Civilizations

Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780743216500
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In Civilizations, Felipe Fernández-Armesto once again proves himself a brilliantly original historian, capable of large-minded and comprehensive works; here he redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the nature of civilization.
To Fernández-Armesto, a civilization is "civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its difference from the unmodified natural environment"...by its taming and warping of climate, geography, and ecology. The same impersonal forces that put an ocean between Africa and India, a river delta in Mesopotamia, or a 2, 000-mile-long mountain range in South America have created the mold from which humanity has fashioned its own wildly differing cultures. In a grand tradition that is certain to evoke comparisons to the great historical taxonomies, each chapter of Civilizations connects the world of the ecologist and geographer to a panorama of cultural history. In Civilizations, the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is not merely a Christian allegory, but a testament to the thousand-year-long deforestation of the trees that once covered 90 percent of the European mainland. The Indian Ocean has served as the world's greatest trading highway for millennia not merely because of cultural imperatives, but because the regular monsoon winds blow one way in the summer and the other in the winter.
In the words of the author, "Unlike previous attempts to write the comparative history of civilizations, it is arranged environment by environment, rather than period by period, or society by society." Thus, seventeen distinct habitats serve as jumping-off points for a series of brilliant set-piece comparisons; thus, tundra civilizations from Ice Age Europe are linked with the Inuit of the Pacific Northwest; and the Mississippi mound-builders and the deforesters of eleventh-century Europe are both understood as civilizations built on woodlands. Here, of course, are the familiar riverine civilizations of Mesopotamia and China, of the Indus and the Nile; but also highland civilizations from the Inca to New Guinea; island cultures from Minoan Crete to Polynesia to Renaissance Venice; maritime civilizations of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea...even the Bushmen of Southern Africa are seen through a lens provided by the desert civilizations of Chaco Canyon.
More, here are fascinating stories, brilliantly told -- of the voyages of Chinese admiral Chen Ho and Portuguese commodore Vasco da Gama, of the Great Khan and the Great Zimbabwe. Here are Hesiod's tract on maritime trade in the early Aegean and the most up-to-date genetics of seed crops. Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written with extraordinary flair, Civilizations is a remarkable achievement...a tour de force by a brilliant scholar.

PART ONE

The Waste Land

DESERT, TUNDRA, ICE

Chapter One

THE HELM OF ICE

ICE WORLDS AND TUNDRA
AS HUMAN HABITATS

The Ice Age in Europe—Northern Scandinavia— Asiatic Tundra—Arctic America—Greenland

. . . you enquired of me at one point about the lands of the North: what huge and amazing variety of objects and peoples lay there, what wondrous features unknown to foreign nations; how the men and innumerable creatures in the North, numbed by the constant merciless cold, managed to withstand the harshness of the elements and the cruelty of the climate they have to live with; from what resources life was sustained, and in what way the frozen earth produced anything to favour them. From that day onward I turned my thoughts to this aim. . . .

—OLAUSMAGNUS,Description of the Northern Peoples(1555), ed. P. Foote, vol.1(London,1996), p.1.

In a word, nought can take root here. I will not say there are no cities. . . . Houses themselves do not exist. . . . One night . . . may last no less than two months. . . . The cold is of such rigour that for eight months of the year snow and ice cover all land and all water. . . . All this being so, one would surely hold that the country cannot be inhabited by so much as wild beasts. It must surely be a desert. Yet inhabited it is.

—FRANCESCONEGRI, Viaggio setentrionale (1700,) quoted in R. Bosi, The Lapps (New York, 1960 ), p. 16 .

Beyond the Gates of Gog: The Savage North

Deserts of ice have a bad reputation as homes of civilization. When Alaska was acquired by the United States for about two cents an acre in 1868 , the purchase was denounced in Congress as money thrown away on an “inhospitable and barren waste . . . in the regions of perpetual snow,” with soil reputedly “frozen from five to six feet in depth” and “a climate unfit for the habitation of civilized men.”¹In reality, most of Alaska is south of the Arctic Circle, and a good deal of it, rendered lukewarm by the Japan Current, enjoys milder winter temperatures than parts, say, of North Dakota or Minnesota; but the last charge had a certain plausibility. For the image, at least, of the state is permanently icebound, and, unlike those of sand, deserts of ice have never sustained a civilization capable of significant modifications of the natural environment.

While working towards this chapter, I have unfolded glimmering, intensely colored lithographs of the Arctic ice-world from inside the books of nineteenthcentury adventurers, who were fascinated by the towering icescapes and strange new world of refracted and reflected light. Yet, when they were stuck fast in an Arctic winter, they despaired of taming it and felt the oppression of an environment that cowed the mind and froze every constructive impulse. John Ross’s sentiments were typical:

Amid all its brilliancy, this land, the land of ice and snow, has ever been, and ever will be a dull, dreary, heart-sinking monotonous waste, under the influence of which the mind is paralyzed, ceasing to care or think, as it ceases to feel what might, did it occur but once, or last but one day, stimulate us by its novelty; for it is but the view of uniformity and silence and death.²

This is an environment where suicide grips unaccustomed minds. In the European and Western Asian tundra, in the opinion of an explorer of the last century, “lemmings are perhaps the most joyous feature of the country.”³When Western Australia was reconnoitered for prospective settlement in the 1820 s, the explorers were deluded into thinking the desert was a paradise because they happened to have arrived with the brief rains. No one could make that sort of mistake about any part of the tundra, even in the most propitious season. Even in summer, it is unmistakably hostile. The deep layers of permafrost, permanently frozen soil, which make cultivation impossible, prevent melted ice from draining away and leave pools as breeding grounds for plagues of mosquitoes in the brief but intense hot season. You cannot even mine the ground: opening gashes for flint and wounds for red ocher, as the first adapters of landscape did, wherever the earth was yielding enough, in the middle Paleolithic Era.

