SOURCE: Winter, Sarah. “Mental Culture: Liberal Pedagogy and the Emergence of Ethnographic Knowledge.” Victorian Studies 41, no. 3 (spring 1998): 427-54.

[In the following essay, Winter examines to what extent some of Martineau's works can be considered ethnographic studies.]

No one seriously doubts that teaching is educational only in as far as, by its very nature, it has the capacity of exerting a moral influence on the way we are and the way we think; in other words, in as far as it effects a transformation in our ideas, our beliefs and our feelings.

—Emile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought (336)

At the end of Eastern Life, Present and Past (1848), an account of her travels in 1846-47 in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria, Harriet Martineau attempts to distill her experiences in a reflection on the historic importance of the East, “the birth-place of the Ideas which have hitherto governed mankind.” She wonders when the “Western Mind,” in its turn, will produce equally dominant ideas, or whether a “new order of knowledge and wisdom” will arise through a future union of the intellectual powers of West and East. In any event, Martineau concludes, the traveler has “responsibilities” to impart the knowledge he or she has gained: “The thoughtful traveller must have some knowledge, and some ideas which he could not have obtained at home, and which the generality of people at home cannot obtain for themselves. These he cannot, in fidelity to himself and his fellow-men, ignore, or bury out of the way of his convenience and repose. … He must speak; and with fidelity” (488-89). Martineau evokes two kinds of “fidelity”—“to truth and [to] man”—both crucial to her humanistic, didactic purpose: to “enlighten” her compatriots by conveying what she “has learned and concluded.” The traveler's account need not be “abstractedly and absolutely true,” but “when all thinkers say freely what is to them true, we shall know more of abstract and absolute truth than we have ever known yet” (488-89). The journey offers Martineau a satisfying occasion to fashion the narrative “fidelity” of the “thoughtful” person—a perspective that is personal yet also contributes to the elaboration of a universal form of knowledge about human nature.

Although Martineau's travel narrative is not an ethnography in any formal sense, and designates “Mind” and “Ideas” rather than “culture” as its objects of investigation, it exhibits a motivation and procedure of conceptualization that I shall delineate broadly as a liberal educational prehistory of the ethnographic idea of culture and method of observation. Martineau's vision of “Eastern” and “Western” Minds is not merely a figure of speech. Her abiding aim is to characterize human intellectual production, as it is exhibited in all the “institutions”—monuments, dwellings, customs, beliefs—that she describes. In How to Observe: Morals and Manners (1838), a text which Christopher Herbert has called “perhaps the first full-scale treatise on the theory and practice of ethnographic observation” (153), Martineau offers a systematic program for achieving “fidelity” in one's understanding of foreign customs. How to Observe is a manual designed to teach travelers to become unprejudiced witnesses of unfamiliar practices and to help them guard against the attitude that Charles Dickens would later satirize in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) as “Podsnappery,” the British tendency to be “affronted” by the “manners and customs” of other countries (128). Martineau proposes to instruct the traveler in “the science of morals,” describing it as “perhaps, the least cultivated, the least definite, the least ascertained in itself, and the most difficult in its application” (14). She introduces “methods of safe generalization” that will allow travelers to avoid purveying misconceptions about foreigners to the “home-stayers” (19). Uninformed and biased reports about foreign customs are particularly pernicious, according to Martineau, because they retard moral progress: “As long as travellers generalize on morals and manners as hastily as they do, it will probably be impossible to establish a general conviction that no civilized nation is ascertainably better or worse than any other on this side of barbarism, the whole field of morals being taken into the view,” and as a result, “there [will be] little hope of inspiring men with that spirit of impartiality, mutual deference, and love, which are the best enlighteners of the eyes and rectifiers of the understanding” (18-19). In order to observe strange morals with “true liberality” (25) of perspective and moral purpose, Martineau maintains, the “philosophical” (29) traveler must remember that “the mind of the observer, the instrument by which the work is done, is as essential as the material to be wrought” (20). The traveler's mind must be schooled in a set of moral “principles” expansive enough to be applicable to all countries and discriminating enough to allow for the correct assessment of the “general influences” behind local customs (29-33).¹

I will say more later about these “general principles” and “safe methods of generalization”; for the moment I would like to point out that Martineau's prescription for “fidelity” in observation is not so far from the program that E. B. Tylor sets forth in Primitive Culture (1871). Tylor begins his influential study by proposing what has frequently been cited as the first formal definition of the ethnographic concept of culture: “Culture or Civilization taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1). George W. Stocking, Jr. has argued that this definition is not as close to the later ethnographic model as first appears, since “at no point in … Primitive Culture … did [Tylor] concern himself with such a cultural whole as an organized or functionally integrated or patterned way of life, nor did he use the word ‘culture’ in its plural form” (“Matthew Arnold” 81). Instead Tylor compiles “discrete cultural elements” in order to infer from them “the stages in the development of a single human culture” whose basis lies in “the assumption of the psychic unity of mankind” (Stocking, “Matthew Arnold” 77). Thus “culture,” as Tylor's definition indicates, is virtually synonymous with “civilization,” and describes a development conceived of as evolutionary, progressive, and universal to humanity.

In his compelling study of the nineteenth-century ethnographic imagination, Christopher Herbert does not attempt to refute Stocking's conviction that Tylor's version of culture is not yet a fully ethnographic one, but argues that the most significant and “radically modern” element of Tylor's definition is its reference to culture as a “complex whole,” signifying that each aspect of social life is “in some sense a corollary of, consubstantial with, implied by, immanent in, all the others.” This essential feature of ethnographic understanding is “what enables it to generate a method of research, a set of directed assumptions, problems, and procedures,” and what “renders the various elements of a way of life systematically readable” (Herbert 4-5). Herbert contends that the systemic “wholeness” attributed to culture also makes the concept intrinsically unstable, since this “wholeness” can never be demonstrated but must always be postulated before any ethnographic reconstruction of a specific culture's “complexity” can begin to make sense. Much of this instability, Herbert suggests, can be traced to the ethnographer's position in the field: the “participant observer” can emulate but never fully participate in the thought worlds of the people she studies, yet she experiences a variety of responses—attachment, complicity, repulsion, sympathy—that complicate her stance of objectivity.

