Topography and Cosmography in the Sixteenth Century

A Window into Early Ethnography

Driton Nushaj

The history of anthropology rarely extends beyond the turn of the nineteenth century. But before anthropologists took up the study of culture, historians, missionaries, ambassadors, and other travelers with an interest in the language and customs of the people they visited produced their own written accounts. Where do these pre-ethnographic accounts fit in relation to a contemporary understanding of "ethnography"? Ancient writers such as Herodotus, Strabo, Ptolemy, and Tacitus did not differentiate ethnographic interests from their broader historical and geographical inquiries (Vermeulen 2015, 2–3). Nevertheless, the questions, methods, and paradigms that travel writers have employed since antiquity to describe otherness provide a glimpse into the epistemological evolution of "ethnography."

Margaret Hodgen (1964), in her historical comparison of pre-ethnographic genres, has shown that early ethnography should not be dismissed simply because it does not conform to secular and rationalist social science originating with Enlightenment thought. Moreover, the sentiments expressed by sixteenth-century writers like Michel de Montaigne and Bartolome de las Casas show an appreciation for a premodern conception of cultural relativism (Martin 2007, 134–35). The history of ethnography is partly a question of legitimacy: Are its origins in Enlightenment science or did it begin as a colonial enterprise in the Age of Discovery (Vermeulen 2015, 24)? While it can be argued that the first usage of the terms "ethnography" and "ethnology" corresponds to the inception of the epistemological foundation of the two concepts (Vermeulen 2015, 269–71), it is equally valid to claim that methods and perspectives that formed a "discipline" may predate its foundation. Moreover, a dialogue about the genealogy of ethnography avant la lettre — the exploration of the tangled roots of the well-defined contemporary discipline — need not lead to the "projecting [of] later epistemological views on the past" (Vermuelen 2015, 270).

This paper will compare the ethnographic and literary techniques used by two mid-sixteenth-century French missionaries — the Catholic Andre Thevet and the Calvinist Jean de Léry — who came into contact with the Tupinambas around Guanabara Bay in Brazil. The approaches that Thevet and de Léry used to write about the indigenous populations amounted to two divergent methods: "cosmography" and "topography," respectively. "Cosmography" reflected Thevet's desire to order the world according to schema used by Renaissance science, combining classical — especially Aristotelian — paradigms within a Catholic worldview (Nushaj 2016). By contrast, the topographic narrative of de Léry is a personal history embedded in the greater struggle of Protestant Huguenots against the Catholic French majority. De Léry's account is therefore structured by a confessional mode of retelling an adventure that tests the fortitude and righteousness of the author as he lands in a remote settlement in Brazil (Lestringant 1990). The clash of methods leads each author to affirm the veracity of his account based on a claim of direct experience. This claim to direct experience was noticeably lauded by Montaigne as a prerequisite for a reliable account about faraway "savages" (de Certeau 1986).

The Claim to Truth

The requirement of firsthand knowledge reflects a new spirit of skepticism expressed by Montaigne in the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformation and the discovery of the "New World" brought about fundamental changes in the European view of the world (Neto et al. 2009). The formulation of an empirical, (pre)scientific autopsy (Lestringant 1994, 13) was taking hold, pitting the experience of the New World against the received knowledge of Renaissance civilization with its basis in classical thought (Neto et al. 2009). Montaigne, in his essay "Of Cannibals," even proposes that the ideal witnesses should be "simple [and] crude" and thus not so clever as to twist information to their own ends (2003, 184). Moreover, when it comes to writing reports,

we ought to have topographers who would give us an exact account of the places where they have been. But because they have over us the advantage of having seen Palestine, they want to enjoy the privilege of telling us news about all the rest of the world. I like everyone to write what he knows, and as much as he knows, not only in this, but in all other subjects; for a man may have some special knowledge and experience of the nature of a river or a fountain, who in other matters knows only what everybody knows. However, to circulate this little scrap of knowledge, he will undertake to write the whole of physics. From this vice spring many great abuses. (2003, 184–85)

Montaigne comes down firmly on the side of reports that limit themselves to the author's direct observation and no more. Topography moved toward describing what was seen and experienced in a single place (topos) with attention to minor details guided by an inquisitive and close enquiry. The importance of observation is fundamental to de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil; the author is more emphatic than Thevet in the importance of sensory experience (Lestringant 1990, 129). "Mon intention et mon sujet sera en ceste histoire, de seulement declarer ce que j'ay pratiqué, veu, ouy et observé" (de Léry 1994, 105). (My intention and my subject in this history will be to declare only what I have experienced, seen, heard and observed [trans. mine]). The avowed commitment to empirical observation for de Léry is a matter of personal circumstances as opposed to a demand made by a preexisting topographic method. Nevertheless, by writing in a mode that emphasizes sensory experience, de Léry was moving away from the conventions of earlier travel writers and cosmographers. By limiting the scope of his account, de Léry avoids some of the "abuses" that are committed by the unbounded epistemological breadth of cosmography.

Jean de Léry and Andre Thevet write in a "poetics of...