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Countries Far Away - Cognition at a Distance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

A. N. J. den Hollander
A. N. J. den Hollander
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam
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Extract

Social reality which is remote in time or in space has a charm of its own. A desire to escape one's own time and environment, the longing for the exotic and bygone (a longing that, at times, is reinforced by the spirit of the time, as during the romantic movement), residual dreams of adolescence, the lure which distance offers to the freely roaming fantasy, the urge for new experience, the turning away from daily and trivial matters, the tendency to criticize oneself through the foreign — there are many and subtle motivations that make the distant and the foreign fascinating. Novalis did not only state that everything becomes romantic and poetic “when it is moved into remoteness”; he also spoke of the “dignity of the unknown”.

Type
Cognitive Processes in the Typing of Cultures: The Old South
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , July 1967 , pp. 362 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1967

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References

1 Cf. Hauser, Arnold, Sozialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur, vol. 2 (1958), p. 183Google Scholar.

2 Here one should not think primarily of the phantasmagories of the type of Münchhausen but rather of the success of invented descriptions like those of Psalmanazaar. (A Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, by George Psalmanazaar, a Native of the Said Island, now in London. 1704. Reprinted in The Library of Imposters, vol. 2, London, 1926.)

3 See Hollander, A. N. J. den, “Soziale Beschreibung als Problem”, Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, No. 2 (1965), pp. 201Google Scholar ff.

4 Cairnes was “Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Economy in Queen's College, Galway, and late Whately Professor of Political Economy in the University of Dublin”.

5 Economist, 14 July 1862, pp. 650–651Google Scholar, called it “a masterly book… by far the best popular treatise on the subject we have seen. It is as temperate and dignified in language as it is firm in principle, and is remarkable for its discriminative instinct, which arranges the different elements of the subject, by a sort of natural perspective, in their true proportions and mutual relations, and deals with their moral or economic importance accordingly.” The Westminster Review, New Series, No. XLIV (Oct. 1862), pp. 489–510Google Scholar: “A work more needed, or one better adapted to the need, could scarcely have been produced at the present time” (p. 490). The National Review, No. XXIX (July 1862), pp. 167–198Google Scholar: “… a compact and truthful analysis…”(p. 169).

6 The Atheneum, No. 1812 (19 July 1862), pp. 77–78Google Scholar; Fraser's Magazine, Oct. 1863, p. 436.

7 So in Fraser's Magazine and in The Atheneum. A moderately critical review was presented by the Edinburgh Review, October 1862, e.g., p. 558.

8 Only the reviewer in Fraser's Magazine (p. 436) noted: “If his account of the Southern States was both true and complete, the behaviour of the Southerners in the present was is an insolvable mystery.”

9 E.g. in the North American Review, April 1863, p. 479, and a writer in The Saturday Review (cf. Cairnes, second edition, p. 358); see also Edmund Kirke (Pseud. Gilmore, J. R.), Down in Tennessee and back by way of Richmond (1864), pp. 104–105, 182–183Google Scholar; ‘Marcel’ in The Nation, 7 September 1865.

10 Cairnes, second edition, pp. 81–83.

11 Loria, Achille, “Die Sklavenwirtschaft im modernen Amerika und im europaischen Altertume”, Zeitschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Vol. 4 (1986), pp. 99–100Google Scholar.

12 Halle, Ernst von, Baumwollproduktion und Pflanzungswirtschaft in den Nordamerikanischen Sudstaaten, Vol. I (1897), Vol. II (1906). Cf. Vol. I, pp. 334–339Google Scholar.

13 E.g. Friedrich Kapp in his Geschichte der Sklaverei in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (1861), which was much read in Germany but not known to Cairnes. See pp. 477 ff.

14 Hollander, A. N. J. den, “The Tradition of Poor Whites”, in Couch, W. T. (ed.). Culture in the South (1933)Google Scholar; also Hollander, den, De Landelijke Arme Blanken in het Zuiden der Verenigde Staten (1933), pp. 205–216Google Scholar.

