The Wayfinders (2 page)

BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER
, let me explain why I think this genetic
research is so important, for this really provides the foundation for all of
the themes and issues that will be discussed in these lectures. Nothing that
has emerged from science in my lifetime, save perhaps the vision of the
Earth from space brought home by Apollo, has done more to liberate the human
spirit from the parochial tyrannies that have haunted us since the birth of
memory.

As a social anthropologist I was trained to
believe in the primacy of history and culture as the key determinants in
human affairs. Nurture, if you will, as opposed to nature. Anthropology
began as an attempt to decipher the exotic other, with the hope that by
embracing the wonder of distinct and novel cultural possibilities, we might
enrich our appreciation and understanding of human nature and our own
humanity. Very early on, however, the discipline was hijacked by the
ideology of its times. As naturalists throughout the nineteenth century
attempted to classify creation even as they coped with the revelations of
Darwin, anthropologists became servants of the Crown, agents dispatched to
the far reaches of empire with the task of understanding strange tribal
peoples and cultures that they might properly be administered and
controlled.

Evolutionary theory, distilled from the study of
bird beaks, beetles, and barnacles, slipped into social theory in a manner
that proved useful to the age. It was anthropologist Herbert Spencer who
coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” At a time when the United
States was being built by the labour of African slaves, and the British
class system was so stratified that children of the wealthy were on average
6 inches taller than those of the poor, a theory that provided a scientific
rationale for differences in race and class was a welcome convenience.

Evolution suggested change through time, and
this, together with the Victorian cult of improvement, implied a progression
in the affairs of human beings, a ladder to success that rose from the
primitive to the civilized, from the tribal village of Africa to London and
the splendour of the Strand. The cultures of the world came to be seen as a
living museum in which individual societies represented evolutionary moments
captured and mired in time, each one a stage in the imagined ascent to
civilization. It followed with the certainty of Victorian rectitude that
advanced societies had an obligation to assist the backward, to civilize the
savage, a moral duty that again played well into the needs of empire. “We
happen to be the best people in the world,” Cecil Rhodes famously said, “and
the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity.” George
Nathaniel Curzon, eleventh viceroy of India, agreed. “There has never been
anything,” he wrote, “so great in the world’s history as the British Empire,
so great an instrument for the good of humanity. We must devote all of our
energies and our lives to maintaining it.” Asked why there was not a single
Indian native employed in the Government of India, he replied, “Because
among all 300 million people of the subcontinent, there was not a single man
capable of the job.”

Having established the primacy of race, and the
inherent superiority of Victorian England, anthropologists set out to prove
their case. The scientific mismeasure of man began as phrenologists with
calipers and rulers detected and recorded minute differences in skull
morphology, which were presumed to reflect innate differences in
intelligence. Before long, physical anthropologists were measuring and
photographing peoples throughout the world, all with the deeply flawed
notion that a complete classification of our species could be attained
simply by comparing body parts, the shape of hips, the texture of hair, and
inevitably the colour of skin. Linnaeus, the father of classification, had
in the late eighteenth century determined that all humans belonged to the
same species,
Homo sapiens
, “man the wise.” But he hedged his bets
by distinguishing five subspecies, which he identified as
afer
(African),
americanus
(Native American),
asiaticus
(Asian),
europaeus
(European) and finally a catch-all taxon,
monstrosus
, which included essentially everybody else, all the
peoples so bizarre to the European eye that they defied classification.

More than a century after Linnaeus, physical
anthropology, inspired by a selective misreading of Darwin, accepted the
concept of race as a given. The confirmation of such preconceptions became
part of the agenda and duty of both scholars and explorers. Among those who
set out to chart the racial saga was a British army officer and explorer,
Thomas Whiffen. Travelling down the Río Putumayo in the Colombian Amazon at
the height of the rubber terror, he described the forest as “innately
malevolent, a horrible, most evil-disposed enemy. The air is heavy with the
fumes of fallen vegetation slowly steaming to decay. The gentle Indian,
peaceful and loving, is a fiction of perfervid imaginations only. The
Indians are innately cruel.” Living for a year among them, Whiffen noted,
was to become “nauseated by their bestiality.” At a time when literally
thousands of Bora and Huitoto Indians were being enslaved and slaughtered,
he offered advice to future travellers, suggesting that exploratory parties
be limited to no more than twenty-five individuals. “On this principle,” he
wrote, “it will be seen that the smaller the quantity of baggage carried,
the greater will be the number of rifles available for the security of the
expedition.”

Whiffen, whose book,
The North-West
Amazons
, was widely read when published in 1915, claimed to have
come upon cannibal feasts, “prisoners eaten to the last bit, a mad festival
of savagery … men whose eyes glare, nostrils quiver … an all pervading
delirium.” Other academic explorers of the era, if somewhat more restrained,
nevertheless subscribed to what Michael Taussig has charitably called the
“penis school of physical anthropology.” The French anthropologist Eugenio
Robuchon, who also descended the Putumayo, the River of Death, noted that,
“in general the Huitotos have thin and nervous members.” Another chapter of
his book begins: “The Huitoto have gray-copper skin whose tones correspond
to numbers 29 and 30 of the chromatic scale of the Anthropological Society
of Paris.” A footnote in Whiffen’s book reads, “Robuchon states that the
women’s mammae are pyriform, and the photographs show distinctly pyriform
breasts with digitiform nipples. I found them resembling rather the segment
of a sphere, the areola not prominent, and the nipples hemispherical.”

