It is important to draw a distinction between the wealth and range of the late medieval and *early modern ethnographic discourses recording information about (in contemporary idiom) the various peoples of the world and their rites, customs, and laws, and the particular academic environment that generated ethnography as an explicit scientific concern. The early modern European discourse on human diversity, understood as an account of physical traits, racial and national inclinations, religious ceremonies, popular customs, rules of civility, laws, and alternative systems of government, is conspicuous after the sixteenth century. By contrast, even within the *Enlightenment, the neologisms ethnographia and ethnologia had limited currency and appear almost exclusively in German-speaking lands, together with related *vernacular terms such as Völkerkunde, from about the 1770s. What had predominated among humanist-trained scholars of the previous centuries was a focus on human history, either within the framework of natural history or, more specifically, as moral and civil history. Geography, cosmography, and travel writing were essentially conceived as aspects of historia; travel accounts in particular, which consisted mainly of descriptive relations organized thematically, could be seen as raw materials to be used for further philosophical interpretation. These various humanistic interests culminated in the science de l’homme of Enlightenment writers, including the controversial and often speculative works by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire. This was precisely the point at which some Protestant academic historians committed to the ideal of a modern system of learning felt the need to coin the neologisms that clearly distinguished between the descriptive and theoretical aspects of a science of peoples. They also adapted the tradition, already well established among humanists and savants, of providing travelers with questionnaires in order to organize their information methodically, thus furthering new scientific expeditions that usually combined ethnography with natural history.
All this, however, seems to suggest a European story line that awards to a particular cultural tradition the key to the emergence of empirical ethnography—a very misleading assumption. Let us therefore begin by looking elsewhere. The South Indian port cities of the Malabar Coast (modern Kerala), such as Kollam, Cochin, Calicut, and Cannanore, were important locations for cross-cultural commercial intersections in the late medieval and early modern periods. They generated a wide range of descriptions not only of their trade but also of their peoples written by foreign observers in a variety of languages, connecting the Far East to the Far West. In fact, between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries we find significant examples of accounts of Malabar from the three major traditions of medieval and early modern geography and travel writing, Islamic, Chinese, and European. These various descriptions can serve as reminder that literary ethnography—the description of peoples and their religion and customs—was far from exclusive to a single tradition. They also exemplify the very different ways in which the *genres that included these ethnographic materials could be cultivated. For example, in 1342 the Moroccan Ibn Baṭṭūṭa participated in a diplomatic mission to China sent by the sultan of Delhi, but after the presents for the Yuan emperor (for which he was partly responsible) were lost at sea in Calicut, and he also lost track of his personal goods, he was forced to change his plans and spent some months in the region and the Maldive Islands. In his travel account, or rihla, the Moroccan noted that the custom of the “infidel” (Hindu) kings of Malabar was to transmit their titles to the sons of their sisters while excluding their own children, a peculiar system of succession via maternal line that he had observed only among a tribe of Berbers in the western Sahara, the veiled Massūfa, or Tuaregs. He also described the trade in pepper—an important local product—and noted the presence of merchants from many countries, including the Chinese with their large junks. Muslims, he observed, were highly respected by the Hindus, but the latter would never share food with them. The traveler also emphasized the safety of the roads and the strict justice implemented by the kings of the region, providing a number of anecdotes to illustrate this. However, these curious observations do not appear in a very systematic fashion. Ibn Battūta’s narrative follows the vagaries of his personal itinerary, and he often seems more interested in describing Muslim communities, and even identifying by name learned individuals whom he met, than in dwelling on the customs of other peoples. This is coherent with the underlying logic of the rihla, the Arabic genre of travel writing, which was an extended religious pilgrimage within the lands of Islam rather than a geographical survey. For Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who dictated his travels from memory in 1353 after returning to Morocco, mentioning by name a number of prominent men strengthened his religious authority as a faqīh (one learned in the law) as well as the authenticity of his account of events.