The ambiguities of the ethnographic perspective are also a source of its continuing usefulness as a modern category of thought and methodological tool for the analysis of human universals and particularities. I would like to develop Herbert's salient analysis of the logical instability of “culture” in a different direction, by considering how the ethnographic conception of culture emerges historically from a view of social life as the product of universal cognitive processes of learning and habituation. For Tylor, as we have seen, the goal of the study of “Culture” is not to isolate and investigate in detail one given society, but through comparison among “the various societies of mankind,” to establish those “general principles” by which the “stages of development” ranging from “lower tribes” to “higher nations” can be codified, and according to which each society's level of civilization can be established. Anthropology is to show “how the phenomena of Culture may be classified and arranged, stage by stage, in a probable order of evolution” (5-6). Tylor ascribes the “uniform action of uniform causes” producing cultural phenomena to general “laws of human thought and action” (1). Such an investigation of culture as a general historical process of civilization depends on the premise of a common human nature, and, more specifically, on the supposition that while intellectual proclivities vary with individuals, basic mental faculties are innate and general. In this essay I shall outline some conditions for the conceptualization of the ethnographic idea of culture not only as an inherently contradictory interpretive strategy and requisite object of disciplinary (anthropological) research, but also as a term describing the individual and social product of cognitive processes and modes of behavior—“thought and action”—that can be taught and learned, and thus predictably inculcated. Before “culture” came to designate a unique way of life and the intricately constitutive relations and practices that compose it, those “cultural” particularities were considered to be incidental manifestations of common mental capacities. “Education,” understood in its most general sense as any form of socialization and experience, was a prominent term for the cognitive action of assimilating and reproducing impressions, habits, and customs. A crucial corollary of this pre-ethnographic idea of education as acculturation was the theory that the universal mental capacity for learning, once formalized and directed, lends itself to the systematic inculcation of schemes of governance, so that “education” also names what we might call the psycho-social agency of institutions. The notion of culture as “complex totality” arises in part from a theory of the comprehensiveness, receptivity, and synthetic action of the mind.²

In order to delineate some areas for research on the assumptions about cognition and socialization contributing to the formulation of ethnographic knowledge, and to the pedagogic action of the culture idea, I will examine writings on education by John Locke, James Mill, and Harriet Martineau, and will conclude by considering a programmatic description of anthropological research by Franz Boas.³ I will argue that liberal pedagogy functions as an early model for the ethnographer's ability to understand a foreign culture; it provides ethnographic knowledge with a crucial set of assumptions about the universality of the mental capacity for learning and socialization, and of domestic sentiments. Martineau's proto-ethnographic “thoughtful traveller” combines not only the “disinterested” perspective of the moral philosopher and the administrative zeal of the Utilitarian reformer, but also the dispositions recommended by liberal pedagogy and domestic education—the enlightened teacher and parent are two practical precursors for the ethnographer's relation to culture as an object and source of knowledge.

The moral, governmental, and philosophical projects impelling the liberal, and Utilitarian, formulation of a pre-ethnographic understanding of culture require the elaboration of “general laws” as the practical results of any inquiry into social life around the world; such projects do not appreciate cultural particularity for its own sake. I will contend that twentieth-century ethnography, despite its definitive focus on distinct cultures, retains this same impetus toward generalization. The mind's cognitive capacity to incorporate society and culture—its aptitude for learning—remains a universal element that carries through both the proto-idea of “education” as acculturation and the specifically ethnographic notion of culture.⁴ The mind guarantees the pervasiveness of acculturation in ways that permit the ethnographic study of cultural particulars to claim universal relevance and scientific status, which in turn support normative ethical and political applications. The modern ethnographic idea is, in this way, more Tylorian than we might suppose. The liberal pedagogical agenda should allow us to understand more fully how the category of culture operates both conceptually and administratively to permit the translation of particulars to universals and back again, and why such a relay has attained the status of a modern and academic common sense about the meaning and utility of ethnographic knowledge. The study of culture remains “useful” in this liberal, and even Utilitarian, sense, because it still allows us to generalize in a morally and politically instructive way (although, crucially, not always for the same political or moral purposes) as the legitimate culmination of any reconstruction of cultural particularity.

I. “EDUCATION MAKES DIFFERENCE”

In his Autobiography (1873), John Stuart Mill reports that during his early childhood his father devoted his considerable intellectual energies to two major activities: the research and writing of what would be his influential History of British India (1817) and the instruction of his children. Administrative history and educational practice are also intimately connected in James Mill's theories about the relation between education and politics. In his article on “Education” for the fifth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1815), Mill defines education as “the best employment of all the means which can be made use of, by man, for rendering the human mind to the greatest possible degree the cause of human happiness” (139). He divides moral (as distinct from physical) education into four kinds: domestic, technical, social, and political (141). Domestic education, which takes place in the family during the earliest years of childhood, and technical education or schooling are dependent on social education, according to Mill, because social life and the opinions of others come to have “dominion” over individuals, and largely determine the shape of their upbringing and formal instruction (191). Mill deems political education the most significant form because the prevailing “political machine” directs “the desires and passions of men” by supplying “the means by which the grand objects of desire may be attained,” and thus provides the most powerful and comprehensive conditions for all other aspects of the formation of the mind and behavior (193).

In The History of British India, Mill makes a similar point about the relation between a political system and the effects of education. He asserts that the success of education in producing a “favourable change in the moral character of the people” of India depends on the political context:

The most efficient part of education is that which is derived from the tone and temper of the society: and the tone and temper of the society depend altogether upon the laws, and the government. … But poverty is the effect of bad laws, and bad government; and is never a characteristic of any people who are governed well. It is necessary, therefore, before education can operate to any great result, that the poverty of the people should be redressed; that their laws and government should operate beneficently.

