Medical Anthropology, Travel, and the Origins of Eurocentrism

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Medical Anthropology, Travel, and the Origins of Eurocentrism Invited paper presented at Université Paris, June 1999. Unpublished manuscript, excerpts drawn from Brian Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlighten- ment (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Cultural Relativism or Eurocentrism? An Historical Perspective But when we review attempts to forge a new Europe, a pan-European na- tionalism, or a unified community growing towards a globalization of Brian Dolan trade and political policy, some striking paradoxes are uncovered. Defin- ing what might constitute a ‘European identity’ has been plagued by prob- lems. Ironically, attempts to strengthen Europe through unification have been somewhat disturbed by the collapse of the Eastern states against Identity, History, and Travel whom the Western powers had initially desired to consolidate their strength. In post-revolutionary Europe, it becomes politically sensitive to All around Europe historic communities are re-emerging, fighting for feign a highly selective federated ‘super-Europe’ which sits snug against devolution, autonomy, and the right to be recognised as politically inde- those ‘outside’ the community, the marginal or peripheral peoples who pendent communities. Yet at the same time, a powerful sense of a shared have recently re-discovered their historical, regional identities. Never European identity has prevailed: in 1991 ‘Ode to Joy’ was played at Slo- defined easily through geographical reference, the Europe of today is be- venia’s proclamation of independence and the EC flag was waved by anti- coming synonymous with concepts of homogenisation, political confor- Soviet demonstrators in St Petersburg. One is quick to associate these mity, and economic standardisation. events with rapid political changes over the last decade. Yet the revolu- A number of questions can be asked concerning the present condi- tions of 1989/90 which overthrew communism in Eastern Europe— tion. In what way does the political rhetoric of economic unification lend knocking down the Berlin wall and, in December 1991, dismantling the itself to new conceptions of European identity? Is there such a concept that USSR—complicated a much longer historical process whereby a ‘Euro- can apply to groups less familiar to our political, economic, and historical pean’ identity was being conceptualised, debated, and redefined within narratives? Is sharing such an identity simply to involve trade and travel many different nations. The parting of the Iron Curtain and the fission of agreements? The quest for a unified, inclusive European identity is guided Eastern states redrew political frontiers, redefined cultural boundaries, and by arbitrary criteria that demarcate geographical boundaries, set ‘member- removed the Cold War dichotomy between West/East which helped define ship’ standards, and often ignore regional distinctiveness and national- ‘Western’ identity since the Second World War. Today it is more difficult historical consciousness. Struggling with concerns and problems over for Britons to sustain a separate identity, without a politically and ideo- thinking of what it means to be European, however, is not new to the logically different nation on the other side of the Continent. twentieth century. British perspectives on these issues have matured over It was also in December 1991 that member states of the European hundreds of years of travel and foreign encounters, and since the eight- Community agreed through the Maastricht Treaty on a course for future eenth century, we find similar questions to our own expressed in travel integration. With the idea of creating a new, ‘unified’ Europe emerged a narratives and contemporary public debate. schedule according to which an era of peaceful co-operation and closer While always arbitrary in one way or another, concerns over who political and economic union could be forged. The creation of a single count as European—geographically or historically—have an intellectual, European market was planned and the agency of the European Union was political, and artistic history. But the level of concern to define ‘the Euro- established. Barriers were broken down, free trade permitted amongst pean’ seems to be proportionate to the degree of political power emanating members of the Community, and legal restraints on travel—imposed after from central Europe. For whom did it matter who or what was considered the Second World War—were loosened. European? Questions of identity mattered most to those who never ques- tioned their own status as such; to those at the ‘margins’—those whose Americanised.’ Through the dialectics of travel and encounters with the identity was in question—these concerns or judgements were irrelevant, if other, both self and foreign identities have been, and are continuously, re- even acknowledged. Problems of European identity have developed as constructed. Eurocentric problems, contemplated in similar ways by scholars from, for Questions of how international identities have been historically example, Britain, France, or Germany. How, then, does exploring the treated are further relevant because they allow us to see how cultural rela- ways that Britons have characterised others around the Continent relate to tivity has grown to be part of the treatment of foreign, as well as one’s broader themes in European history? One significant link is that the his- own, society. Whether referring to present concerns over human rights tory of British perceptions of those who counted as European is also a his- and environmentalism or historical concerns over imperial expansion, the tory of the rationalisation of the classification of populations. Through the distribution of disease, or rights to ‘citizenship,’ different nations have development of the sciences of demography, anthropology, philology, and used cultural comparisons to distinguish the progressive society from the natural history during the Enlightenment, taxonomies of human kind barbaric, the civilised from the uncivilised, the modern from the ‘tradi- placed conceptions of ‘European-ness’ on new epistemological bases. tional’ society. These categories, like all classification systems, have al- From the eighteenth-century philologist Sir William Jones to the nine- ways had problematic boundaries. But through travel and the uses of teenth-century social anthropologist James Cowles Prichard, individuals Enlightenment ‘sciences of man’ to inspect foreign frontiers, strides were from Britain with a range of interests used the social-scientific route to the made to map the margins of the historical and scientific classification of classification of human kinds to seek new evidence for their accounts of populations—‘primitive’ or ‘enlightened,’ within a ‘European’ or ‘extra- European ancestry. European’ domain. In twentieth-century cultural studies, Western society has been Studies of how scholars at different times and in different nations criticised for its presumptuous naiveté towards other cultures, for its eth- have represented the Other—foreign, distant, or culturally unfamiliar— nocentricity, and for its cartographic biases and Eurocentric imagery. The have become a prominent feature of literary and historical scholarship ‘Other’ in Western civilisation has a long history of being pushed and since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said explored prodded, explored and colonised, misrepresented and appropriated. While how comparative linguistics, anthropology, travel literature, and museum such critiques have forged new levels of cultural awareness and cross- artefacts were used by western Orientalists to construct representations of cultural communication, we have also begun to see ways that cross- the exotic ‘Orient,’ the term being derived from travellers’ references to cultural encounters have been more dynamic and interactive than previ- the land lying eastward, ‘the place of the rising sun.’ The literary traveller ously portrayed, and cannot solely be represented as a monolithic, imperi- did not just move through foreign territories, but recognised a rich inter- alist conquest. Travellers in foreign territories witnessed different ways of play between the diverse, natural geography and the different levels of ci- life and lived in strange and motley conditions, and their travel diaries of- vility of the people who occupied these territories. ten revealed their anxieties. Not only recording the contours of the land- From Enlightenment thinkers such as the German jurist and histo- scape, travel writers ineluctably left traces of their psychological journeys. rian Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) to the Scottish conjectural historians, As a result of what can be considered the ‘foreign effect,’ encounters away the development of human civilisation was conceived as being an histori- from home—given enough time and through the active interests of enough cal process that followed lines of progressive refinement of social courte- people—not only transformed the foreign into the familiar, but provided sies and increasing cultivation of arts and sciences. In The Civilizing new perceptions of and reflections on life at home. As Ralph Waldo Em- Process, Norbert Elias described how different degrees of civility were erson wrote of his countrymen travellers, ‘We go to Europe to become marked by changes in the standard of behaviour in individuals of a society and how this reflected changes in a society’s psychical makeup. He two perspectives. First, a European view of the extra-European charted different ways that societies
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