By contrast, the observations recorded a few decades later by Ma Huan, a Chinese Muslim at the service of the eunuch admiral Zheng He (a close collaborator of the Ming emperor Yongle), follow a different logic. Ma Huan participated as translator of foreign documents (and probably interpreter) in the extraordinary series of imperial trading expeditions undertaken between 1405 and 1433 and was in Malabar in 1414, 1421, and 1432. He is explicit about the fact that he personally collected the notes about peoples, customs, and natural products that made possible the composition of his Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores. He was not the only observer who wrote about the expeditions of Zheng He—for example, Fei Hsin produced The Overall Survey of the Star Raft in 1436 on the basis of similar materials—but Ma Huan’s account was geographically more precise and thematically more balanced and may be considered the most developed example of Chinese ethnography in relation to those voyages. In Cochin and Calicut he described the people, their dress, and their houses, and he distinguished various social groups (“five kinds of people”), including Muslims and various Hindu castes, all with different marriage customs and funeral rites. It is clear from his description that he was better acquainted with the communities of traders than with the local military and religious elites, and Ma Huan approved of their way of doing business, which accorded with Chinese ideas of proper conduct. By contrast, he failed to distinguish between Hinduism and Buddhism, encompassing the worship of “the elephant and the ox” under the (to a Chinese) more familiar teachings of Buddha. He seemed particularly fascinated by the yogis and their nakedness. Like Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, he did not fail to note that royal succession was through the sisters of the king as being more certain—“the woman’s body alone constitutes the legal family.”
Our third example, the extensive description of the towns and peoples of Malabar written by the Portuguese crown official Duarte Barbosa circa 1516 as part of his survey of the lands of East, is exceptional for its accuracy and detail and may be considered a first step toward the possibility of a systematic description of a social system. Barbosa was able to accomplish this because he was—not unlike Ma Huan—a professional interpreter and scrivener at the service of the commercial factor in the town of Cannanore; at the same time, unlike his Chinese predecessor, he settled in India and lived in Kerala many years and had acquired a sophisticated knowledge of the local language, Malayalam, rather than just using Arabic or Persian as a lingua franca. Barbosa’s pioneering ethnography was therefore extremely competent when it came to describing different religious, ethnic, and social groups, notably the various castes of “gentiles” and the matrilineal succession of the nayars. Nonetheless, there were limits to his understanding of Hindu beliefs, no doubt because he was a layman and—unlike many Catholic missionaries seeking to spread the Christian faith in different parts of Asia under the patronage of the Portuguese kings—he lacked the theological training and authority to engage in religious disputations. Where Ma Huan had confused different forms of infidelity, what we today would call Hinduism and Buddhism, Barbosa saw (like many other European observers) something similar to the Christian Trinity in the supreme God of the Brahmans, the Trimurti—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.
The juxtaposition of different accounts of Malabar helps us to appreciate the variable quality of these early ethnographic writings in terms of “empirical information” and points toward two fundamental variables: the conditions of production of each particular account, and the importance of the genre conventions that developed in each cultural tradition. All the accounts we have considered were ideologically charged, but also informative, in different degrees. The most obvious limitations had to do with linguistic competence, but professional interest and intended audiences also played an important part. Each account illustrates a particular balance between the pursuit of practical information about peoples and their customs by means of the ideal of accurate description, and the ideological value of a discourse on exoticism in which engaging one’s own identity—whether for internal critique or for collective gratification, including the legitimation of empire—often counts more than understanding cultural diversity. Ma Huan’s preface encapsulated perfectly these two dimensions: he collected notes “about the appearance of the peoples in each country and the variations of the local customs” so that readers would have the facts, but he also aspired to show “how the civilizing influence of the Emperor” had spread beyond that of any previous Chinese dynasty. The interpretation of human diversity, overtly or subtly, is thus an inevitable component of any genre whose aim is to record it, and there is no such thing as an objective account. Nonetheless, we can recognize in these descriptions of Malabar a common desire to be informative and accurate within the parameters of each tradition.
What constitutes “information” is therefore problematic—and this is true not only because any descriptive discourse about human diversity is, inevitably, ideologically charged, but also because fictional elements and hearsay are often found alongside personal observations. Even if we exclude fictional works (including some entirely fraudulent efforts) and restrict ourselves to ethnographic works undertaken with the purpose of recording actual historical conditions, the temptation to amplify the travelers’ experience often led to some degree of anachronism and falsification. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, for example, is very unlikely to have reached China (his chronology of a journey to Quanzhou, Canton, Hangzhou, and Beijing in 1346–47 is impossible to fit in), but he had good reasons to claim that he had gone there, so that he liberally amplified his pilgrimage narrative by relying on the information about the countries of Southeast Asia and ports in south China that he had collected from other Muslims (some of them Chinese) in India. Some of the information he transmitted in this manner—for example, his description of paper money—might have been accurate, but the journey never took place, and his report of the country of “Kawalisi” ruled by a formidable warrior princess who spoke to him in Turkish seems entirely made up. By contrast, even the most honest of travel writers could transmit “false” information when reporting what they learned from local informers and interpreters. When Antonio Pigafetta, author of the first account of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world, in 1521 described the penile implants (sagra or palang) used by the men in the island of Cebu (modern Philippines), he was being informative, however shocking his observations—he had examined them personally, and indeed various other contemporary travelers reported this custom in Southeast Asia. When the same Pigafetta reported that there were islands near the Moluccas whose natives ate human flesh, another island inhabited by pygmies, and yet another beyond Java—which he himself never reached—where women lived without men, and got pregnant from the wind, he was entirely accurate too, transmitting faithfully what he had been told by an old pilot from Tidore (other travelers in the Indian Ocean, including Marco Polo, reported similar stories). It is only from the perspective of the critical accumulation of contradictory reports that some of this information was eventually understood to be “false.”
