Among the more unusual books I have seen from the period during World War II is a collection of letters written by Carl Sauer (1889-1975). Andean Reflections: Letters from Carl O. Sauer While on a South American Trip Under a Grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, 1942 (1982) gathers 25 missives sent back to the officers of the Foundation. The first was written in January, 1942, less than a month after Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately this book is out of print and it's not easy to find. But for a raw history, a special kind of overview by an astute observer, there's not likely to be any match for this period--at least in English.

Where this book differs from a travel narrative lies in the unusual historical circumstances and the nature of the grant that Sauer had received from the Rockefeller Foundation. At the outbreak of the war the U.S. was quite worried about protecting the whole hemisphere. Meanwhile, in the world of academics, the rise of the "social sciences" had precipitated a different sort of conflict. By sending Sauer, a "cultural" geographer from UC Berkeley, to South America (one of five U.S. academicians sent south in 1942,) the Foundation hoped to play an important role in the outcome of both battles.

On the strength of the introduction by Robert West it is not possible to clearly grasp to what extent both struggles are at issue in Sauer's trip. West's take seems to cast the journey in purely academic terms. And for the most part so does Sauer himself. It may well be that Sauer was never overtly asked to conceive of the trip otherwise.

But there are hints of other purposes. For example, one of the other grant recipients was off to study Japanese immigration in Brazil. Lest this seem like an idle academic interest let me mention that over a thousand Peruvian-Japanese and Bolivian-Japanese were... I'm faltering for a term here and can think of none that describes this event... were "taken" from these two countries and shipped to the United States. Once here they were held in relocation camps for the duration of the war.ⁱ How this was possible to seize foreign nationals--under the laws of any of these nations--is only explainable in the context of the war.

In Sauer's letters there are more than occasional references to German heritage--particularly among the Chilean scholars where a German minority apparently existed. In one assessment of a taxonomist he makes explicit note of his colleague's Nazi sympathies. Having been asked to take stock of the state of the social sciences in the Latin countries of the Pacific Rim, Sauer is obviously in a remarkably sensitive position to gather intelligence for the war effort. He is literally surveying the intellectual and educational resources of Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia--the Pacific rim of South America. One wonders if Sauer's own German heritage might have made this ambiguous service more or less difficult.

There is another fascination in his letters that also lies somewhat between the lines. The survey of social scientists and their research may have been the most important task Sauer performed for the Rockefeller Foundation, but he had his own agenda. In these letters you can see the outlines of projects which would consume the rest of his career. My knowledge of Sauer's work is limited but there's no doubt about its depth and breath.

I have looked through, for example, Colima of New Spain in the Sixteenth Century (1948), and can see some of the origins of that book in Sauer's meeting with a Peruvian scholar in Cuzco. Sauer describes an encyclopedia proposed by Federico Ponce de leon Pacheco that would compile all of the place names of the Peruvian Highlands and demonstrate the pre-Quechua origins of these communities. Sauer's book about the Mexican state of Colima utilizes this very technique, searching back through colonial records beginning with Cortés, to sketch the earliest occupation of what was at one point the frontier of the Spanish empire. His study reveals a geography of administrative and economic organization patterned on the pre-existing Indian communities of that region, a template in part evident in the surviving place names for the modern settlements around the volcano.

This particular study of Colima at the time of conquest is buttressed with a lot of other information that Sauer had amassed during years of fieldwork in Mexico. His studies of ancient crops, archeology, prehistoric mining, climatic regimes, contemporary handicrafts and so on were then truly innovative elements of what are now understood to be standard approaches to cultural evolution.

It's very difficult to imagine the Rockefeller Foundation finding anyone else more qualified for the task of surveying the state of the social sciences in this region of the world. Sauer was uniquely poised between the humanities and the 'hard' sciences. His commitments in both directions ran very deep. His doubts about the American mining taking place in Chile strike me as incredible for that time. The very same reservations he expressed in 1942 glare out from every page of CHIP News today. But even the book about Colima, largely a dry and uninteresting collage of historical information, closes on a similar note of deeply disturbing insight:

Finally, it may be noted, that all the important modern towns of southern Jalisco, such as Zapotlán, Autlán, Tamazula, and Tuxpan, had been large aboriginal towns, strong in trading peoples (mercaderes). These, as well as the town of Avalos, formed a cluster of native trading centers without parallel west of the Valley of Mexico. These urbanized Indians may have been more resistant to infection and the psychological depression incident to the Conquest. The industrial and commercial character of these places today goes back to the pre-Conquest times.