(580)

This account of the necessary conditions for effective Indian education of course serves as a justification of British rule. But Mill makes education and governance virtually synonymous: he understands education, in its most general sense, as political socialization—as the reproduction of “the tone and temper” of a society. Education, in its more restricted meaning as schooling, cannot encourage social improvement if the dominant “political education”—the way that particular systems of laws and government determine social life—leads to negative conditions such as poverty.

“[T]o ascertain the true state of the Hindus in the scale of civilization,” Mill argues, is “an object of the highest practical importance” to the British people who are “charged” with their rule, because “[n]o scheme of government can happily conduce to the ends of government, unless it is adapted to the state of the people for whose use it is intended” (225). If the British administration of India has not produced the results of “good government,” as the persistence of poverty would indicate, the fault lies not with the system of government itself but with a failure of classification: overestimating the degree of civilization of the Hindus (226). A major goal of The History of British India is thus to assert the necessity of British rule by demonstrating that Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, have failed to attain the “cultivation” (193) and mental “culture” (198) of Europeans. Mill's sense of a hierarchy of “culture” lacks Tylor's Darwinian evolutionary framework, but still assumes that Indian civilization can be assessed through a general schema charting the progress of human development.

Mill's article on “Education” thus suggests that both the ability to determine the stage of civilization at which a particular society has arrived, and the capacity to rule it, depend on a knowledge of the general mental processes involved in learning and understanding. Based on an associationist account of learning taken from his readings of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and particularly David Hartley, Mill determines that “the business of education is, to make certain feelings or thoughts take place instead of others … to work upon the mental successions” (147). Given the decisive role of the prospect of pleasure or pain in determining the trains of association, Mill reasons, the science of education should be focused on three goals: “to ascertain, what are the ends, the really ultimate objects of human desire; … what are the most beneficent means of attaining those objects”; and “to accustom the mind to fill up the intermediate space between the present sensation and the ultimate object, with nothing but the ideas of those beneficent means” (153). To illustrate the potential social benefits of inculculating “beneficent” trains of association, Mill contrasts two hypothetical minds, one where the intermediate means between objects and desires are beneficent and one where they are “vicious”:

Suppose the sight of a fine equipage to be the commencement, and the riches which afford it, the appetite, or the end of a train, in the mind of two individuals at the same time. … The mind of the one immediately runs over all the honourable and useful modes of acquiring riches, the acquisition of the most rare and useful qualities, the eager watch of all the best opportunities of bringing them into action, and the steady industry with which they may be applied. That of the other recurs to none but the vicious modes of acquiring riches—by lucky accidents, the arts of the adventurer and impostor, by rapine and plunder, perhaps on the largest scale, by all the honors and glories of war. Suppose the one of these trains to be habitual among individuals, the other not: What a difference for mankind!

(153)

This inspiring difference Mill hopes to produce universally by habituating everyone's mind to find the same kinds of “useful” and “beneficent” means to ends that are products of typical human desires. Trains of mental associations only vary, Mill implies, because socialization and education entirely depend on, and thus automatically reproduce, a child's immediate environment. The two kinds of thinking that Mill describes fall into recognizable middle-class (“honourable and useful”) and aristocratic (“vicious”) patterns of behavior; they represent social differences that Mill proposes to supersede through educational schemes that would inculcate a dominant middle-class, liberal mentality.

The determinative role of habitual trains of association also carries over to such collective “habits” as customs and beliefs, and hence to what we would call cultural differences:

That, at least, all the difference which exists between classes or bodies of men is the effect of education, will, we suppose, without entering into the dispute about individual distinctions, be readily granted; that it is education wholly which constitutes the remarkable difference between the Turk and the Englishman, and even the still more remarkable difference between the most cultivated European and the wildest savage. Whatever is made of any class of men, we may then be sure is possible to be made of the whole human race. What a field for exertion! What a prize to be won!

(147)

Mill's excited conclusion that education alone is what distinguishes Turks and Englishmen, Europeans and savages, suggests that what the ethnographic concept of culture will come to designate as cultural difference and specificity is for Mill merely the incidental outcome of the social inculcation of different trains of associations, determined by custom and history. Thus “education” here is the name for the crucial cognitive process of acculturation, which produces what Louis Dumont has referred to in another (anthropological) context as “factual but secondary differences” (3). “Education” requires a constitutive mental capacity for social formation, but the particular substance and results of that formation are only of temporary relevance for the Utilitarian philosopher and imperial bureaucrat: they are noted only in order to imagine how they can be overcome. The British administration of India would not need to be “adapted” to fit the Indians, if the Indians could be re-educated to suit it. Given the mind's flexibility, the contingency of any form of education understood as acculturation automatically implies, for Mill, that all human customs are susceptible to modification.

Mill's assumptions about the relation between government and education are predicated on the strong link posited in British Enlightenment moral philosophy and political economy between the study of human “understanding” based on Newtonian scientific principles and the justification of systems of government. David Hartley's work provided the most pivotal philosophical formulation of mind for the Utilitarian emphasis on social reform through education. In Various Conjectures on Perception, Motion, and Generation of Ideas (1746), Hartley states that “the principle [sic] use of the doctrine of associations must be considered to be the amendment of ethics and morals,” and recommends particular attention to ways that “the tender minds of children can be best formed for virtue and piety,” (54-55; cited in Olson 101). Human beings according to this associationist conception are paradoxically most natural, given the mind's conformation with the laws of nature, in being products of their environments and experiences—that is, in being what we would call thoroughly culturally determined. In the Utilitarian version of this project to provide a scientific correlation between human nature and politics, education becomes the crucial means both to describe and to engineer an appropriate fit between the two. Mill's conception of education stresses the process, and not the outcome, of social activity. It also implies the seeming political neutrality of the mind itself, as an apparatus regular in its operations but receptive of any contents or design that its surroundings impose—the Lockean “tabula rasa” or “blank page.” John Locke also employs the term “education” to account for the variety of human attainments and customs, and I turn to his writings not only because of their foundational role in the formulation of classical liberalism but also because of his influential early formulation of liberal pedagogy.⁵ Locke's critique of innate ideas supplied a key framework for later elaborations of liberal pedagogy and political theory. The Lockean supposition that the mind is furnished with operations and capacities but not with a storehouse of universal concepts also afforded an early philosophical basis through which to imagine how the cultural diversity that ethnographers would claim to distinguish could arise from mental functions common to humanity.⁶