In all cases the emergence of an ethnographic discourse and its impact should not be taken for granted: it was, rather, constitutive of the parallel development of distinct cultural and intellectual trajectories throughout many centuries. It is remarkable, for example, that while European accounts of India would multiply in the centuries following the establishment of colonies by the Portuguese and other Europeans, the Chinese genre was interrupted not long after the death of the Yung-Lo emperor in 1424, when the Ming government completely withdrew its support for the kind of imperial trading expeditions that Zheng He had led successfully between 1405 and 1433. In that hostile context, despite the existence of a few printed editions from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the impact of any individual texts such as Ma Huan’s was very limited (indeed, at the turn of the sixteenth century even the copies of the charts produced by Zheng He’s expeditions were ordered to be burned by ministerial mandate). The Chinese genre of ethnographic writings did of course continue in other, primarily continental, contexts, but the maritime branch no longer flourished, and with it also declined the cultural capacity to produce fresh information about very distant lands and to subject it to informed criticism. Compilations relying entirely on previous sources remained a possibility, but their quality as sources of up-to-date historical information could be compromised.
A European equivalent would be those works written in the medieval and early modern periods that continued to refer back to classical sources concerning the marvels of India. When Joannes Boemus, the German canon of Ulm Cathedral, published the first edition of his Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus (The customs, laws and ceremonies of all peoples) (Augsburg, 1520), he primarily worked from authoritative books in Latin that could be centuries old, rather than from the reports about Africa or the New World recently written by explorers such as Amerigo Vespucci. It remains an interesting paradox that Boemus’s book proved extremely popular and saw many editions and translations precisely during the same decades that many new accounts about the various parts of the world (including the book of Duarte Barbosa) began to reach Europe. Nonetheless, the Spanish translator of Boemus, Francisco Thámara, saw fit to add new materials extracted from historians of the Spanish Indies, such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the self-appointed Pliny of the New World. It was a symptom of the changing perspective. Unlike in China, in western Europe throughout the sixteenth century the vast multiplication and frequent publication of new ethnographic writings created the conditions for an entirely new approach to the analysis of information. Increasingly, sources could be historically and geographically contextualized, a process made possible by the emergence of great compilations of “modern” (as opposed to ancient) travel writing. The highest standards of textual selection and historical criticism were set by the Venetian civil servant and humanist Giovanni Battista Ramusio in the three large volumes of his Navigationi et Viaggi (Navigations and voyages) published in the 1550s, and a model for many subsequent efforts. It was Ramusio who made books such as Duarte Barbosa’s widely available, while also reclaiming the authenticity of Marco Polo, who in this manner became a pioneer of modern geography, rather than a potential fabulist.
While there may be something universal in the human curiosity about the customs and beliefs of different peoples, we may conclude that the extent to which ethnographic genres were driven by a desire for practical information is a historically specific issue. The early modern European trajectory in this respect was conditioned by an exceptional convergence of new developments. The first crucial condition was of course the development of oceanic navigation and new military technologies, such as artillery and firearms, which facilitated the creation of European commercial colonies and even substantial territorial conquests in many parts of the world. Opportunities for observation, and the impetus for collecting practical information, multiplied, and a global network of communication, through travel or in writing, expanded massively and eventually stabilized.
