Bullsh*t Anthropology - Reading Graeber & Wengrow

 

For a long time, I’ve thought that anthropologists and archaeologists tend to make a lot of grandiose and sweeping claims regarding the origins of culture and human society which they can’t really substantiate. At last, I’ve found an anthropologist and an archaeologist who seem to agree with me.

 

THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: A NEW HISTORY OF HUMANITY by David Graeber & David Wengrow (Penguin, 2022)

From the summer of 1994 to the summer of 1997, I was a student studying for a BSc in Anthropology at the University of East London (UEL). The Anthropology Department at UEL was staffed by academics who described themselves as Marxists. They maintained that what they were teaching us was ‘radical anthropology.’ One of the tutors was Chris Knight, an anthropologist who had come up with a novel idea for the origins of culture being linked to menstruation: – a theory which he maintained could be proved by meta studies of language and mythology, etc., wherein modern human societies had evolved out of a matriarchal primogenitor; presumably some long forgotten band of proto-communist hominids who had emerged ‘Out of Africa’ in the long dark and distantly remote millennia located at the other end of human prehistory. Folk memories of which, he maintained, still echo down the generations in common culturally-shared tales of myth and folklore. He called his theory the ‘sex strike’ theory, and he set out his elaborate thesis in a hefty scholarly tome, titled, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Yale University Press, 1991). This was the bible which we undergraduates were all expected to buy, imbibe, absorb, and adhere to, as well as to generally espouse as new radical anthropological-evangelists – especially (it was taken as tacitly read), if we wished to do well in our essays and the final exams, thereby earning our degrees.

 

It was an extremely well-choreographed curriculum, a slick syllabus which was very deftly delivered by a bunch of very clever and adept academics. In the first year we were all generally wowed, bowled over, utterly enthralled and completely taken in. But some students among our cohort began to have their doubts at some point or other during the second year of our studies. In the third year some even began to openly rebel. And, of course, the result was a graduating class neatly differentiated into thirds, two-twos, two-ones, and firsts, with the weightier majority of sceptics grouped at the lower end of this academic scale, and the few fully-paid up acolytes rewarded for their open homages to the guru in the rarefied elite group of first-class honours (a grand total of three out of thirty-or-so graduates, if I recall correctly). I was a lower-middling sceptic, who, having sought to divert and dilute my degree with as many scientific archaeology electives (run by the Environmental Science Department at UEL’s Stratford Campus) as I was permitted to take, somehow emerged at the other end of it all having gained myself a ‘Desmond’ (i.e. – a two-two).

 

Looking back, it was a truly bizarre and intellectually beguiling three years. I remember sitting and rather squeamishly watching what felt like a glacially-paced film screening of two Yanomami Indians with pudding bowl haircuts, somewhere deep in the Amazon, repeatedly bashing each other over the head with long wooden poles. It looked like a much more violent and far less funny version of Monty Python’s fish slapping dance. I remember wondering what I was meant to make of it all. Looking back now, it seems like an apt metaphor for my three years as an anthropology student. However, I no longer dismiss those three years quite as diffidently as I probably did at the time. Undoubtedly, I did learn a lot during my undergraduate degree, and what I learnt is something I’ve reflected upon and probably continued to adapt over the course of the intervening decades.

Karl Marx

 

Certainly, when I returned to university (after some 15 or so ‘gap years’) to study for an MA degree in World History, all that early grounding in Marxist theory meant reading Eric Hobsbawm made a lot more sense than I’d expected it would. During my BSc, I had become very interested in one area of anthropology which UEL termed as ‘cultures of dominance and cultures of resistance.’ And, rather naively, I thought I’d stolen an intellectual march upon my tutors by writing a short dissertation explaining the success of the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia using Gramscian-Marxist theories of hegemony and power. I really enjoyed researching and writing this particular piece, and it seemed all the more ironic to me that I did so while sitting at one of the desks in the old Round Reading Room of the British Library, where Karl Marx himself famously used to sit reading and scribbling.

 

The Round Reading Room, The British Library

But the truth was, much of my undergraduate studies completely befuddled me. I’d really wanted to study for a joint anthropology and archaeology degree at Durham University, but things had gone awry with my A-levels. And so, after running the grim gauntlet of ‘clearing’ (in which I very nearly got into SOAS), I ended up at UEL feeling utterly thwarted. One good thing about UEL though, was that the timetable was very compact. It was usually condensed into just two- or three-days attendance per week. This meant that during my undergraduate years I was able to spend a lot of my time working as a volunteer at the British Museum, and I also spent a month each summer camping on archaeological excavations in the UK, which is where I really wanted to be. Consequently, much of what I was taught at UEL seemed like it was a diversion from what I was properly interested in.

 

That diversion, I realise now, was essentially the theoretical side of things. I mistakenly thought I was solely interested in the ‘material culture’ aspect of our remote past, but the truth is (and always was) that there’s no divorcing the two aspects. Material remains only tell you so much. It’s true that a lot can be revealed from sophisticated scientific analysis: – for example, examining dental enamel from a skeleton can tell you that the person whose grave was excavated at Site X actually grew up and spent most of their life living at Site Y, which is mind-blowing because Site X and Y are thousands of miles apart and there’s nothing else associated with that grave which could have told you this remarkable fact about the physical mobility of both individuals and broader populations at this time. Although, that said, I did find it unconscionably tedious to sit through lecture-after-lecture on the slow multi-millennia-long evolution of emmer wheat, which it seemed as though it was being taught in real time! – But in many ways, listening to outlandish theories about how human culture had evolved out of a system of collective social coercion which was codified in cyclical systems relating to menstruation, sororal solidarity, and the phases of the moon seemed oddly mind-bending in an altogether totally different direction, and a trifle too speculative for some of us even as still wet-behind-the-ear undergraduates. As far as theories go, this one certainly qualified as being firmly ‘out there’ on the fringes. I took very few notes during my third year. Instead, I mostly sat there listening to our lecturers with a somewhat baffled sense of intense concentration, and at the end of each lecture my conclusions always seemed to amount to the same response, which was: “But how can you possibly know that for sure?”