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1690), originally written as a series of letters advising a friend on his children's upbringing, the former tutor asserts that “I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. 'Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind” (10). Here Locke refers primarily to differences among individuals, but he extends such implications to social life as well: “[I]f a true estimate were made of the morality and religions of the world, we should find that the far greater part of mankind received even those opinions and ceremonies they would die for rather from the fashions of their countries and the constant practice of those about them than from any conviction of their reasons” (112). Locke certainly does not rule out the possibility that reason could support religious belief, but indicates “fashions” and “practices” that the ethnographic investigation of culture would endow with primary interest only in order to reach a universally valid account of the primacy of reason. For Locke, as for Martineau, “respect and custom” tend to foster the kind of bias that undermines rational comprehension of the truth (Conduct 185). Both writers provide accounts of acculturation that describe in a proto-ethnographic way how people acquire what an ethnographer would call the culturally specific elements of their identities.

For Locke, “education” does not end with childhood and is not a passive process. As he explains in his posthumously published pamphlet Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706), “thinking men” should continue to educate and re-educate themselves. They should undertake a rigorous self-examination in order to eliminate prejudices of “education, party, reverence, fashion, interest” (184), and thus cultivate a “comprehensive enlargement” (171) and “indifference” of mind: “To be indifferent which of two opinions is true, is the right temper of the mind that preserves it from being imposed on, and disposes it to examine with that indifferency, until it has done its best to find the truth, and this is the only direct and safe way to it” (186). This is a formula for creating a (classical) liberal disposition and objective perspective, since a disposition of “indifference” is possible only after the thinker has escaped from narrow specialization and systematically exposed himself to multiple and new kinds of knowledge, including knowledge purveyed by other persons: “[I]n those whom he differs from, and, until he opened his eyes, had a general prejudice against, [the thinking man] meets with more to be said for a great many things than before he was aware of, or could have imagined” (172). Martineau similarly affirms that the traveler can never hope to comprehend the general causes of morals and manners from the testimony of persons unless he or she hears without favoritism multiple, and potentially contradictory, native explanations of a particular practice: “[The traveler] will therefore be anxious to engage all he meets in full and free conversation on prevailing topics, leaving it to them to open their minds in their own way, and only taking care of his own—that he preserves his impartiality, and does no injustice to questions or persons by bias of his own” (How to Observe 193).

Two related kinds of “indifference” inform Locke's and Martineau's theories of the impartial observer. Locke's “thinking man” supplements his self-examination with intensive reading in “all sorts of knowledge” so that he may attain a “variety and freedom of thinking, as an increase of the powers and activities of the mind, not as an enlargement of its possessions” (Conduct 192-93). This kind of “indifference” produces a “comprehensive” intellectual facility in acquiring knowledge, and, by relying on the mind's instrumentality, also establishes an objective perspective that allows the thinker to perceive compatibilities among forms of knowledge that would have contradicted his former biases. Martineau's version of “indifference” requires that the observer not take sides in what are, in any case, local disputes—that is, she should not align herself with the “prejudices” of others. The “enlightened traveller” should occupy a transcendent viewpoint:

The true liberality which alone is worthy to contemplate all the nations of the earth … knows that actions and habits do not always carry their moral impress visibly to all eyes, and that the character of very many must be determined by a cautious application of a few deep principles. … The true philosopher, the worthy observer, first contemplates in imagination the area of humanity, and then ascertains what principles of morals are applicable to them all, and judges by these.

(How to Observe 25-26)

To ascertain on behalf of the home-stayers the general (and therefore true) causes of diverse morals and manners, the impartial traveler must conceive of each particular person, institution, or custom in the context of and as representative of humanity. As we can see in Locke's suggestions for the “conduct of the understanding,” and through Martineau's reading of moral philosophy, this liberal perspective also arises from a rational self-scrutiny through which the “impartial” thinker can approximate the world's totality by cultivating the mind's ability to incorporate and order impressions through strenuous intellectual efforts. As Locke puts it, “God has made the intellectual world harmonious and beautiful without us; but it will never come into our heads all at once; we must bring it home piecemeal, and there set it up by our own industry, or else we shall have nothing but darkness and a chaos within, whatever order and light there be in things without us” (Conduct 215). The comprehensive knowledge ideally obtainable by the mind must reproduce the “harmonious” wholeness of a world already in itself fully “intellectual.”

Thus Locke, Mill, and Martineau do not seek knowledge of diverse “customs and habits” as an end in itself, but as a means to a position of liberal “indifference” for the educated person, moral philosopher, social scientist, colonial administrator, and thoughtful traveler. Nevertheless, the complex of priorities and classificatory procedures entailed in “education” begins to do some of the work, both conceptual and political, of the ethnographic concept of culture. Raymond Williams offers three primary definitions for the modern usage of the term “culture,” all of which derive from the extrapolation of agricultural and human “cultivation” to general processes: (1) “a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, from the eighteenth century”; (2) “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity in general”; and (3) “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” (87; 90). Mill's usage of “education” participates in the earlier understanding of acculturation that regards “culture” as a general process of cultivation. Martineau and Mill register human diversity, but only in order to derive a basic knowledge of human socialization so that they may impose flexible, appropriate, and “generally valid” schemes of moral conduct and political administration. The salient aspect of acculturation for these reformers is the necessary, neutral, and formal mental processes it entails and not the “secondary effects” of customs and manners resulting from specific instances of “education.”