Second, there was a revival of historical and geographical learning led by the humanists, a revival that took place in a Christian society but embraced many secular themes, and empowered a wide range of social agents. Some of this historical learning, in Latin or Greek, was focused on the classical past and remained extremely elitist, but there was also a degree of popularization through translations, compilations, and various educational genres, even plays and romances. One of the consequences was that traders and other commoners, who were often literate, became crucial participants in the development of the new ethnographic genres, not only as observers (who could report orally) but also, increasingly, as writers. Men like Columbus, Vespucci, and Pigafetta, or the New World chroniclers Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and Pedro de Cieza de León, are remarkable examples of lay ethnographers who did not participate directly in the revival of classical learning as intellectuals, but could read historical works and echoed some of their themes. Columbus, for example, in order to interpret his geographical discoveries, read and annotated the fifteenth-century cosmography of Pius II, the humanist pope, who in turn had relied on the recently recovered ancient geography of Strabo, as well as the latest account of India by the Venetian merchant Niccolò de’ Conti (ca. 1444).
The third important condition was the consolidation of printing and the expansion of the book market. Manuscripts remained of course essential, and many works were never printed or published, but the availability of books multiplied the dissemination of historical information, not least works with ethnographic contents, which attracted wide audiences. Amerigo Vespucci’s letters, rehashed by an opportunistic publisher in the Latin pamphlet Mundus Novus (A new world) (1503), became so popular that the new continent discovered by Columbus across the ocean was eventually named after him. No doubt Vespucci’s description of the naked cannibals of Brazil who lived “according to nature” like Epicureans, without laws, private property, or any sense of shame, contributed to this popularity. Some institutions, notably the Portuguese crown, were keen to keep some sensitive geographical information away from rivals. However, when in 1524 King John III negotiated with Emperor Charles V the division of spheres of colonial influence in the Moluccas (in the Junta of Badajoz), the book of Duarte Barbosa was made available in manuscript by the Portuguese cosmographer Diogo Ribeiro. It was translated into Castilian by the Genoese ambassador Martino Centurione, and the political negotiations eventually culminated in the treaty of Saragossa of 1529, which by means of a sale of rights awarded the islands to the Portuguese crown. A few years later, Ramusio translated this text into Italian (comparing it to another Portuguese manuscript) and published it, making this major account of the lands and peoples of Asia widely available to the European *Republic of Letters.
Finally, the fourth condition was the mobilization of substantial ecclesiastical resources in support of extremely ambitious evangelizing projects, especially by the religious orders of the Catholic Church, who worked in tandem with the monarchies of Portugal and Castile.
Missionaries would become some of the better-trained and systematic ethnographers of the period, including many missions in areas not under direct European imperial control, such as Persia, northern India, Japan, China, Siam, Vietnam, Tibet, Ethiopia, and Angola. Because their motivation was religious zeal and their theological training often thorough, missionaries were particularly keen to learn foreign languages and engage in religious disputations. In some cases they wrote thematically comprehensive *encyclopedias describing all the aspects of the life of native populations under their charge. The case of the Franciscans in New Spain (modern Mexico) is particularly striking, because it reveals the mechanisms through which concern for effective religious conversion led to a deepening ethnographic ambition. For authors like Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, the initial idea of destroying a devilish, false religion by simply burning all the native books of divination, and preaching instead a new and pure Christian religion, had proved to be a dangerous illusion, because the old idolatrous beliefs were subtly inscribed in everyday cultural practices, such as harvesting, eating, and dancing. The inquisitorial methods used to detect heresy and idolatry were therefore mobilized to interrogate native elders, who acted as informants of the missionaries (in a brutal colonial setting, the implicit coercion was of course overpowering). Sahagún and his native aides—educated as Christians in a special school for the sons of the elite—recorded their information in the original language, Nahuatl, and organized it thematically to cover all aspects of the religious, moral, and natural life of the Mexican Indians. The final product, the famous Florentine Codex, with a Spanish translation and many color illustrations, was remarkably rich and comprehensive and has guided the various efforts of modern historians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to reconstruct the culture, beliefs, and daily life of the Mexica (the “Aztecs”). However, the Universal History of the Things of New Spain, completed in the 1570s, was not meant to offer neutral information, neither in its interpretative biases (as the Franciscans imposed a Christian concept of religious exclusivism that was alien to the Nahuas), nor in its intended uses. Paradoxically, the Spanish authorities were themselves uneasy about the value of the initiative—a work conceived as a tool to identify and persecute idolatry was, for some critics, a dangerous means of perpetuating it. Its circulation was therefore severely restricted. Nonetheless, the ethnographic research conducted by the Franciscans had already been crucial for those historians who successfully wrote about the conquest of Mexico for a wider European public, such as the chaplain of Ferdinand Cortés, Francisco López de Gómara.