 

It was only much, much later on in life that I came to realise that this is the point of the humanities. Even subjects such as archaeology, anthropology, and history, which draw on concrete aspects of science and scientific practices, are essentially nothing more than plausible fictions – ideas, opinions, theories – it’s as simple as that. Though some practitioners in these fields might evangelically espouse their academic revelatory notions as some sort of gnostic gospel truth which we should all revere and adhere to as the ‘be-all, end-all’ answer to the ultimate questions concerning the origins of life, the universe and everything – it’s still only a theory, their theory. It’s simply one theory among many which have gone before, and one which will be followed by many more still to come.

 

It was the cult-like hagiographical obeisance that came with the theory which really turned me off and caused me to tune out, although not drastically enough to make me drop out. I hung on in there. Partly, because it was a circus which, nevertheless, could still entertain even the most sceptical of minds. I clearly remember the closing moment of the final lecture for my BSc, when one of our tutors had wowed us for one last time with such a grand epiphany-like conclusion to their showman-like exposition, explaining some all-encompassing aspect of life rooted in the long lost deep-time of human prehistory, and one of my (by now deeply-jaded) fellow-students raised his hand and asked: “Yeah, that’s all very interesting, but where do the Spice Girls fit into all of that?” --- To which the long-suffering tutor concluded his lecture by telling my fellow student (and former housemate) to “F*ck off!” --- It was certainly a radical and rather definitive ending to three very long but ultimately intellectually-formative years.

 

Consequently, reading the first chapter of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Penguin, 2022) instantly catapulted me back to that 1930s-era lecture hall at UEL’s old Barking campus. Here was a book, at long last, which seemed to be echoing my baffled bemusement. A book which was also asking: “But how can you possibly know that?” – A book which was at last finally holding up a mirror to what (to coin a David Graeber-like phrase) I’d long thought of as being bullsh*t anthropology.

 

Graeber and Wengrow’s book begins by stating that: “Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 BC. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.” – How fantastically refreshing. A book about everything which starts by stating that we know nothing as a point of fact! – But, of course, there has to be more to it than that. After all, how else could this book be over 700 pages long? – How the heck is it going to make sense of all of this unknowable stuff?

 

Well. This is a very smart book. One which balances both exegesis and exposition. Hence it should be read not so much in search of concrete answers, but perhaps more in quest of cognitive challenges. It walks a surprisingly genial line between hermeneutics and teleology (largely by means of avoiding the use of such words). It’s a real joy to read. An intelligently clear and conversational book. One which encourages us to engage with our own dialectical processes of reasoning: telling us that the answers we seek matter only if we give equal weight to the questions which beget those answers; prompting us to wonder why such questions need asking at all? – In essence, it is all a matter of perspectives. And, of course, awareness. Maintaining an awareness that individual and collective personal, social and cultural biases pervade all levels of critical thinking. In many ways, we are simply blind to our own blind spots. But we can escape this ever-decreasing circle.

 

In order to demonstrate this, the two Davids go back to the supposed rational objectivity of Enlightenment thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, looking at their engagement with little-known contemporary world-views as were then held by the relatively recently encountered cultures of the New World. Asking not how the assumed proto-communist equality of our early ancestors was lost, and thereby wondering how inequalities within our societies first arose; but rather, asking why it was (and still is) assumed that we began our social evolution in these egalitarian bands of early hunter-gatherers? – Graeber and Wengrow speculate that perhaps the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity (within distinctly defined limits and constraints) came into being as a response to the interactions of colonial settlers and missionaries with the Amerindian populations they encountered in the New World.

 

It’s a fascinating reversal. And it is also a far cry from what I was taught as an anthropology undergraduate back in the mid-1990s. At that time the theoretical-side of physical anthropology was alive with debates between those who believed the ‘Out of Africa’ theory, advocated by anthropologists such as Chris Stringer and my own tutors at UEL, and those who adhered to the ‘multi-regional evolution’ theory of equally eminent scholars such as Milford Wolpoff, and also Lewis Binford’s ‘new archaeology’, which redefined processual approaches to the study of material culture. Elaine Morgan even came and gave us a special lecture on her ‘aquatic ape’ theory – a lecture which was partly disrupted by some Islamic fundamentalist students, who were regularly causing problems at UEL at that time (… I’ve often wondered in recent years what became of those guys and where they are today). Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), a major scientific recalibration of Darwinian evolution, was a much-venerated text at this time at UEL too. The (then still relatively recent) DNA-sequencing findings regarding so-called ‘mitochondrial Eve’ were helping to bolster the popular image of the African Rift Valley as some sort of Garden of Eden for early humanity. And the eponymous Australopithecus, known as ‘Lucy’, along with the footprints found at Laetoli, were the superstar protagonists of most of our essays.

 

But, despite the very tempting allure of all this anthropological evangelism, I couldn’t help being niggled by my doubts, mostly arising from the sparsity of evidence which was so thinly but definitively staked out over such vast tracts of time – how could so much theoretical weight be borne by the stray findings of a single fragment from an incomplete hominid fossil dating from one distant millennium be made to quantum leap through the aeons and marry with that found in another? – The two Davids phrase it far better than I ever could have done so when I was writing about all this back in 1994-1997: “If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3 million years, there actually was an age in which the lines between (what we today think of as) human and animal were still indistinct; and when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.” (p.89*)

 

It wasn’t so much the theorisation itself which bothered me, but rather the imperative didacticism which went with it. The fact that we were required to nail our (preferably Marxist) colours to the mast and expected to defend them to the death. There was no room for bourgeois ‘middle-roaders’, even though all I wanted to do was keep an ‘open mind’ to all the different possibilities. And I guess around this time, the two Davids – who aren’t that much different in age to me, must have been thinking the same as fellow undergraduates in their respective institutions. As they say: “There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint. While the technology we are capable of bringing to bear on such remote periods improves dramatically each decade, there’s only so much you can do with sparse material. As a result, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to fill in the gaps, to claim we know more than we really do. When scientists do this the results often bear a suspicious resemblance to those very biblical narratives modern science is supposed to have cast aside.” (p.90)

 

