Roman/Biblical
taxonomy, that gave rise to the intellectual problematics of race, rather it was the
unanticipated presence of Native Americans, a surprise of profound implication,
rendered even more certain once it was clear, post-Magellan, that America was not part
of Asia.
306 J. Z. Smith
IV
To expand fully on the development of polygenetic theories of race and their long
history of contestation with monogenetic ones would require at least another lecture
recalling the judgement of George Stocking, Jr.: ‘it seems fair to say that polygenism—
or more broadly, the problem of race, was the central concern of pre-Darwinian
anthropology’. Adding only that it by no means disappeared post-Darwin, having major
supporters and schools of thought, at times overriding Darwinian theory in France,
Germany and the United States. Such a lecture, among other matters, would have to
trace the development of two complex terms and ideas: the new coinage ‘race’ (a word
of uncertain derivation) and an old Latin philosophical term, ‘species’, much reinterpreted
in relation to race in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. It is a history
that initially combined a breeder’s sense of significant minimal intraspecific diversity
with later European aristocratic ideologies concerning the purity of bloodlines. The
word ‘race’ was first employed in sixteenth century Italian and Spanish animal
husbandry to refer to relatively small differences within the same sort of domestic
animal—that is to say, what Linnaean taxonomy would come to call ‘varieties’,
extended to humans, in the same Romance languages, in the sense of ‘caste’ or ‘class’ as
in a ‘race of beggars’, or ‘bishops’. By the eighteenth century, English lexica define ‘race’
solely in terms of familial descent, as in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
(Edinburgh, 1771): ‘Race, in genealogy, a lineage or extraction continued from father
to son’ [III.525]. However, its earliest known human genealogical occurrence is in a
Spanish document from 1611, in the context of a concern for purity referring to the
‘race’ of converted Jews. Our present view of race as a ‘variety’(not a ‘species’) returns
to a language characteristic of husbandry—with ‘species’ defined, since Buffon in 1749,
primarily (and poorly) in terms of the capacity to interbreed fruitfully.
I should like to glimpse these new theories through the eyes of an eighteenth century
savant, who stands midway between the polygenesis of La Peyre`re and L.P. and the
emergent science of races, Henry Homes, Lord Kames, whose Sketches of the History of
Man, first published in 1774, ran through three editions during his lifetime, as well as
two posthumous ones. As I have already noted, his book is the first work I know of
to link the Terentian tag, ‘nothing human is alien to me’, which serves as its epigraph,
to the disciplinary ideal of anthropology.
Kames was one of that remarkable group of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers who
stand at the beginning of important theories in the Social Sciences (as well as, ironically,
providing most of the philosophical tools for later Christian Fundamentalisms). Kames
was a friend or patron of figures as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, David Hume
and Adam Smith, a writer on legal history, aesthetics and the utility of manure, he
turned his attention to anthropology at a time when the new definition of species as the
capacity for sexual interbreeding was first proposed by Buffon, when the biological
classification of humans and anthropoids was being worked out by Linnaeus, and when,
in Edinburgh, there was serious debate as to whether the native Americans ‘ought not
to be accounted a race of orang-outangs’ [James Dunbar, Essays on the History of Man in
Rude and Cultivated Ages London (1780): 162]—that is to say as members of a second
human species, Homo nocturnis with two varieties, according to Linnaeus’s tenth edition
(1758), in contradistinction to Homo sapiens with six varieties.
Kames begins his work by a slashing and sarcastic attack on both Linnaean taxonomy
and Buffon’s definition of ‘species’. The former he declares to be arbitrary (in technical
Nothing Human is Alien to Me 307
language, an artificial rather than a natural classification), for example, it is capricious to
classify a man with a bat as a mammal because they possess nipples while denying that
a whale is like a fish though both possess fins. It’s all a matter of what characteristics one
chooses as significant. The latter, the definition of ‘species’, which is more pressing to
his argument, is simply foolish. Imagine being uncertain as to whether a rabbit is a
hedghog until, by chance, we can determine whether they can have successful sexual
intercourse and procreation. By analogy, the same for human beings. Just as there are
different species of plants and animals in different climates and environments, so too
human beings. There are different species of human beings, suited for their different
locales, by divine design and (multiple) creation. This is especially clear in the case of
native Americans:
America has not been peopled from any part of the old world. The external appearance
of the inhabitants, makes this conjecture a certainty, as they are widely different in
appearance from any other known people (3:141).
If we can rely on the conjectures of an eminent writer [Buffon], America emerged
from the sea later than any other part of the known world: and supposing the human
race to have been planted in America by the hand of God later than the days of Moses,
Adam and Eve might have been the first parents of mankind, i.e. of all who at that
time existed, without being the first parents of the Americans (3:146–48, esp. 146,
cf. 1:75–77).