But those “secondary effects” will become the object of knowledge that the ethnographic idea of culture designates, with continued reliance on the “educational”—cognitive, pedagogical, and political—connotations that precede and accompany it.⁷ Within anthropological discourse (and the social sciences generally), “education” continues to serve as a general term for culturally variable kinds of upbringing and formal instruction, but ceases to describe a universal cognitive capacity shaped by circumstances and the diverse, contingent outcomes of that shaping. That function is taken over by the culture concept. The shift from “education” to culture in an ethnographic sense requires a significant change in emphasis from process to result—from “acculturation” to the “complex whole” of culture—and a shift from a diachronic and historical, to a synchronic and “textual” interpretive approach.⁸

II. “SYMPATHETIC PRINCIPLES”

Martineau's How to Observe: Morals and Manners also derives the ethnographic idea of culture from a broad notion of education as acculturation. Herbert finds in Martineau's treatise early indications of the contradictions inherent in the ethnographic idea of culture and typical of the practice of fieldwork by a participant observer. He points out the inconsistency between Martineau's strictures about the necessity of an interpretive method based on scientific, or “philosophical principles” of observation and classification, and her insistence that the traveler must possess an attitude of sympathy toward the people he or she encounters. Martineau claims that “[i]f the observer goes with a free mind and an open heart, not full of notions and feelings of his own, but ready to resign himself to those of the people he visits; if he commits himself to his sympathies, and makes himself one with those about him, he cannot but presently discover and appreciate what interests them most” (How to Observe 189-90). According to Herbert, Martineau's idea of sympathy entails a psychological state that seems incompatible with the practice of objective interpretive “principles”; he interprets this proto-ethnographic sympathy as a “vacancy and a state of radical personal displacement,” which entails that “the ethnographer is definable only as a nonentity” (154).

Without disputing Herbert's astute diagnosis of ethnographic ambivalence, I wish to reorient his findings by proposing that for Martineau the traveler's sympathy creates an occasion for education, and that her “principles” of observation are the kind of premises about the universal “laws of thought and action” that Mill and Tylor both assume and seek to demonstrate. In the context of associationist psychology, a sympathetic approach to foreigners attempts to reconstitute artificially—as a pedagogical technique—an early state of receptivity, before the “trains of associations” and habits that result from the various aspects of one's education have inculcated the “prejudices” that form one's common self. Mill describes the sway of “social education” in a way that highlights this pedagogic action of ethnographic sympathy: “[W]hen, by means of words and other signs of what is passing in the minds of other men, we are made to conceive, step by step, the trains [of associations] which are governing them, those trains, by repetition, become habitual to our own minds, and exert the same influence over us as those which arise from our own impressions.” Mill explains here what he terms “the source of the power which society usurps over our minds” (“Education” 191), but if it were possible to create a state of mind in which one's education could be bypassed or suspended, then presumably the neutral cognitive mechanisms of one's basic learning might work again, but this time to access a foreign mentality.

Martineau's writings consistently theorize education both as what we would call cultural formation and as an index of cultural diversity and specificity—the generation of factual but secondary differences. Her treatise on Household Education (1849), for example, is a virtual compendium of the educational practices of assorted societies; like Mill, Martineau insists that “education … make[s] … difference” (22). According to Martineau, “In every country of the world there is some sort of general notion of what the men and women ought to be: and the men and women turn out accordingly: and the more certainly, the more clear the notion is” (11). To illustrate this point, she outlines in a paragraph the educational “aims” of a short list of historical and contemporary peoples, personified as individuals: the Biblical Patriarch, the Spartan, the Jew in Palestine, the Americans, both “city-dwellers” and “the red men,” the Arab, and the Mongolian. Each of her descriptions is a kind of miniature ethnography, intended to distill “‘what is fixed and essential in a people’” (How to Observe 20), for instance, the red Indians:

Their idea of perfection is a man's being a perfect warrior; and yet in a way quite unlike the Spartans. The red Indian is not trained as a servant of the State, but as an individual; and the Indian women are degraded and oppressed, while the Spartan women were considered and respected—whatever the ground of consideration might be. The Indian boy is trained to use his five senses till they reach an unequalled degree of nicety. And, when old enough to bear the pain without dying, he is subjected first to hunger and want of sleep, and then to such horrible tortures as it turns one sick to think of. He who comes out of this trial most bravely, and who afterwards shows himself the most alert sentinel, the strongest and most enduring soldier, the most revengeful enemy, the most cruel conqueror, and the sternest husband and father, is, in the eyes of his people, the most perfect man. The red Indians, therefore, generally make an approach to this kind of character.

(Household Education 15-16)

Martineau does not offer her sketch of the red Indian “character” as an intrinsically valuable piece of knowledge in itself; she does not imagine that her readers interested in domestic education really care what such a character consists in, although she presumes they share her revulsion at the cruelty of red Indian ordeals of manhood. Instead, Martineau's comparative approach simply provides so many demonstrations of the existence of domestic education in all societies, and thus constructs the transcendent, global liberal viewpoint from which to ascertain what educational end may be superior in general. The significant fact for Martineau is that education in all societies aims toward some general idea of character, even though specific ideas of “perfection” differ. Martineau's account works to fashion a delicately balanced (some might say naive, arrogant, or contradictory) objectivity enlaced with moral judgment. She does not condemn the red Indians for their particular notion of character—that would evince prejudice—but does stage a sympathetic response to the red Indian boy's physical experience of “horrible tortures.”