In many ways, especially when looking at the Palaeolithic, all of this seems so massively remote that it is surely inconsequential to our own lives as modern human beings, isn’t it? – Well, maybe not. There is more than just a philosophical dimension to pondering the deep past. It is also a way of reflecting upon the present. If we haven’t always been the way we are now, what are the possibilities for the future, and who might we yet become? – In this sense, The Dawn of Everything does have another dimension. It seeks to go beyond a straightforward re-write of anthropological thinking. This book does have an agenda: “There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. To understand how this situation came about, we should trace the problem back to what first made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges.” (p.87-88)

 

As already noted, modern thinking is to a large degree rooted in the ethos born out of the Western Enlightenment. It is a distinctly entrenched paradigm which surrounds us like a fog, but anthropology and archaeology can help us to wake up to the fact that not everything everywhere has been the same for all time. There are distinctly different ways of living, of organising and operating as collectively cohesive social animals. An excellent book, in this regard, which I value very highly is David Turnbull’s Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies In The Sociology Of Scientific And Indigenous Knowledge (2000), which really does show in a series of remarkably mind-expanding modes that there are many diverse epistemologies which can be used to understand our shared world, as well as re-orientating our perspectives within it – from the cross-generational collaborative means and methods by which enormous Medieval cathedrals were designed and constructed, to the global navigational systems whose subtleties were honed, adapted and successfully applied over centuries by Pacific islanders, regularly migrating over vast (and seemingly featureless) tracts of open ocean, almost like seafaring nomads. The way of the world forged in the mindset of the Western Enlightenment is far from the only way to collectively know and understand ourselves.

 

Indeed, this was also something we looked at as part of my Anthropology BSc. I remember, during that ‘cultures of dominance and cultures of resistance’ module I mentioned earlier, we studied E.R. Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), which, when it was first assigned to us, I thought qualified as perhaps the most boring sounding book title in the world. But, in truth, it was utterly fascinating. It spoke of the ways in which one society could periodically shift its social system of governance, operating in a kind of double morphology. Echoing the early work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on the Nambikwara in the Amazon, which Graeber and Wengrow discuss in some detail (in Chapter 3 of The Dawn of Everything), the Kachin of Burma regularly alternated between two organisational systems depending on prevailing factors at different times. As Graeber himself summarises Edmund Leach’s book (on GoodReads): “This is an anthropological classic of the first water – and one of the books that opened my eyes to what anthropology could be. It’s hard to explain how reading about hill tribes in Southeast Asia where powerful people periodically try to create little kingdoms (gumsa) in imitation of the Shan states in the valleys, but where the complexities of their forms of agriculture and marriage systems inevitably lead them to collapse and form democratic republics (gumlao) again – and then the whole cycle starts all over again – but when you read it, you are entranced. Well, okay, I was. It’s books like this that made me want to dedicate my life to anthropology.”

 

Since Leach wrote way back in the 1950s, much more recently this same region has inspired a whole new re-evaluation of so-called ‘anarchic’ states of being which has resulted in a much debated concept, dubbed ‘Zomia’, in which certain societies situated in the highlands of Southeast Asia have seemingly managed to avoid incorporation into the fabric of the modern nation states that surround them without being wholly cut-off from modernity, as is often assumed of remote Amazonian tribes and the like. James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) is the equally entrancing text which has sparked this revival of interest in such matters. It’s exactly these kinds of academic reappraisals which, as the two Davids highlight, is now causing a growing number of people to re-evaluate the long-held assumptions that there was some sort of uniform social and political progress within early human societies, leading from simple egalitarianism to more complex, codified and hierarchical systems; which in turn led to agriculture and urbanisation, then onto conquest and colonisation, etc., eventually resulting in the modern globalised world of capitalist, free trade and free market economies which we know and hold today as supposedly the ‘be all, end all’ perfection of human existence.

 

Essentially, we have lost sight of how societies can and do change in order to adapt according to their shifting ecological and economic circumstances. While I was at UEL I remember reading and writing about two starkly contrasting studies conducted by the same anthropologist. These ethnographies were The Forest People (1961) and The Mountain People (1972) by Colin Turnbull, which respectively describe life among the Mbuti and the Ik, two societies each located in vastly different regions of Africa. The first book presents a vision of a mobile band of pygmies living an idyllic, egalitarian, Garden of Eden-like existence, while the other confronts the reader with a harsh and hellish, Holocaust-like vision of a violently brutal and selfish society, having been pushed to the very brink of social cohesion by dislocation, drought, famine and an oppressive scarcity of resources (the Ik were previously nomadic, but had been forced to become sedentary). Writing an essay on The Mountain People was possibly one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. But it was an education in itself of how the norms we take for granted only afford us the narrowest of views as to what human life can be – particularly in its potentials for both good and ill. It taught me that an appreciation for difference, and a desire to know (even if it’s impossible to fully understand) another culture is the true gift of studying anthropology, i.e: maintaining an openness to insight.

 
 

Ever since completing those three years and graduating with my Anthropology BSc, I’ve had a long and troubled relationship with my first degree. At the time it seemed like a mistake, and I struggled with the pedagogical constraints through which it had to be negotiated; but ultimately, I don’t regret it. If anything, it has come to exert an ever-greater relevance to the things which I have done subsequently. I know anthropology has shaped and informed my outlook on life in general, and it still very much influences my approach to my continuing PhD studies as an historian. Hence, what once seemed like a bad hand which life’s croupier had dealt me, one that has long lingered with me like a cognitive millstone, now seems to have been a long unappreciated gift – one which only the passing of time has at last finally managed to unmask. As in Turnbull’s The Forest People, seeing the sacred molimo trumpet out of context is merely a prosaic act when contrasted with the importance of visualising what it embodies while hearing it at the appropriately sanctioned moment in its ritualised use. Essentially, behind the different masks of certainty which other people force us to choose between, I believe it is possible to maintain a sense of ‘negative capability’ (as John Keats described it: that is, the ability to balance and live with opposing or contradictory thoughts and ideas). Because this might very well be the only thing which (paradoxically) helps us to stay sane.