In making his argument, Kames goes on to note that the logic of separate human
species would lead to the view that God created successive pairs of humans, differing
each from the other, and placed each in the proper locality where they would propagate
and develop languages and cultures appropriate to their surroundings. While this is
clearly Kames’s view, he consciously makes a move towards biblical orthodoxy. Such a
logic is contrary to the Mosaic record that God created only one pair, and they were by
no means at a savage level of civilization. Therefore there must have been degeneracy
as a result of a global catastrophe. The dispersion after Babel is ‘the only known fact that
can reconcile sacred and profane history’ (1:60–61). It takes a very small step to link
Kames’s Babel-theory with that non-biblical thesis first advanced by the German
philosopher, Immanuel Kant, in his three problematically monogenetic essays on race
(1775, 1777, 1785) that climate was an insufficient explanation for racial difference
(yielding only, as we might now say, ‘acquired characteristics). Rather—expanding the
scale of biblical time—there were global, irreversible natural catastrophes which altered
the primordial human stock into diverse human types which have since remained
immutable. To quote a French monogenetic version of this argument from 1801, which
is, in fact, part of a new creation myth dependent on new geological models:
The great varieties within the human species are not a recent product of natural causes
to whose influence man is submitted, like the secondary variations based on nuances of
skin and nature of hair. When the human species was divided into basic groups, and
the different races began to exist, the influence of climate was greater than it is today.
They were formed, these races, in an era very close to the last of the horrible
catastrophes which convulsed the earth’s surface (B. Lace´pe`de, Discours 1801:23–24).
The debates within the human sciences between monogenesis and polygenesis
continued through the mid-twentieth century, often signaled by the difference between
two terms (although deployed inconsistently in different circles and languages),
‘anthropology’, the ‘science of [singular and uniform] man‘ and ‘ethnology’, a term
308 J. Z. Smith
created by the modified polygenist William Frederick Edwards in the 1830s to designate
‘the science of [plural and distinct] races’. Nor, as already noted, did Darwin make a
decisive difference. Thus Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently discovered the
theory of the origin of species through natural selection, could write in one of the
earliest statements (1864) on the implications of Darwin for cultural evolution, that,
although humankind had once been a single ‘homogeneous race’, natural selection,
operating on this primal human stock, ‘scarcely raised above the brute’, produced the
physical differences which distinguished the present races, differences which were so
deeply ingrained that one might ‘fairly assert that there were many originally distinct
races of men’ (JAS, London, 1864: clxiv–clxx). Within the sphere of cultural (as
different from physical) anthropology, the monogenist/polygenist debate was sublimated
into the dominant argument of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century,
diffusion (monogenesis) versus independent invention (polygenesis).
Simply put, monogenesis celebrated similarity; polygenesis, diversity–the latter
leading, for the first time, to the development of a complex vocabulary for describing
and explaining difference, limited only by the unfortunate eighteenth century decision
to correlate biological and cultural characteristics. From the point of view of difference,
with respect to biology, the intellectual choice was whether to understand the human
races as ‘varieties’ (i.e. as accidents) or as ‘species’ (i.e. essences) as well as the question
as to whether the latter be seen as ‘real’ or ‘nominal’, ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’. If difference
was understood to be accidental, a monogenetic account could be fashioned where
difference was accounted for by natural causes (as would ultimately come to full
expression in the Darwinian theory). If understood as essential, then a polygenetic
account which held the races to be irreducible was required. From the point of view of
similarity, with respect to culture, a monogenetic account would need to refurbish the
old language of diffusion and derivation; a polygenetic account would have to
emphasize parallel, independent development. From these choices, combined with
questions of hierarchy, a necessary component in any taxonomic enterprise, one could
generate the central anthropological debates which dominated eighteenth and nineteenth
century anthropological discourse, and still, to a large degree, rule popular
perceptions, processes and notions of cultural comparison.
The novelty of the Americas gave the West its first compelling language of difference
as more than an accidental, dependent variable. We have yet to set forth a set of equally
compelling cultural and comparative theories fully adequate to this language. This
remains, today, the unfulfilled challenge to the human sciences.
This paper was presented as the Holstein Family Community Lecture 1996 at the
University of California, Riverside. The oral style has been retained and a minimum of
references added.
JONATHAN Z. SMITH is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of
the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His most recent published work is
Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity
(1990) and he served as general editor of the HaperCollins Dictionary of Religion (1995).
University of Chicago, The College, 1116 East 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637, U.S.A.
Nothing Human is Alien to Me 309