INTRODUCTION TO THE First INTERLUDE

When the European Renaissance is addressed in histories of anthropology, the discussion is usually very brief. And when anthropologists do discuss the Renaissance, they rarely focus on what matters to traditional historians: the Italian Renaissance. Centering on an outburst of creative activity beginning in the late middle ages (13th century)  in the Italian city states, the Italian Renaissance is credited with bringing an end to centuries of intellectual doldrums known as the Dark Ages by means of a Greco-Roman revival and an outburst of vernacular innovation. Although historians with an anthropological bent have long found the Italian Renaissance deeply interesting (see Cassirer, 2010), its anthropological relevance has been unclear.

Enter Jack Goody (1919-2015).

Goody was an English social anthropologist, a member of the generation that came of age after 1945 through extended, long-term participatory fieldwork in rural villages in Africa. Goody’s research was in Ghana, in West Africa, with the LoWili and LoDagaa peoples. Like most social anthropologists at the time, his topical focus was on kinship, marriage, and social organization. His major publications based on his fieldwork were completed in 1962. For most anthropologists, that would pretty much be a career: a major book, a few follow-up articles, and perhaps a return visit to northern Ghana in twenty years to visit with youngsters now grown old.

But Goody was full of surprises. He lived a long life, and he continued writing to the very end. Over time, he shifted his attention from African ethnography to broad comparative studies embracing Africa, Asia, and Europe. Initially, these works also focused on kinship and marriage (Goody, 1990), but after a brief excursion into the study of the impact of literacy on social life (Goody, 1987), Goody discovered, deep into his retirement, his life project: changing the established historical narrative of European history, and especially the Renaissance.

In a recent article, the historian Peter Burke referred to Goody as “that vigorous opponent of Eurocentrism.” Goody insisted, among other things, that there were many renascences, rather than one Renaissance, and they happened in concert in Europe and beyond (Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto, 2017; Goody, 2010). Rather than being a singular event expressing a European monopoly on intellectual energy, it was thus necessary to speak of renascences in the plural, as recurrent, widespread, and interconnected cultural happenings.

Goody met with resistance, which inspired him to work all the more. In the closing decades of his life, Goody wrote seven books on the matter – with intriguing titles like The East in the West (Goody, 1996), The Theft of History (Goody, 2006), and Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Goody, 2010). Goody’s work has made it impossible to overlook the fact that most European innovations had been invented elsewhere, in Japan, China, India, or the adjacent Near Eastern and Arab worlds. And after Goody, it is now broadly agreed that the Renaissance must be understood not in the singular, but rather in the plural, and more significantly, as “the first genuinely global movement in the history of ideas.”

Historians continued to treat Europe as the center point, but they had to acknowledge that the European Renaissance had roots in many places, and impacted life in many others – including colonized peoples in America, particularly New Spain and New France (Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto, 2017). As Burke and his colleagues note, in 1539, Antonio de Mendoza was in Mexico City reading a work on architecture by Vitruvius,  thus fulfilling the traditional concept of the Renaissance as a “a movement to revive the culture of Greek and Roman antiquity” (ibid). But at the same moment, they note, Franciscan friars were teaching the sons of the Mexico nobility to write in Latin with Cicero as a model, and a rich assortment of new knowledge and valuables that went far beyond gold and silver – including tomatoes, potatoes, maize, peppers, and new spices – were flowing to Europe, India, southeast Asia, and China, where they were changing diets and much else.

Thus, as our narrative moves forward 18 centuries – from Aristotle (384-322 BCE) to 1492 – the world opens up much wider than ever before, and the traffic in ideas and the violence that accompanied that opening up achieves a global impact. Accordingly, the next chapter examines proto-anthropological research in sixteenth century New Spain, and chapter four follows by examining anthropological work seventeenth century New France.

REFERENCES CITED IN THE FIRST INTERLUDE

Burke, Peter., Clossey, L., & Fernández-Armesto, F. 2017. The Global Renaissance. Journal of World History, 28(1), 1–30.

Cassirer, Ernst. 2010 [1927]. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. University of Chicago Press.

Goody, Jack. 1996. The East in the West. Cambridge University Press.