 

Looking back, I see two experiences: one at the very end of our undergraduate degree, and the other many years later, which put this conclusion into the most quotidian of contrasts for me – posing a fundamental question which I’ve never really been able to fully answer for myself, hence why the continual relevance of such a prolonged re-evaluation remains a constant in my thinking-life: 

The first was a discussion that some of my fellow students had amongst ourselves after one of our last lectures at the end of our final year. It was a moment marking the culmination of all of us having spent three years steeped in a deep and meaningful appreciation of the rich, broad cultural and political diversity of humanity in all its myriad forms. Someone idly asked all of us what we were going to do once we’d finished our studies that summer. Most spoke of summer jobs and then of their aspirations towards future careers or further education: MAs, MScs, that kind of thing. But one lad, a young Israeli boy, said he was going home to do his National Service. Most of the group openly commiserated with him, but he looked up and quickly rebuffed us, saying: “Oh no, I’m looking forward to it. I’ll get the chance to shoot some Palestinians!” – There was an uneasy silence. No one was sure if he was joking or not.

 

The second happened a couple of decades later, when I was flying home to London from Seoul in South Korea. I was sitting next to a young Korean girl, and naturally enough at some point during the long flight we got talking. She told me she was travelling to the UK to begin studying at university. She quizzed me on what life was like in the UK, what my own experience had been of going to university there, and she asked me what I’d studied. When I told her I’d studied anthropology she said it was a subject which interested her and quizzed me further on what that was all about, so I did my best to summarise it. When I’d finished, she asked me with a dead straight face (the seriousness of which only just stopped me in the nick of time from bursting into laughter): “How do you reconcile all of that with your faith in Jesus Christ?”

 

Sitting back in my seat, traversing the world at 35,000 feet, far above the immense spectrum of everyday lives being lived out collectively and individually beneath the raft of pure white clouds passing below us at a rapid rate of knots in that sealed metal tube with wings, I found myself reflecting once again: how it is all too easy to take the world at face value and not realise that we are all only ever looking into a mirror which simply shows us what we already know and consequently take completely for granted. There’s no seeing the wood for all the trees. No wonder, then, that the world is such a messed-up place!

 

If life tends to confound our expectations, it’s no wonder we are always seeking to find the points upon which we can anchor ourselves. But the true challenge is trying to travel freely by casting those anchors aside. Attempting to see beyond that mirror, to look into other surfaces and perceive how things might be reflected differently there. For me, this book, The Dawn of Everything, is a mirror of one sort or another. I’m not sure if it represents a revelation of something new, or simply a confirmation of all the things I thought I already knew, but which previously I had no way of articulating for myself before reading it. I realise I am still very much stuck in my initial, overly-enamoured phase of admiration for this particular book. And it is a book which I’d highly recommend everybody to read. Sadly, my quasi-review here has barely even scratched the surface of all that it contains, nor have I done sufficient justice to the real aplomb with which this book is crafted. It is truly impressive (I could hardly believe my eyes, but the two authors’ description of the domestication of wheat is genuinely riveting reading!). Had he not passed away in September 2020, David Graeber could well have become for me the anthropological guru par excellence whom I’d managed so assiduously to avoid all these years!

 

And in this regard, I should perhaps end by coming full-circle, to append a somewhat amusing footnote, referring back to Chris Knight: who, despite his professed admiration for David Graeber, has recently taken Graeber to task by rather baldly stating that: “For David and his whole circle, I don’t exist. My book doesn’t exist, it never got written, and it’s irrelevant.”** – Knight seems to think that Graeber doesn’t give enough credence to the findings of ethnographers and consequently totally misreads the most fundamental truths about hunter-gatherer societies. Personally, I think Graeber and Wengrow’s new book does engage with all of the issues which Knight complains about (see Chapters 4 & 6 in particular). And likewise, according to my reading of The Dawn of Everything, I also think the two Davids very effectively expose a lot of the speculative assumptions inherent in ‘bullsh*t anthropology’ (which I’ve complained about at length above) by underlining my contention that speculations are all we really have to work with here. Consequently, as with any theory regarding the origins of human society, there needs to be enough latitude for doubt, even if they too (Graeber and Wengrow, that is) think they’ve managed to figure it all out and have very persuasively managed to argue their own particular case.

 

Ultimately, all churches – whether sacred or secular – are founded upon faith. In the end, the only choice we each have is deciding who we wish to follow. I guess – as with my ever-evolving reflections upon the strange fruits of my Anthropology BSc, fruits both sweet and sour in a world both complex and straightforward – the real test, I suppose, will be to see what I think of this particular book in 30 years’ time. After all, it’ll be fascinating to see where things go from here.

 

*NB – The page numbers I reference above are taken from the page counter of a PDF version of the book (which you can find here on the Internet Archive) which gives no actual page numbers on the text itself.

**Quote taken from an address which Chris Knight made to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Online Communist Forum on 24 January 2021.

~

I have collated a playlist on YouTube of videos by and about David Graeber – including a couple of critiques of Graeber’s work by Chris Knight (as quoted above), and interviews with David Wengrow about ‘The Dawn of Everything.’ Knight has also written a blog post giving his own extensive critique of ‘The Dawn of Everything’ which you can find here: Chris Knight - Wrong About (Almost) Everything (FocaalBlog, 22 December 2021). There’s also an interesting article on some of the early critical responses to ‘The Dawn of Everything’ here in The Observer (12 June 2022). Plus a reluctantly disappointed homage, which asks 'What Happened to David Graeber?' by Crispin Sartwell, LARB (20 January 2024). And for a recent review of the current situation concerning the debate between the 'Out of Africa' vs. 'Multi-regional' models of human evolution, you can listen to Prof. Chris Stringer’s 2023 Huxley Lecture - 'Mostly Out of Africa.'

Trolley Hunters - Banksy

 

 Also on 'Waymarks'

From the Heart of the World - Alan Ereira

Shandley Williams - Totem

Ring of Fire - An Indonesian Odyssey

Peckham Rock - Banksy

Elspeth Huxley - Seeing West Africa on the Cusp

 

Four Guineas by Elspeth Huxley (first published 1954) is a colonial geographer's guide to West Africa, written with a journalist's eye leavened by a certain degree of philosophical self-reflection. Not so much a travelogue as a gazetteer, tallying the accounts of British taxpayer's financial contributions to the "civilising mission" of empire in a "benighted land."