15 Cf. the first edition, p. 28, where he discovers a pattern in a revolutionary process; p. 41, where he denies that there is any evidence for the truth of the assumption that Negroes are “by nature” lazier than whites - this in contrast to an already existing racist bias. Cairnes had a clear and correct insight into the causes of the disappearance of slavery in the North and its promulgation in the South. He denied a direct connection with the climate (p. 35, first edition), whereby he showed a better understanding than many of his contemporaries and later authors.

16 This possibility - and not the fertility of the soil, as Cairnes concluded from a wrong argument - was of decisive importance in the raising of cotton.

17 Even today the prestige value of “having been there” is an everyday experience that can be quite amusing. It sometimes happens in the Netherlands - and it may not be much different in other countries - that women who have accompanied their husbands on professional trips to America give lectures upon their return on difficult and complicated American problems. It is almost unnecessary to mention that “the Negro problem” is one of their ever-recurring themes. The pretentious naivite of these ladies does not concern us here; the naivite of an audience, however, that considers somebody qualified to give information and pass judgment simply because “she was there” is staggering and does interest us. “Distance” in itself must have a highly inflative value in man's self-esteem: the overcoming of distance authorizes even the unqualified to act as experts. The ladies mentioned above would certainly be sadly deflated if they would venture to discuss in public a complicated sociological or political problem of their own country, although their ignorance in that case might, hopefully, be somewhat smaller than when they were dealing with American issues. It could, at any rate, scarcely be greater.

18 One of Cairnes' American critics refuted the claim that there were five million “mean whites” living in the wilderness practically as white Indians (Cairnes, first ed., p. 123). “The mean whites seem thus, under an inexorable law, to be bound to their present fate by the same chain which holds the slave to his” (Cairnes, first ed., p. 131). The critic called this claim absurd. Cairnes reprimands him in Appendix D of his second edition: “He denies that even the names ‘mean whites’, ‘white trash’ have any place - out of the negroes’ quarters - in the Southern vocabulary; and he treats the impression which prevails in this country of the existence of such people as an example… of the delusions to which nations are liable respecting the social conditions of other countries” (Cairnes, second edition, p. 358). Cairnes corrects the mistaken notion of his American reviewer a few pages later and “proves” that even if there were not five million of these vagabonds in the South, then there were at least four million of them and they, “existing in a community of which the aggregate… does not exceed six millions, must form a sufficiently formidable element of mischief (Cairnes, second edition, p. 376). Indeed, a society in which two-thirds of the population are criminal paupers would be worse than a precarious affair. It would be a social monstrosity. Cairnes did in fact find the situation odd enough to classify it as “a structure essentially different from any form of social life which has hitherto been known among progressive communities” (Cairnes, second edition, p. 122). It would indeed have been a new phenomenon, only the facts were otherwise.

19 The tendency to perceive distant things so that they will best fit into one's own scheme of thought can even in scholarly thought result in the incorrect assumption that something exists that does not exist and has never existed at all. An interesting illustration to that is the myth of a “Black Belt” as an extensive region of black soil extending through all the Gulf States, a myth that haunted European geography books for a long time. See Hollander, A. N. J. den, “Het Begrip ‘Black Belt’ in de Geografische Literatuur over Noord Amerika”, Tijdschrift Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, July 1936, pp. 573–584Google Scholar.

20 Hollander, A. N. J. den, “Enige economische aspecten van de negerslavernij in de Verenigde Staten van Noord Amerika”, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, 1944, pp. 100–120Google Scholar.