Not everyone was interested in the measurement of
breasts and skulls. Those who preferred to look forward to a brighter world
distorted Darwinian theory in anticipation of creating a new and better
society. Eugenics means “good birth,” and the movement that flourished at
the turn of the twentieth century called for the selective breeding of
healthy and fit individuals, with the goal of improving the gene pool of
humanity. By the 1920s this ideal had been inverted into a rationale for
forced sterilization and the culling of deviance. If one could improve the
gene pool through selective breeding, surely one could achieve the same goal
by eliminating from the stock elements deemed to be undesirable. This was
the twisted scientific principle that in time allowed the Germans to justify
the slaughter and systematic extermination of millions of innocent people.

Given this sordid history, the ludicrous
ambitions of phrenology, the murderous consequences of eugenics, the
perennial confidence and hubris of the scientific community even when
promoting the most dubious of claims, it is no wonder that many people,
notably those from non-Western traditions, remain deeply skeptical of any
sweeping theory of human origins and migration. That such research is
dependent on the collection and analysis of human blood from remote and
isolated populations only further inflames passions and concerns. Indigenous
peoples, in particular, are deeply offended by the suggestion that their
homelands, enshrined in narrative and myth, may not have been inhabited by
their ancestors since the dawn of time. There have even been accusations
that the recent scientific revelations about our genetic heritage may prompt
open conflict and the forced removal of tribal peoples from lands that they
have in fact occupied for all living memory.

I am quite certain that these fears are
unfounded. History suggests that dominant groups do not need excuses to
ravage the weak, and I do not believe that any theory that emerges from
these new studies will somehow tip the balance and in and of itself lead to
the disenfranchisement of a people. It is true that the Nazis turned to
pseudoscience about genetics and race to rationalize genocide, but, as
Steven Pinker reminds us, the Marxist–Leninists were inspired to equally
despicable and devastating acts of genocide by their pseudoscientific
fantasies about the social malleability of human nature. “The real threat to
humanity,” Pinker writes, “comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial
of human rights, rather than curiosity about nature and nurture.”

Knowledge poses no threat to culture. What’s
more, these research efforts only generate a certain type of knowledge,
defined within a specific world view. Western science by definition rejects
a literal interpretation of origin myths that root the Haida, for example,
to Haida Gwaii. But that rejection does nothing to quell the spirit of the
Haida or to persuade my friend Guujaaw, head of the Council for the Haida
Nation, that his people have not occupied the archipelago since human beings
emerged from the clamshell and Raven slipped out of the ether to steal the
sun. A scientific suggestion that the Haida may have “come from somewhere
else” has already been made; it has long been the foundation of orthodox
anthropology. But this scientific “truth” does nothing to limit the
authority and power of the Haida today. Their ability to deal nation to
nation with the Canadian government has little to do with mythic ancestral
claims and everything to do with political power, a priori evidence of
occupancy at the time of contact, and the ability of leaders such as Guujaaw
to mobilize support for his people throughout the world.

Science is only one way of knowing, and its
purpose is not to generate absolute truths but rather to inspire better and
better ways of thinking about phenomena. As recently as 1965, American
anthropologist Carleton Coon wrote two books,
The Origin of Races
and
The Living Races of Man
, in which he
advanced the theory that there were five distinct human subspecies. Little,
apparently, had been learned since the time of Linnaeus. The political and
technological dominance of Europeans, Coon suggested, was a natural
consequence of their evolved genetic superiority. He even asserted that
“racial intermixture can upset the genetic as well as the social equilibrium
of a group.” Coon at the time was the president of the American Association
of Physical Anthropologists, a full professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, and curator of ethnology at the university’s Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology.

That such statements, convenient as they were
during the last years of Jim Crow and segregation, were seriously
entertained by the academic community as recently as 1965 should certainly
give us pause as we consider the implications of the new research in
population genetics. But when the science in fact suggests an end to race,
when it reveals beyond any reasonable doubt that race is a fiction, it
behooves us to listen. We should at least hope that for once the scientists
have it right.

And they do. They have revealed beyond any doubt
that the genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. From Ireland
to Japan, from the Amazon to Siberia, there are no sharp genetic differences
among populations. There are only geographical gradients. The most remote
society on earth contains within its people fully 85 percent of our total
genetic diversity. Were the rest of humanity to be swept away by plague or
war, the Waorani or the Barasana, the Rendille or the Tuareg would have
within their blood the genetic endowment of all of humanity. Like a sacred
repository of spirit and mind, any one of these cultures, any one of the
7,000, could provide the seeds from which humanity in all its diversity
might be reborn.

What all of this means is that biologists and
population geneticists have at last proved to be true something that
philosophers have always dreamed: We are all literally brothers and sisters.
We are all cut from the same genetic cloth.

It follows, by definition, that all cultures
share essentially the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this
intellectual capacity and potential is exercised in stunning works of
technological innovation, as has been the great achievement of the West, or
through the untangling of the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth —
a primary concern, for example, of the Aborigines of Australia — is simply a
matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural priorities.

There is no hierarchy of progress in the history
of culture, no Social Darwinian ladder to success. The Victorian notion of
the savage and the civilized, with European industrial society sitting
proudly at the apex of a pyramid of advancement that widens at the base to
the so-called primitives of the world, has been thoroughly discredited —
indeed, scientifically ridiculed for the racial and colonial conceit that it
was. The brilliance of scientific research and the revelations of modern
genetics have affirmed in an astonishing way the essential connectedness of
humanity. We share a sacred endowment, a common history written in our
bones. It follows, as these lectures will suggest, that the myriad of
cultures of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed
attempts to be us. They are unique expressions of the human imagination and
heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be
human and alive? When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond
in 7,000 different voices, and these collectively comprise our human
repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a
species over the next 2,500 generations, even as we continue this
never-ending journey.