Upon a Stone Altar

[ikhet_sekhmet]

I'm reading this book partly for a writing project and partly for the frivolous reason that one of my Kpop boys visited the Pacific island of Pohnpei as part of a "survival" reality show*. Apparently Pohnpei was the inspiration for R'yleh. This frippery aside, the introduction gives an overview of Western anthropology's changing attitude to the complex and sophisticated cultures of "nonliterate, technologically less sophisticated" peoples, which I found very helpful.

Despite the Romantic interest in the "noble savage" in the late Eighteenth Century, it wouldn't be until the early Nineteenth Century that scholars started to properly study what they called "primitive societies". The predominant idea was that societies should naturally progress from "primitive" to complex ones like our own (just as evolution was misunderstood as natural progress from simple to complex creatures). Herbert Spencer thought "primitive" societies had somehow got stuck; Lewis Henry Morgan, "laying the foundations for Marxian anthropology", thought early societies were "egalitarian communities distinguished by free and open access to the production, distribution, and consumption of goods", but became politicised, resulting in "stratification, exploitation, and inequality". (Now that particularly interested me because it's an idea I've come across a number of times in descriptions of early societies, such as Mesopotamia.) Franz Boas, by contrast, held that each society was unique, operating on its own laws, rather than by some universal principle.

Anthropologists began to accumulate large amounts of information about various cultures and to ponder how each one thought. Émile Durkheim, for example, argued that the meaning of religion wasn't the relationship with the supernatural, "but in the reaffirmation of human beings united, in part, by a strong system of belief". (That tallies with studies of evangelical religion in the US which found that adherents did not have a deep understanding of their denomination's theology - belief or faith was not what held their church together.) Claude Lévi-Strauss "believed the logic of mythical thought to be as clear and orderly as that of modern society".

Similarly, the peoples of the Pacific were not helpless, simple people destroyed by the arrival of Westerners, but "manag[ed] quite effectively the forces of change brought to their islands from the outside." Hanlon in particular mentions a book by Alan Moorehead called The Fatal Impact which I think must have influenced science fiction to some extent - the story of death and destruction "when the large, technologically advanced civilizations of the West collided with the small, primitive, technologically backward societies of the Pacific Islands." (Of course, H.G. Wells had set the precedent for alien invasions in 1897 with War of the Worlds, but surely this book confirmed the common idea that contact between the advanced and the less advanced must always be disastrous for the latter.)

* The show, still running, is "Law of the Jungle". Being a Korean show, everyone cooperates and looks after each other, instead of engaging in metaphorical death-matches as you might expect from a Western reality series.

__
Hanlon, David. Upon a Stone Altar: a History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1988.