21 Calverton, V. F., “Modern Anthropology and the Theory of Cultural Compulsives”, in Calverton, V. F. (ed.), The Making of Man (1931), p. 1Google Scholar. Needless to say, Calverton here neglects the individual differences between thinkers of the nineteenth century. To a certain extent Cairnes tried to squeeze an American reality into the Procrustean bed of his system. Others reacted differently. His stay in the United States contributed to Friedrich List's refutation of the universality which the classical liberal theory of economics demanded for itself. He had an eye for the physical and temporal limitations of economical maxims. Ch. Gide, and Rist, Ch. in their Histoire des Doctrines Economiques (1926), say on p. 327Google Scholar: “Ainsi le systéme de List est le premier où se fasse nettement sentir sur la pensée europeenne l'influence des expériences économiques du Nouveau-Monde”, to which we would add that List was not the first to do so. It is doubtful that the propensity Cairnes illustrates so strikingly was especially typical of the nineteenth century. The problem poses itself again and again as soon as we try to understand a social reality that is not ours. This also applies to our own society when it is too far removed from us in historical time. For this reason the problem preoccupies the historian as much as the sociologist and the anthropologist. Thus Bloch notices: “Une nomenclature imposée au passé aboutira toujours à la déformer, si elle a pour dessein ou seulement pour résultat de ramener ses catégories aux nôtres, haussées pour l'occasion jusqu'a l'eternel” (Bloch, Marc, Apologie pour I'Histoire ou Métier d'Historien, 1949, p. 88)Google Scholar. Compare also Febvre, Lucien, Combats pour I'Histoire, 1953, pp. 213–217Google Scholar; Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, 1946, pp. 247Google Scholar ff.; Ricceur, Paul, Histoire et Vérité, 1955, pp. 34Google Scholar ff.

22 Tocqueville, Alexis de, De la Democratic en Amerique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1835), Vol. 2, p. 374Google Scholar.

23 The semantic factor is a delicate one in any description of social reality. Historians can attest to that but they hold no monopoly. “For the social scientist, writing is reporting on what he has done, observed and found out, in the humanities the writing is the essential operation” (Renier, G. J., History, Its Purpose and Method, 1950, p. 245Google Scholar). But “… language is an inadequate and primitive instrument” (p. 246).

24 First edition, p. 87: “The deterioration of the institutions and of the character of the people of the United States is now commonly taken for granted in this country.” Cairnes'; view was not an exceptional one in the England of his time.

25 Europe's preoccupation with slavery during the first half of the 19th century also led to the formation of incorrect ideas about life in West Africa. The wars of the Negro states were viewed as the consequence of slave trading and the accompanying moral and social decline of the Africans. It was also thought that the protracted Yoruba wars were to be understood in this way. These wars were in reality of political origin, even though an economic element was not entirely absent. The incorrect view was one of the reasons for the failure of British officials to mediate in the Ijaje wars. Compare Ajayi, J. F.Ade and Smith, Robert, Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century (1964), pp. 123Google Scholar ff.

26 See Hoetink's, H. excellent critique of this schematized view, Het Nieuwe Evolutionisme (Assen, 1965), p. 6Google Scholar.

27 One is reminded of Karl Jaspers' remarks about the psycho-cultural picture of the world in his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, fourth edition, 1954, p. 171. (“The foreign is misunderstood and thought to have developed out of evil desire or ignorance.”) See also pp. 173–174.

28 Here I am thinking of what Robert Redfield mentioned as an attractive possibility offered by “community studies”: “One may make use of a community as a convenient place in which to study a special problem of general scientific interest. One may study a community not to find out all about it, but with special reference only to a limited problem stated in advance… One may study special problems in the context of the whole” (Redfield, R., The Little Community, 1960, p. 155)Google Scholar.

29 Sociology for the South (Richmond, 1854)Google Scholar; Cannibals All (Richmond, 1857)Google Scholar.

30 Wright, Arthur F., “The Study of Chinese Civilization”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 233–255CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Reprinted in P. P. Wiener and A. Noland, Ideas in Cultural Perspective (1962), pp. 354–376. “Thus the Europeans in their early studies were in a sense captives of the tradition they studied and of the self-image of Chinese civilization, which the perpetuators of that tradition had developed over the millennia” (p. 354). “(They) were in thrall to the literary and cultural traditions of the Chinese elite” (p. 355).