The book describes Elspeth Huxley's personal view, as she sees it, of an ancient continent without art or culture (except for the inexplicable 'anomalies' of Nok, Benin and Ife), of 'ju-ju' cults and tribal societies mired in blood feuds and lingering rumours of (once prolific) human sacrifice, seen askance from the diligent efforts of colonial district officers and missionaries, toiling in the opposite direction, setting up schools and hospitals; alongside rising local and national political institutions, struggling in their infancies. The author's eye and voice is ever present in these pages, but the author oddly isn't. The text manages to stand at one remove from both of these opposing 'realities' of Africa. But ultimately Huxley's purported objectivity is opaque, a thin veneer over the surface of things as seen en passant.

Whilst Four Guineas seeks to immerse the reader in the daily life of West Africa the book constantly circles back upon itself and betrays Huxley's self-affirming (if at times jaundiced) view of Britain's imperial mission - and this makes it a hard book to navigate, a tough read in some respects, now some 70 years on from its original time of publication. Oddly dry and redundantly academic, but with flashes of life and wit appearing every once in a while, usually as a terminal flourish to each chapter. Although, more often than not, that wit is witheringly ironic and condescending, occasionally racist in places. And yet, Huxley has a keen eye and a sharp pen when it comes to the inequities, physical harm and misogyny experienced by African women.

It's a strange book. Neither wholly a champion nor a detractor of empire, Huxley isn't exactly an apologist either, though her attempts at being an objective observer tend to veer in that direction. Four Guineas casts an eye into a particular time and place, both consciously/unconsciously couched in a particular contemporary mindset - it gives a window into a colonial world in its twilight phase, pondering the onset of the post-colonial at its cusp; and as such, it perhaps remains a valuable historical document for that fact in and of itself alone, as the following two quotes from the book's closing pages may help to illustrate:

"A new troubling tide - that is what we are, we Westerners, a tide that has stirred the deposit of centuries. Tides, by their nature, recede. In one sense we are already in recession; as the ruling power, Britain is everywhere disengaging her grip. The speed of this retreat is indeed phenomenal, and much greater than it needs to be if Britain's work is to endure. As it is, the time has been too short to lay secure, or even rudimentary, foundations. Yet, had it been prolonged, the ill-will engendered by sloth in abdication - once abdication had been proclaimed as the objective - would so have inflamed and poisoned the body politic that Britain's constructive task would have become impossible, since rifles do not promote racial harmony. This was Britain's dilemma, which she solved by deciding to hurry quickly and risk the results." p.312

"It sometimes appears that our modern colonies are forcing-houses where, under conditions of great heat and sultriness, we cultivated transplanted seedlings in soil deficient in certain ingredients needed for the healthy growth of those particular exotics. We force an omnipotent bureaucracy without honesty, a democracy without enlightenment, an economy without toil, a nation without unity, a culture without art: in short, a society without faith to give it purpose or a code of morals to give it strength. Strange blooms may result." p.313

[My copy is The Reprint Society (London, 1955) edition]

 

Elspeth Huxley, 1907-1997

Elspeth Huxley was born in England in 1907 to British parents, Nellie (née Grosvenor, daughter of Lord Stalbridge) and Major Josceline Grant, who became colonial settlers in Thika, British East Africa (now Kenya) in 1912. Growing up on her parent’s coffee plantation, Elspeth began her somewhat sporadic education at a 'whites only' school in Nairobi, and then briefly at boarding school at Aldeburgh in Suffolk from which she was expelled for gambling on horse racing. In 1925 she returned to England in order to study agriculture at Reading University, then in 1928 she continued her studies in the USA at Cornell University. After which she worked as an assistant press officer at the Empire Marketing Board, and then subsequently as a broadcaster for the BBC during the 1940s and 1950s, specialising in African affairs. She also served as member of the Monckton Advisory Commission on Central Africa (1959-1960).

 

In 1931 Elspeth married into the famous Huxley family. Her husband, Gervas Huxley, who had been her boss at the Empire Marketing board, was a cousin of the writer, Aldous Huxley. She was also a friend of Joy Adamson, author of Born Free (1960), which is perhaps more widely remembered because of its film adaptation and the popular song of the same title. Elspeth’s own writing career was long and prolific. She began as a teenage journalist, writing for various newspapers and magazines in Africa. Publishing her first book in 1935, she subsequently authored more than forty books of both fiction and non-fiction – Africa forming the common theme and backcloth to her novels, memoirs, travelogues, and commentary works. Perhaps naturally her colonial background, her education, and her work for British imperial institutions shaped and influenced her outlook which was initially very pro-colonial, but she later came to support contemporary moves towards African Independence, as Four Guineas attests. In this respect, whilst some of her personal attitudes have become outmoded, her polemical writings still stand as interesting insights into, and valuable eye-witness accounts of changing colonial attitudes regarding the political, economic, environmental, and cultural issues which were widely salient across the African continent during the mid-late twentieth century.

 

Four Guineas is perhaps not one of her better-known works, such as The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (1959) and The Mottled Lizard (1962), autobiographical reflections upon her life growing up in Kenya which have been criticised as describing a rose-tinted view of colonial Africa and providing an apologia for colonial rule. Her books, however, also reflect a deep and often empathetic interest in the cultures of the Masai and Kikuyu peoples, which she had previously written about in her novel, Red Strangers (1939). When it was first submitted to the Macmillan publishing house, the unflinching descriptions Red Strangers contained of female circumcision rites were said to have made Harold Macmillan (who later became British Prime Minster) blanche, but refusing to compromise on editing such passages Huxley took the book to Chatto & Windus instead, who published it with less qualms. A recent reissue of the book by Penguin Classics was supported by the polemical scientist, Richard Dawkins, who himself was likewise born and raised in colonial Kenya. Dawkins also wrote a preface to the new edition.

 

In 1962 Huxley was awarded a CBE for her writings on Africa, and she continued writing on these subjects into the 1990s. Elspeth Huxley died in England in 1997, aged 89. In an obituary, The New York Times described her as “a witty and energetic journalist” whose “eclectic literary output reflected an extraordinary range of interests”, and as a constant supporter of myriad causes who remained tirelessly “energetic to the end.” It seems to me she was perhaps a writer of her own era, but also one who reflected the changes and adaptations of those times, having lived through an epoch in which the world experienced a massive and rapid cultural shift of global proportions. Through her contemporary commentaries she perhaps unwittingly gave us a ‘history of the present’ as she and her contemporaries saw it in real time; a worldview which we might no longer share in its narrowness and its self-inflated suppositions, but one which we could certainly benefit from studying and understanding in order to broaden and better our own.