Martineau's version of liberal relativism also allows her to praise the “conscientiousness” of the South Sea Islander mother, who follows her duty in sacrificing her first child to the gods, even though her “ignorance” leads her to commit a “horrible crime.” Martineau does not place her emphasis on the specific custom, nor even on its deplorable outcome, but rather on the mother's exhibition of the “common” human “power to desire and to do what is right” that can be brought “into harmony all over the world” by an infusion of knowledge (173-74). If only such a mother could be taught what is truly, universally right, Martineau imagines, then she would be able to exercise her common human sense of duty to appropriate, humane ends. Martineau's relativism forms the prelude to a moral universalism.

In arguing for the superior justice of the educational goal she advocates—“to bring out and strengthen and exercise all the powers given to every human being” (Household Education 19)—Martineau, like Mill, also foregrounds the effects that education and political arrangements have on one another.⁹ She contends that throughout history, those groups of people whose educations have been “slighted”—usually women, slaves, and working people—are also those who have been politically disenfranchised (19-20). Martineau reverses Mill's priorities, however, and makes the domestic determine the political forms of education. She is as enthusiastic about the importance of domestic education as Mill was about political re-education, asserting that all people, no matter what their rank or achievements—the queen, Sir Isaac Newton, the workhouse pauper—share the common experience of being raised at home: “If thus, the loftiest and the lowliest, the purest and the most criminal, the wisest and the most ignorant, are comprehended under the process of household education, what a wide and serious subject we have to consider!” (41). Domestic education also can include all aspects of experience, well beyond book learning: “Anxious parents [who cannot afford schooling for their children] may take comfort from the thought that nothing ever exists or occurs which may not be made matter of instruction to the mind of man” (198). Domesticity and the sentiments it inculcates, such as charity, duty, and sympathy, provide the common domain of human experience from which Martineau derives her moral “principles” on which to base “safe generalizations” about foreign morals and manners.

Like Mill, Martineau understands education in associationist terms. Her “Essays on the Art of Thinking” (1829; 1832) endorse the early acquisition of an ordered mode of mental classification to attain “clearness and strength” of the intellect: “The habit of classifying our impressions as they are received, and arranging our ideas in such an order as that we may know where to find them, and when to produce them, must be formed by early attention and considerable labor; but the acquisition is worth any degree of exertion. The habit once formed, the benefit is secured for ever; the mind converts all things to wholesome aliment, and the process of assimilation goes on with ease and without intermission” (75). This habit of classification (a kind of mental digestion) allows one to discriminate among relevant and extraneous ideas, and its possession also differentiates one type of person from another: “How large a portion of useful knowledge we daily forego, how awfully we weaken our minds by the retention of ideas which can minister to no good, we cannot at present estimate; but we may form some faint idea by drawing a contrast between the mind of Milton and that of a fashionable fop, between such a man as Hartley and a scoffing, dissolute infidel” (75). For Martineau, all human beings come into the world with an equal right to have their faculties fully developed, no matter what their individual proclivities might be—it is in their habits of thinking, and thus their educations, where what we would call differences of class and culture originate. Her goal of equal opportunity based on a common cognitive endowment, however, does not prevent Martineau from ordering societies according to how far they cultivate the habitual practice of logical thinking. In fact, her egalitarian premises facilitate such ranking, since the presupposition of universal mental capacities allows her to distinguish levels of specifically rational competence both within her own society and among nations.

In her recommendation that one should “habituate the mind to follow the inductive method in all researches” (“Art of Thinking” 73), Martineau provides a pedagogical groundwork for her account of the traveler's method of observation. She enjoins readers not to stick to preconceived theories or general rules where more “discriminating” judgments and potentially new findings are required: “[I]f we seek to extend our range, we must be careful that our minds are so disciplined as to receive new ideas without prejudice, that they are strengthened for the formation of new conceptions, prepared to apply well-known truths in their proper places, and to leave them behind when we enter on unexplored and extended regions” (“Art of Thinking” 74). The observer of the morals and customs of other nations, then, must suspend habitual forms of classification without relinquishing that hard-won “mental discipline” that would permit the mind to produce a “new conception”—that is, a new understanding of a foreign conception—from its habitual, trained capacity to arrange and classify impressions logically, according to cause and effect (“Art of Thinking” 75). As for Locke, habitual ideas are a form of “prejudice” when they impede “impartial” observation by imposing a familiar classification prematurely, but the ability to categorize impressions logically is necessary for the appropriation of new knowledge. Martineau also suggests that procedures of classification are not devoid of sentiment, but that emotions generate and inform general classificatory and moral “principles”:

The chief value of good feelings [in children] arises from their being instruments in the formation of good principles and habits. … A frequent repetition of these feelings produces a series of actions, till, by the unfailing power of association, the emotion and consequent action become inseparably connected; and the feeling, rising in dignity and importance, becomes a principle.

(“On the Agency” 202-03)

In this way a child's “natural” sympathy becomes an adult's rational benevolence. This transformation of personal sympathy into impersonal benevolence dovetails with Mill's account of how individuals' “appetites” can be channeled through “beneficent” habitual means toward general social and political ends.

In Martineau's “sympathetic” proto-ethnographic observation, there is no contradiction between sympathy and principle because sympathy is one of her basic philosophical principles as a universal human capacity of understanding through fellow-feeling. The traveler's sympathy becomes not only an emotional response but also a potentially replicable, and therefore scientific or “philosophical,” technique of cultural re-education: as Martineau puts it, if the “traveller be full of sympathy, everything he sees will be instructive” (How to Observe 50). She assures the reader that “[t]here is the same human heart everywhere—the universal growth of mind and life—ready to open to the sunshine of sympathy, … and, if the traveller has a good one himself, he will presently find this out, whatever may have been his fears at home of checks to his sympathy from difference of education, objects in life, etc” (How to Observe 45). Once again, Martineau's assumption, one that qualifies her relativism, is that cultural variety must be understood as “modification … by local influences” of “a few universal interests which everywhere stand first” (191). The goal of the sympathetic traveler and proto-ethnographer should be to produce “generalizations” that are “safe” from prejudice because they are based on the exercise of this common capacity for simultaneously intellectual and affective—educational—understanding.