Despite a substantial gap between the many ethnographic materials, written and visual, that existed only as relatively rare manuscripts (quite a few lost to us) and those that circulated more widely in multiple copies or in print, often heavily edited and in some cases censored (notably in Catholic countries where the Inquisition was active), it seems fair to generalize that a considerable proportion of the ethnographic information produced in the early modern centuries found its way to the early modern reading public, and that few parts of the globe reached by Europeans remained unknown to the Republic of Letters—especially to those *polymaths and men of letters capable of reading many languages. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the interior of Africa and the Pacific islands remained as mysterious frontiers, but vast libraries could be assembled with books about the Ottoman Empire, India, Brazil, Peru, or China, and the contours of “the great map of mankind,” as Edmund Burke referred to it in 1777, were fairly well understood. Combining the global structures of commerce developed by rival colonial powers, the humanist revival of historical genres, the wide participation of lay and religious travelers as observers and writers, the quick consolidation of relatively cheap means of dissemination by means of printing, and the existence of an extensive and indeed growing reading public and book market, it may be concluded that after the sixteenth century the European capacity to both produce and consume informative ethnography was truly remarkable. In reality some of these trends were already apparent in the late Middle Ages—the possibility of missionaries, merchants, or ambassadors describing in detail exotic peoples and their religion and customs was apparent starting in the thirteenth century, with the precarious Franciscan embassies to the Mongols, and the Portuguese exploration of West Africa in the early 1400s. However, the combination of factors that led to the explosion of the genre throughout the sixteenth century was revolutionary in its synergy and impact. It had a transformative effect on European intellectual culture.
In this essay we have defined ethnography (which is of course, strictly speaking, a modern concept) primarily as a widespread descriptive, information-rich literary practice that could appear in a variety of related genres, from a simple descriptive account of the beliefs and cultural practices of different peoples included in a letter, relation, or travelogue, to the more comprehensive works of natural and moral history, geography, and cosmography composed for an educated public. The intellectual culture of the humanists gave these works an additional antiquarian dimension and comparative power, but the essence of the genre centered on the testimony of an eyewitness, typically a rather humble figure who largely relied on everyday language in order to report what he saw or heard. The step, however, from providing information to suggesting interpretations was always very small. For the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas, for example, the “defender of the Indians” in the Spanish Indies, the evidence collected by Franciscans about the native inhabitants of New Spain could be used to prove that they were no less rational and civilized than the ancient Greeks and Romans (an important issue when it came to determining their rights). For Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, a mestizo historian of Peru seeking to claim his double heritage, the solar cult of the Inka suggested a monotheistic belief that prepared the ground for the arrival of Christianity. The Protestant pastor Jean de Léry in Brazil, adopting the moralistic tone of a strict reformer, noted that the naked Tupinambá were less corrupt in their natural state than the Europeans with their clothes. For Thomas Harriot, writing in 1587 at the service of Walter Raleigh in support of the early English colonial project in Virginia, the description of the coastal Algonquians of Roanoke Island (in what is today North Carolina) proved their capacity for Christianity and civilization, but also their weakness against the Europeans and their firearms: the English should not be deterred by their presence. All these were polemical arguments that went beyond a neutral exposition of ethnographic information.
The more philosophically inclined writers did not simply engage in arguments that were politically charged, but also reflected on the nature of civilization. For a *Jesuit in Japan, Luís Fróis, the contrast between European and Japanese customs that he systematically listed in 1585 revealed that it was possible for rational peoples to do many things very differently without necessarily endangering the salvation of the soul (provided the universal principles of divine and natural law were respected). Similarly, a reader of Jean de Léry in France in the same period, Michel de Montaigne, considered that the cannibals of Brazil had a lesson to teach to his contemporaries in Europe: eating human flesh for the sake of revenge was indeed a barbarian action, but Europeans were no better in the manner in which they treated each other, and could hardly equate their own behavior with the dictates of right reason. In fact, all judgments about truth and morality were influenced by one’s own local customs, and the claim of the civilized to universal rationality was a form of vanity. For that reason, Montaigne preferred the observations about distant lands from a simple man who faithfully reported what he saw to the interpretations of someone more educated, and therefore more pretentious, who ended up distorting the truth in order to prove his own ideas. Ethnographic information and elite erudition were not always the best of friends.
Joan-Pau Rubiés
See also globalization; merchants; money; observing; publicity/publication; scrolls and rolls; surveys and censuses; translating; travel