Also on 'Waymarks'

Dan Eldon - "Safari as a Way of Life"

Temples & Feluccas - Travelling in Egypt

Challenge in Nigeria, 1948.

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. - Africa and Colonialism

An Interview with Elspeth Huxley, 1970.

Further Reading

Elspeth Huxley and the Dead Man: On Writing Heroes and Heroines

by Eva Molina, Other Annapurnas, 24 May 2023

Owen Lattimore's Desert Road

 

In early January 2020, I bought myself a copy of Owen Lattimore’s The Desert Road to Turkestan (1929) in the gorgeous treasure house of books which is Isseido Bookstore in Jimbocho, Tokyo’s famous ‘book town’ district. It was a travelogue which I had long been wanting to read, but 2020 had other plans. I left it at our home in Tokyo and then found myself stuck 9,000 miles away, unable to return as I then found myself living under ‘lockdown’ in the UK during the Corona virus pandemic which seemed to stop the world in its tracks. It was well over a year and a half before I was reunited with my copy of Lattimore’s first published work, but it was well worth the wait. Owen Lattimore’s Desert Road is a truly magical book.

 

My copy is the Kodansha reissue of 1995, which contains Lattimore’s own updated Introduction from 1975, plus an additional Introduction written by his son, David Lattimore (Professor of Chinese Studies at Brown University in the USA). In this edition it’s interesting to read how the older Owen Lattimore looks back and reviews a work written while he was a young man. Re-evaluating some of its faults and weaknesses – faults which he deems were due either to his young age and inexperience, and/or due to the tenor of the times in which it was written. He says “there is […] a kind of condescension that makes me wince today, 45 years later when I read some of the pages – a once-fashionable condescension of ‘the white man among the natives.’ I particularly regret some of the patronising remarks about my loyal companion, ‘Moses’, because they belong to the bad old tradition of praising the ‘faithful native servant’ as an indirect way of building up one’s superiority. There are also passages that show that in spite of my love of venturing into the deep interior, I had by no means thrown off the social snobbery and appalling political insensitivity of the Treaty Port foreigner on the coast of China in the 1920s.” (p. xxvi)

 

That said though, Lattimore’s book is far less condescending than some of his contemporaries, such as the plant hunter, Reginald Farrer, for example, whose ‘humorous’ descriptions of the locals he hires in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands repeatedly reduces them to racist caricatures and simplistic clichés. Farrer and Lattimore were both men in their twenties at the time they wrote their travelogues; but, unlike Lattimore who lived a long life, Farrer died young (whilst travelling on one of his journeys), so we’ll never know if like Lattimore he may have grown to regret and revise the opinions of his younger self. Lattimore owns up to his overly “bookish” attempts (as he puts it) to impress his reader, viewing his first published work as “a young man’s effort, sometimes too strained an effort, to show how much he knows, how thoroughly he has mastered his problems, how deeply he has penetrated the lives of people whose nature the reader could never understand without his help.” (p. xxvi) However, his younger self was perhaps more perceptive than his older self gives him credit for. Certainly, he was more honest and open than a great many of his peers in one major respect, as the book’s original Preface attests; where he notes he has consciously attempted to avoid a “tendency, regrettably marked among my own countrymen, to omit all references [to other travellers, such as Nikolay Przhevalsky and Pyotr Kozlov], thus giving the vicious implication that one has been travelling in totally unexplored and unmapped countries.” (p.xxxv)

 

The Desert Road to Turkestan was a book which marked the beginning of a transformation in Lattimore’s life and livelihood. It certainly helped to launch him on a long and distinguished academic career. A career which was the envy of some of his contemporaries, who attempted to severely malign him in the suspiciously paranoid and febrile atmosphere of McCarthy era America during the 1950s. Born in the USA in 1900, Lattimore had grown up in China where his father worked as a businessman in Tianjin. And, like many children born to ‘Treaty Port’ foreigners, he was sent overseas to school, first in Switzerland and then in England. Returning to China, he entered employment in Arnhold & Co.’s import-export company. But unlike other foreigners residing in China at the time, Lattimore actively studied Chinese and Mongolian, a character trait which his family joked was due to the fact that he simply couldn’t “bear not to know what other people are saying.” His job as a commercial agent required him to travel, a role in which his abilities as a polylinguist were a real advantage. It was one such journey, “to expedite a wool shipment,” which led him to the railhead at Hohhot (Kuei-hua), where modern transportation reached its furthest extent and gave way to the older modes transit which had hitherto sustained the commerce between China and Central Asia for centuries, the place where great long caravans of camels set out across the steppes of Mongolia, following the much fabled ‘Silks Roads’ heading west. Lattimore was transfixed. He realised this was a way of life which was teetering on the cusp of great change.

 

“It was a strange thing to walk in those markets, feeling the pulses of the life led through inenarrable yesterdays by the farthest-going caravans, and knowing the shadow of tomorrow would distort all their type and character. When the camel man has done up his bundle, he shambles away out of the city as if he were expecting to stroll home within half an hour; but he plods on until he finds the camp where the caravan waits behind the hills with its camels at pasture, until its complement of loads be filled; when camp is broken, he plods away again until he fetches up in Central Asia; for the men of his calling, by leaving their houses and pitching tents, depart with no more ado from the civilization of telegraphs and newspapers, bayonets and martial law, into a secret and distant land of which they only know the doors.” (p.27)

 

Eleanor & Owen Lattimore

Oddly enough this journey was actually Lattimore’s honeymoon, yet he travelled alone with the caravan men across Mongolia. His wife, Eleanor Holgate Lattimore, likewise travelled alone – departing from Manchuria, heading to ‘Chinese Turkestan’ (Xinjiang) through Russia on the trans-Siberian railway. Rendezvousing in Xinjiang the newly-weds travelled onwards together, through the Karakorum mountains to India via Ladakh, even though the internecine rivalries between Chinese warlords which around this time in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 frequently flared up in chaotic bouts of fighting meant this would likely be a hazardous undertaking. Eleanor later published her own travelogue, Turkestan Reunion (1934), which travels in tandem to Owen’s Desert Road, based on her letters written during the journey. The couple returned to China once more after a brief stay in America, travelling through Manchuria. Owen wrote about this journey in his second travelogue, High Tartary (1930). Returning to Mongolia in the 1930s, Lattimore continued to observe and reflect upon the influence of Chinese settlers on the traditional way of life of the nomadic pastoralists whom the Chinese were increasingly displacing. 