Martineau's primary model for such understanding is the emotional and imaginative interaction that creates a bond between parent and child. A mother's ability to inspire her child's attachment depends upon “a power of entering into the little mind, and meeting its thoughts and feelings” (Household Education 143). In a formulation that prefigures the contact envisioned in the ethnographic encounter, Martineau conceives that the possibility of “meeting” another person's “thoughts and feelings” derives from a fundamental experience of familial affections and interests. She abstracts and codifies domestic influence to form the liberal pedagogical disposition—a sort of didactic receptivity—through which she elaborates her proto-ethnographic method. This influence has its origin in the kind of maternal love that can see beyond sentiment to discipline a child and foster his or her development gently and effectively, but maternal influence quickly sheds its gender to become parental, pedagogical, philosophical, and even scientific. The whole exercise of observing morals and manners is meant to produce an objective viewpoint for the observer and the “home-stayer” who reads the ethnographic narrative—a viewpoint that gives access to the general knowledge and “liberality” of judgment that will sustain a world order founded on human sympathy. Many Victorian intellectuals saw nothing anomalous in a scientific morality. They insisted that classificatory “principles,” when applied to human beings and societies, could be both objective and moral—as in Martineau's dual senses of “fidelity.” While her attempt to combine unbiased observation, inductive methods, and sympathy with those she encounters produces paradoxes that will become typical of ethnographic participant observation, for Martineau such contradictions cannot surface because of her assumption that the domestic sentiments she recognizes are universal.

III. “PHILOSOPHICAL INDULGENCE”

In constructing an all-encompassing, objective liberal perspective, Martineau and Locke both insist on the necessity of learning how and when to discriminate. Locke takes pains to contrast “distinction,” which is “a perception of a difference that nature has placed in things,” and “division,” or “making a division where there is yet none” (Conduct 207). The detection of “natural differences” conduces to correct knowledge, while the artificial creation of divisions should proceed with caution: “The collection of several things into several classes gives the mind more general and larger views; but we must take care to unite them only in that and so far as they do agree. … For entity itself, that comprehends all things, as general as it is, may afford us clear and rational conceptions” (Conduct 207). For Locke, the application of words to things in particular carries with it a tendency to create difference where none really exists; the world itself is a complex totality, and it is only the mental processes involved in understanding that require the disassembly of things and their reassembly in the mind. Perhaps because she does not fully share Locke's representational understanding of mind, but can rely on the general acceptance of a domestic education based on the liberal pedagogy he influentially formulated, Martineau evinces a more positive assessment of “discrimination.” She finds its practice by parents particularly beneficial for children, since, “as no two minds are alike in all points, it would be as absurd to regulate all in a precisely similar manner, as to have a totally different system for each” (“Art of Thinking” 74). The “truly wise parent who knows how to enforce general rules with steadiness, while he applies particular methods with discernment” exercises exemplary discrimination: “Such discrimination should be our aim in our interpretation of the common events of life, in our judgment of human character, in the lessons we draw from circumstances, and in our study of books and the world of nature” (74). Martineau's own “train of associations,” then, creates analogies between domestic education and the scientific method of classification that enables one to derive general rules of logical discrimination, moral conduct, or governmental policy, and apply them to particular natural phenomena, national customs, or societies. These associations also map the conceptual, methodological, and political trajectories leading from “education” to “culture.”

Martineau concludes Household Education by offering a telling example of what I have been characterizing as the liberal balancing act between global and domestic perspectives, scientific and moral principles, politically interested and morally “disinterested” pedagogy and government. She attempts to reassure parents that society will “naturally” compensate for the deficiencies in the home instruction they provide, allowing the children even of “indulgent and censorious” parents to grow “first grave,—then just and fair,—then philosophical, and at the last indulgent, as the truly philosophical must ever be” (322-23). Martineau is confident that sympathy—in the form of Christian charity—will inevitably impinge upon the children's experience to temper a home environment that fostered an excessively critical frame of mind. These children's entry into social interactions beyond the family reforms their domestic acculturation, permitting the kind of re-education that Martineau's ethnographic method envisions. Their ultimate attitude of “philosophical indulgence” (or indulgent philosophy) epitomizes a liberal disposition that attempts to correlate emotional response and rationality. This correlation produces a character that is fascinatingly, if inconceivably (to us), unified through its contradictions. But this is also a person capable of conceiving “culture” in its ethnographic (as well as its Arnoldian) sense: she is simultaneously critical and tolerant, and possesses a mind indulged and disciplined to project complex classifications, leading to general implications, of the diverse morals, manners, and persons she surveys.

In order to translate domestic education into an ethnographic method, then, home influences need to be formalized as a pedagogy that trains the adult observer how to learn afresh. Liberal pedagogy conceives the acquisition of knowledge as a process leading to self-possession. John Stuart Mill, in his essay “On Genius” (1832), describes the goal of education in terms that illustrate this process on an individual level:

Those who have no eyesight of their own, or who are so placed that they cannot conveniently use it, must believe upon trust; they cannot know. A man who knows may tell me what he knows, as far as words go, and I may learn to parrot it after him; but if I would know it, I must place my mind in the same state in which he has placed his; I must make the thought my own thought; I must verify the fact by my own observation, or by interrogating my own consciousness.

(331; cited in Garforth 145)

Locke makes almost exactly the same declaration, but means his terms to be taken literally:

Knowing is seeing, and, if it be so, it is madness to persuade ourselves that we do so by another man's eyes, let him use ever so many words to tell us that what he asserts is very visible. Until we ourselves see it with our own eyes, and perceive it by our own understandings, we are as much in the dark and as void of knowledge as before, let us believe any learned author as much as we will.