The ice is the only environment in which civilization seems literally tohave been unimaginable. Medieval marvel-mongers claimed to have visited the North Pole, and writers of romance invented a “conquest” of it by King Arthur, but that was only possible because they did not know what the Pole was like: they supposed that a warm current made it accessible and ice-free.⁴Explorers and writers of fiction have envisaged “lost cities” in every other type of environment (see pages 73, 152 )—but not this one. The only exception I know of occurs in one of the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft—a master of the genre who flourished in the 1930 s, a few blocks away from my apartment in Providence. In a work of 1931 , At the Mountains of Madness, he told the tale of an expedition from “Miskatonic University” that stumbled on the remains of a city erected in Antarctica by monstrous beings millions of years ago:

The almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular and geometrically eurhythmic stone masses . . . reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet . . . on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to human habitation. Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation.⁵

Confinement to a horror story is a measure of the incredibility of civilization in the ice.

For most of recorded history, therefore, civilized writers have sensed more affinity with sand people than ice people. It has always been easier to see the tundra-dwellers as other than brother. The Finnish tradition of Arctic scholarship is unusually revealing, and even poignant, because Finns often feel drawn northwards by an obvious tug of kinship. The great linguist Matthias Alexander Castren, the first scientific explorer of the tundra of the Samoyeds, in the midnineteenth century, felt that he was among “distant relatives. . . . Sometimes,” he wrote

it even occurred to me that the pure instinct, the innocent simplicity and the geniality of these so-called children of nature could, in many ways, put European wisdom to shame, but all in all, in the course of my travels through the deserts, I regretfully noticed, beside such good traits, so much that was repulsive, crude and beastly, that I pitied rather than loved them.⁶

Castren’s self-appointed successor, the Finnish philologist Kai Donner, set off by sleigh from Tomsk to study the Samoyeds in 1911 , “fleeing from reality into the wondrous world of legends.” He literally stripped off the bunting of civilization—“my better suits, starched clothing, bedlinen, toothbrush, shaving utensils”—and clothed himself in the hairy pelts of the traditional wodehouse: adouble layer of coats of elk fur to cope with temperatures of minus forty degrees Celsius.⁷Determined to experience the Arctic in winter, he reached Pokkelky in February 1912 —“the metropolis of the Taz,” the “capital” of all the Samoyeds of the river. Their gathering place in the “palace” of their prince, he found, was the only dwelling resembling a building: “a half-subterranean shack with beam walls” and a chimney of clay and branches. Thirty people slept packed together on the floor. The cold was too intense for anyone ever to undress, and the place bred vermin and exuded stench. Though the sun appeared for a few minutes daily, “it was always dark inside, since no light could penetrate the thick ice windows.”

On a winter fur-trading caravan he found how merciless the grip of an Arctic-environment can be. There was not enough to hunt. The company dragged rotten carcasses through the snow in order to have something to eat. The women devoured their fattest lice “like candy.” Even by the fireside in the tent the temperature never got up to zero. The reindeer stuck in snowdrifts and had to be led by men on snowshoes. The party was reduced to making tea out of red bilberries and tobacco out of birch shavings. They abandoned their baggage and sheltered, as the Ostyak do, behind walls of crushed snow. Donner suffered from hallucinations and frostbite. On a mild day the temperature rose to twenty degrees below zero. He emerged with a strong romantic attachment to the companionship of the ice desert “among savages whom I had learned to love and understand.”⁸

His account echoed a long tradition, from the initiation of ethnographic inquiries in the time of Peter the Great. Russians rarely felt Finns’ natural intensity of sympathy for their “small peoples of the north.” Russian visitors condemned the tolerance of “swinish living” among people who slept with dogs, smelled like fish, and failed to bow in deference or remove their hats when they spoke to each other.⁹On the other hand, by the late nineteenth century, critics among them of their own society were able to identify or attribute appropriate virtues in “natural men” living strenuously under nature’s laws or embodying “primitive communism” and a morality “completely free of the vices that urban civilization brings with it.”¹⁰The view formed in the 1890 s by Frederick George Jackson, the English explorer of Waigatz—the “holy island” where the pre-Christian Samoyeds liked to be buried—was similarly ambivalent, though uncolored, in contrast with those of Finns and Russians, by any detectable ideological discourse. For him the Samoyeds were filthy and indolent but honest and childlike: “they simply swarm with vermin, and possess an inextinguishable stench,” but were hospitable, with “no wrangling and little backbiting.”¹¹

Those who knew the ice world only by report, imagined it with a similar range of reactions. The forest, for most of antiquity, was a habitat barbarous enough. To choose to live beyond the forest line seemed to transgress the outer limits of savagery or, in the estimation of critics of civilization, to represent anamazing option in favor of submission to nature. Tacitus, towards the end of the first cen...