 

 

Although he had sat and passed the entrance exam for Oxford, Lattimore never went to university because he was unsuccessful in attaining the scholarship which he would have needed to support himself during his studies. This missed opportunity, however, certainly never held him back. Indeed, soon after it was published, The Desert Road to Turkestan was duly noted for its scholarly merits. As his son, David, recounts: “In America, the Social Sciences Research Council, imaginatively judging the book equivalent to a Ph.D., awarded my father a year of ‘postdoctoral’ study in anthropology at Harvard University. More grants followed for further travel and study in China and Inner Asia, one from the Harvard-Yenching Institute and two successive ones from the Guggenheim Foundation.” It was perhaps an astute rather than ‘imaginative’ award, because anyone reading The Desert Road surely can’t help but take notice and admire the deft and very subtle way in which Lattimore manages to interweave highly perceptive strands of several allied subject areas – combining geography with history and anthropology, and these in turn with etymology and language, as well as relevant nods to contemporary politics – all within the first-hand narration of a singular and unusual journey. The Desert Road very ably records what was certainly an arduous journey made at a unique point in time. It’s this combination of elements, along with Lattimore’s quietly understated talent as a writer, which today makes this book a genuine classic.

 

 

When I began reading it, I expected Lattimore to be erudite and interesting. I’d already dipped into his most famous scholarly work, The Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1940). But what I’d not really expected was for him to be such affable company while travelling on The Desert Road. There are several points where his humour shines through marvellously. To give just two examples, remarkably both from the same chapter of the book: – the first is his recounting of his conversation with a doctor friend prior to setting out, in which Owen is seeking advice on maintaining a healthy diet while travelling with the camel caravan, and what preparations he should make ahead of his journey:

 

“Now my stomach is a prideful organ that has always urged me to let it try anything once, and has usually liked it. Nevertheless, when I returned to Peking, I took that same stomach to a friend of mine who was a doctor with Mongolian experience and asked him what I should put into it. The doctor thought of a lot of things. He drew up a wonderful list in which the proportions of the proteins and the carbohydrates and the what-nots were superbly balanced. Then he checked it by the dietary of the American Navy (for he was versed in many things besides Mongolia), saw that it was good, and made some additions. Afterward I checked it with a check book and made some subtractions. Finally we arrived at a ‘modus edendi.’ Of the original theory on which the regimen was based I seem to remember only that the American Navy can keep afloat (if pushed, as the saying goes) on baked beans and what are Americonautically called “canned” tomatoes.

               Although a layman, I take a really intelligent interest in my gastric juices. Therefore, when the doctor had squared his idea of what I should buy with my idea of what I should pay, and announced that the calories, at any rate, would be no disgrace to the American Navy, I made bold to ask him how I stood on vitamins, the A and the B, or both, or either. I told him roundly that tinned vegetables were deficient in vitamins. Nor could he deny it. We pondered the vitamins with silent gloom and a whiskey-soda. At last the doctor said: ‘Well, anyway, America was largely civilized by the canned tomato.’ To which I answered … but no matter. The American Navy has been getting very large of late.” (p. 164)

 

Lattimore's dog, Suji (eating from a dead camel carcass?)

My other example rather reminds me of a very memorable passage in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933, coincidentally not so long after Lattimore’s Desert Road – in which Orwell meditates on the probable evolution and hence eventual dilution of the efficacy of the F word as a particularly versatile and pungently pugnacious swear word. Lattimore ponders the vernacular in a similar vein, observing:

 

“It is a pity that even in this age of experiment a treatise on swearing would have to be privately printed, because language that is robustly and originally foul is almost always achieved by startling combinations of words that look so disgusting. It is a still greater pity that the disguised use of swearing in print should have led to all kinds of sham. I do not mean so much things in the style of ‘d---!’ or ‘The captain swore a frightful oath. ‘Confound you!’ he said turning on his heel.’ I mean serious and active falsity in our literature, which was revealed to me while pondering an attempt to Bowdlerize the strong talk of the Kuei-hua camel men without emasculating it. What I cannot away with is the spurious ornament and gingerbread ‘picturesqueness’ of our versions of Persian, Egyptian, Arabic, Hindu, and Oriental cursing generally. In that hour of mental exertion it was forced on my understanding that the ruck of those rococo expressions must be not only related in kind but identical in word with many of the raw formulae of the caravan men. They have, I can only suppose, very little of that artful sophistication they have assumed in English. What is ko-p’ao! jih ta tsu-tsu! (a favourite address to a camel) but ‘O base-born son of a shameless ancestry!’ Yet literally (and, except for the comparatively little-known dialect of the northwest, I have selected an Easy Example for Beginners) it is ‘Bastard! – his ancestors!’

               It is at that word in blank that we stick. ‘Defile’ is in some measure a version; but it is not a full rendering, not a flat-footed, absolute translation.” (pp. 153-154)

 

I can’t help wondering what Lattimore would have made of them had he lived long enough to read the works of Irvine Welsh … ?

 

Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart at Gilgit, 1935.

The Desert Road to Turkestan had a significant influence on subsequent travellers to the region, perhaps most notably on Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, for whom the book was both an inspiration and a guide. Fleming and Maillart, both very young but experienced solo travellers, combined forces to make a journey through Xinjiang around ten to fifteen years after Lattimore made his journey through Mongolia. They were journalists, each respectively working for British and French newspapers at the time, who each subsequently wrote their own travelogues of their shared journey. It’s fascinating to read Fleming’s News from Tartary (1936) alongside Maillart’s Forbidden Journey (1937), simply to see how a single journey can differ so greatly in simple terms of personal perspective. Each disavowed any intentions to claim that they were ‘serious explorers’, claiming that their journey was an entirely ad hoc one which succeeded simply through luck and good fortune rather than by means of meticulous planning and preparation. Nonetheless, their journey was commended by more experienced veterans of the Desert Road, notably Sir Eric Teichman, who chronicled his own journey in a book titled, Journey to Turkistan (1937), and, of course, by Owen Lattimore himself.