The survey of scientists in 1942, his observations in the letters, did lead to a handful of particular grants that Sauer recommended. But more importantly, I think, he left a wonderful record in the letters themselves. By and large Sauer was not given to grand generalizations nor philosophical digression. The letters--his whole body of work--seems to reflect this. He worked inductively, from the particular toward cautious and qualified summaries. Here is one of several thumbnail sketches that will eventually lead Sauer to conclude that the local associations, not the universities, are the seed beds of intellectual activities in South America:

Last letter from Guayaquil. In spite of being a rather grisly tropical port on a river that seems to be eternally in flood, sweeping down the debris of the back country, there is a little center of activity in the Centro de Estudios Históricos. This local academy consists mostly of ancients who meet fortnightly in a formal council room in the municipal building. Next to it are the regional museum (not too bad) and two libraries (better than you'd expect). One of these is the gift of Carlo Rolando, still the ruler of the roost in intellectual matters. He has spent a lifetime manufacturing pills for the miserable inhabitants of the coast, and has invested the proceeds in anything that might belong, into a library of the coast. Amazing series of old newspapers, ephemeral journals, down to handbills and wedding and funeral announcements. Antiquarian, with good classifying habits, one might say, but this drive to get everything that has been printed in the coast region has really made a regional archive of some value. Moreover, he has this collecting and bibliographizing fanaticism that makes people from all up and down the coast turn anything printed locally over to him. A hellish part of the world, but its social science archive exists for its future culture historians.

Guayaquil... Guayaquil. How many times have I heard Gerda speak the name of this magical city? And now I have to reconcile her rosy memories and my childhood imagination with this "grisly tropical port." In Guayaquil she bought a tiny landscape by Oswaldo Moncayo, a miniature the size of an 3 x 5 index card. Maybe not even that large. In the background: a snowcapped volcano. In the foreground: Indians in brightly colored woolen ponchos tending sheep near their round huts. The human figures and the sheep were painted with a "brush" made with a single hair.

Here is a detail from the foreground, magnified by four times:

Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1991) is an example of just the opposite sort of reasoning, a deductive logic that has constructed a large edifice and then marshaled the evidence to furnish it. In this instance the "evidence" lies in the travelogues/diaries/accounts of the New World explorers, of which he has read a host. Greenblatt, coincidentally, is also at Berkeley and teaches in their English department. His view of "literature" inclines toward history, which is to say that he reads books as documents of a particular age rather than as mere records of individual thought. In this view literature, or writing of any sort, is always the sign of something else.

Like Gerda (and Susan Sontag), as a child Greenblatt fell under the spell of the travel writer/adventurer Richard Halliburton. At the beginning of this book he makes it clear that in his mind the style of Halliburton's books--the presentation of marvelsⁱⁱ --was a rhetorical invention (or maybe more accurately, a reflex), but in any event, an exhuberant narrative tone, that appealed to his young audience. This insight is the jumping off point for his own study.ⁱⁱⁱ And what a breathtaking study it is. This man's work is driven by all of the excesses and virtues of contemporary theory and yet, to his credit, he manages to write in way that is relatively clear and interesting. It may sound cynical to describe Greenblatt as the Wunderkind of contemporary American intellectualism but it is also a statement of fact. Marvelous Possessions is the case for either viewpoint.

-January 14, 1998

Endnotes

ⁱ For a detailed history of this program see C. Harvey Gardiner's Pawns in a Triangle of Hate: Peruvian-Japanese and the United States, Seatlle: Universty of Washington Press, 1981.

ⁱⁱ One of Halliburton's books was literally titled The Book of Marvels.

ⁱⁱⁱ Greenblatt's interest in travel literature also shows up in an article published in The New Yorker, October 11,1993. You can find "Kindly Visions," a review of Reading the National Geographic, at www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/helmers/natgeo.html

Maguerite Helmers has posted the article at this address in connection with her class "Rhetoric, Culture and Travel." (You may find it interesting to look around these other pages of hers.) Greenblatt's article does a good job of expressing both the attraction and the revulsion I've felt when reading that magazine. It's sick but hilarious to think about the Geographic doing a piece titled "Changing Berlin" in 1937.

Editor’s note: Helmers’ site has undergone more than a few transformations. Although the Greenblatt piece has disappeared, her current home page is still worth browsing.

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf