13 - Summary

Summary

Americans customarily associate the name of Humboldt with the explorer, naturalist, and geographer of the Americas Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), as does the present study; but he also appears here in a different role, although not always easy to authenticate due to a partial loss of historical documentation: He operated as a major resource person and intermediary for his elder brother Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), with new linguistic and ethnographic resources plus valuable contacts with American scholars. If Alexander too is of interest for his part as a major American liaison, it is “the other Humboldt” in his role as an empirical Americanist linguist and anthropologist who is the main subject of the present book.

When the younger Humboldt made his first discoveries of the Orinoco River ecology as part of his early American explorations at the turn of the nineteenth century, his elder brother faced similar, if less dramatic or intensive experiences of linguistic and sociocultural alterity with speakers of Basque in the Spanish Pyrenees.