 

Fleming’s book is nonchalantly laid back in tone, never seeming to take the journey seriously; an affected attitude which some have taken to be a cover for the fact that he was really making the journey in order to gather intelligence for the British Secret Service (his brother, Ian Fleming, was famously the writer and creator of James Bond, 007). Maillart’s book, in contrast, is much more reflective and romantic in tone; clearly the vast open spaces she travelled through, as well as the places and people she encountered, touched her heart deeply; and indeed, she continued to travel in Central Asia for many years thereafter. She subsequently made another famous shared journey, this time travelling through Afghanistan, travelling in company with fellow Swiss writer and photographer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom Maillart calls ‘Christina’ in her book, The Cruel Way (1947). Lattimore certainly thought very highly of Maillart, both as a traveller and a writer.

 

Ella 'Kini' Maillart

Given Lattimore’s unusual entré into academia, it is perhaps not so surprising to discover that his scholarly career was equally unusual. His academic life was suitably adventurous, and in many ways it remained as independently motivated as his first journey with Mongolia’s caravan men. It brought him into the orbit of some of the era’s most prominent and powerful statesmen. He met Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai in the 1930s, before they came to power in China. And he was appointed by American President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the Second World War to act as a foreign adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, who was then the President of the Republic of China. And though Lattimore’s politcial analysis differed little in substance from that of other official US China watchers at the time, his access to such individuals and some of his alleged political sympathies with the left enabled a shadow of doubt to be cast over his underlying aims and intentions. 

Owen Lattimore with Chiang Kai-shek

As such, he was suspected of harbouring Communist sympathies and accused of being the top Soviet spy operating covertly in the United States by Senators Joseph McCarthy and Pat McCarran. A lengthy Congressional Investigation meticulously picked through everything he wrote himself and commissioned from other writers and academics whilst he was working for the Institute of Pacific Relations as the editor of its journal, Pacific Affairs. No conclusive proof, however, was found at the time or since to prove the allegations; and despite the support of friends and colleagues during the tortuous course of the various hearings, Lattimore’s name and career in the US never really recovered from what he described in a book of the same title, as an Ordeal by Slander (1950). Consequently, in 1963 he moved to the UK where he took up an appointment to found a new Department of Chinese Studies (now East Asian Studies) at Leeds University, where he also established a programme of Mongolian Studies, a subject he remained devoted to even in the years after he retired. He spent much of the remainder of his life in Europe and Mongolia rather than the USA, although he died and was buried there in 1989.

 

Owen Lattimore during the McCarthy Era Congressional Investigations

During his lifetime he received due recognition and many academic honours, and his scholarly work still resonates with students and specialists across many disciplines today because he retains that far-reaching, transcendental sense of perception which seems an essential prerequisite in making truly original connections. Lattimore’s work has since been built upon, continued and diversified in more recent years by many notable scholars, such as James Millward, Peter Perdue, and Alfred J. Rieber, to name only a few. And as Peter Perdue has observed, “Modern historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists have revised many of Lattimore’s arguments, but they still rely on his insights. All of the themes addressed by Lattimore continue to inspire world historians today.”

 

Indeed, despite his own self-referential criticisms of his younger authorial self in The Desert Road to Turkestan, I think there is still much to be learned from his first book – not least in terms of his mindset and his methodology, but also from his authorial manner; it is his patience and his curiosity allied together in the way in which he conducts himself and couches his observations which establish him as a master of his chosen métier. Setting his pace in time with that of the caravan plodding along the Desert Road, he walks with steady, well-paced assurance, with an open eye which remains trained to the horizon at all times. In many ways, reflecting on his background in relation to his remarkable life, beginning from relatively humble, if unusual, circumstances, and his highly accomplished career which managed to endure such extremes of adversity, I think it’s a fair claim to make, that Lattimore’s writings show that true scholars are both born and self-made.

 

~

Mongolia - On The Edge of the Gobi, 1975.

In 1975 Owen Lattimore advised and narrated two documentary films about Mongolia made for Granada Television’s “Disappearing World” series. These two films, plus a two-hour long interview with Lattimore by anthropologists, Caroline Humphrey and Alan Macfarlane in 1983, help to give a clear view of Lattimore as a person. His speaking voice was no less beautifully clear and measured than his written voice, it is a real joy to be able to hear him speak in what remain as a series of fascinating films and conversations. I have collated a ‘playlist’ of these documentaries and interviews on YouTube, which you can access here.

 

Mongolia - The City On The Steppes, 1975.

~

 

Owen Lattimore, 1967.

Further Reading

 

Charles Forsdick, ‘Peter Fleming & Ella Maillart in China: Travel Writing as Stereoscopic and Polygraphic Form,’ in Studies in Travel Writing, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2009), pp. 293-303

Caroline Humphrey & David Sneath, The End of Nomadism? Society, the State and the Environment in Inner Asia (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1999)

Justin M. Jacobs, Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016)

James Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)

Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, 2005)

Peter C. Perdue, ‘Owen Lattimore:World Historian’, in Oxford Handbooks Online: Scholarly Research Reviews, 2018.

Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

William T. Rowe, ‘Owen Lattimore, Asia, and Comparative History’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 66, No. 3 (August, 2007), pp. 759-786

 

 

 

Also on ‘Waymarks’

 

Hyperbole Most Florid – Reginald Farrer & William Purdom

Salween: Black River of Tibet – Ronald Kaulback & John Hanbury-Tracy

Retracing the Silk Road

“It seemed to me a little hard that I should have had only this one chance of seeing one of the remotest places of the earth [Etsina / Kara Khoto], and, passing almost within hail, yet pass it sight unseen. It made me wonder how much more I might have seen and learned, had I been a Competent Traveler, with all the assistance of lavish funds and the cordial regard of legations. As it was, the fortune I followed was no more than the fortune of travel in company with the trading caravans – the haphazard life among men whose very going forth and coming in is a survival from forgotten ages, and is as regardless of outer things; men sometimes closed-lipped and sometimes free-spoken, whose fragmentary legends of immemorial tradition are like dim lights flickering down long corridors of ignorance.” (pp. 193-194)

Owen Lattimore, on the Desert Road, 1926