(Conduct 200-01)

Locke and Mill both make the educational (and implicitly political) point that one must guard against the unquestioning adoption of others' authoritative views. For each, the acquisition of knowledge occurs through a pedagogical transaction that cannot be reduced to mere imitation, memorization, or unreflecting acceptance on the part of the learner. The individual experience of learning from another person requires both a critical distancing from the teacher—not accepting the knowledge purveyed on trust—followed by the attempt to make the other's thought one's own by verifying its correspondence to experience and subsequent observations. Both Mill and Locke conjure up a metaphoric blindness to signify the real threat of incomprehensibility—the “void of knowledge” represents a specifically cognitive failure. The confidence of James and John Stuart Mill, Martineau, and Locke in the transmission of knowledge, despite the potential for radical breakdowns, persists because they view these transactions as “educational,” part of the constitutive process that gives a specific content to a person's understanding. Learning and socialization will occur in some form, so the challenge for the liberal reformer lies in how to regulate them—both for children and for whole societies.

Liberal pedagogical thought thus provides the ethnographic analysis of cultures with the necessary premise that acculturation of some kind will always take place, and that knowledge can be acquired and transmitted between persons as long as the mind of the learner/observer is trained to function rationally and critically. Translated into Martineau's understanding of the “philosophical traveller's” intellectual training, the critical practice involved in Locke's and Mill's accounts of adequate learning becomes the proto-ethnographic observer's technique of adopting a skeptical stance toward her own customs and manners. Because the “philosophical traveller” has learned to conceive of herself (and her mind) as having come into systematic possession of various kinds of knowledge, it also becomes possible for her to envision how she could divest herself of certain parts of it, while retaining others. Martineau's writings suggest that the liberal understanding of formal learning as culminating in self-possession functions historically as a practical and conceptual preparation for the ethnographer's attempt to learn about different ways of life through a principled and disciplined effort to dispossess herself of prejudicial knowledge even as she preserves her rational competence.

IV. MENTAL CULTURE

In reconstructing the educational assumptions and goals of ethnographic knowledge, I have suggested that the ethnographic approach to culture has never abandoned its confidence in the mind's universal capacity for acculturation. The culture idea derives a certain part of its own universality and rationality from the neutrality of basic processes of cognition implied in acculturation. Within the proto-ethnographic “educational” perspective, “wholeness” and “complexity” exist as the mind's potential through its comprehensive capacity to learn and experience, and the world becomes such a mind's oyster (as long as mental discipline does not fail, and give way to Locke's nightmare of mental “darkness and chaos”). The “thoughtful traveller” or the ethnographer, on the model of the liberal pedagogue or parent, has become conscious of and learned to abstract the cognitive habits of observation, imitation, and assimilation that produce “local truths” and affections (Conduct 212), or native morals and manners. Seen in historical perspective, such forms of liberalism also represent a “prejudiced”—partial and specific—perspective deriving from economic privilege and access to literacy and education. Martineau makes clear that as the ethnographic attitude becomes more general the most important syntheses of knowledge about human diversity will not be left to amateurs, but will be recognized as the proper domain of “philosophers,” the academic authorities in the “science of society” (How to Observe 15). Martineau's “philosophical traveller” is also a precursor of the professional social scientist.

As we have seen from Locke's, Mill's, and Martineau's own interests in the diversity of human societies, the crucial shift toward the ethnographic concept of culture does not consist merely in noticing that societies differ, or in understanding social life and customs as constitutive of human identity, but in conceiving of such constitutive differences as important objects of specialized knowledge. This specialized knowledge can still be employed to support administrative and political reform agendas of many kinds, and such uses have contributed importantly to the academic institutionalization of social science (as well as other) disciplines. A lecture by Franz Boas shows how the study of the cognitive bases of culture could be used to justify ethnographic investigations within anthropology, and how the generalized knowledge that follows from an understanding of acculturation supports larger claims for the relevance of ethnographic knowledge.

In his assessment of anthropology circa 1932 (“The Aims of Anthropological Research,” originally delivered as an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December, 1932), Boas attests to the impossibility of both the “science of morals” that Martineau envisioned, and the Tylorian investigation of culture defined as the evolution of human civilization. “Cultures differ like so many species, perhaps genera, of animals,” according to Boas, and “their common basis is lost forever,” while “moral behavior … does not seem to fall into any order” (254). Boas has fully embraced the idea that each distinct culture is a complex whole: “[T]he various expressions of culture are closely interrelated and one cannot be altered without having an effect upon all the others. Culture is integrated” (256). And he espouses a fundamental relativism, since even the categories that the anthropologist applies to the study of cultures are in fact impositions of his or her own conceptions: “forms of thought and action [Tylor's terms exactly] which we are inclined to consider as based on human nature are not generally valid, but characteristic of our specific culture” (258).

Yet Boas demonstrates that he has not abandoned the exploration of cultures as myriad conformations of mind. He advocates the study of the relation of the individual to his culture, what Locke, Mill, and Martineau term “education” and I have glossed as acculturation or socialization:

Society embraces many individuals varying in mental character, partly on account of their biological make-up, partly due to the special social conditions under which they have grown up. Nevertheless, many of them react in similar ways, and there are numerous cases in which we can find a definite impress of culture upon the behavior of the great mass of individuals, expressed by the same mentality. … If we once grasp the meaning of foreign cultures in this manner, we shall also be able to see how many of our lines of behavior that we believe to be founded deep in human nature are actually expressions of our culture and subject to modification with changing culture. Not all our standards are categorically determined by our quality as human beings, but may change with changing circumstances. It is our task to discover among all the varieties of human behavior those that are common to all humanity. By a study of the universality and variety of cultures, anthropology may help us to shape the future course of mankind.

(259)

Aside from its typical, almost generic qualities as a public disciplinary definition before a professional conference, an occasion which seduces Boas into making ambitious claims about the potential of anthropology to shape the future, the lecture discloses twentieth-century developments in the “educational” stakes of the study of culture. Boas dismisses the idea of human nature yet implies the possibility of formulating a general account of acculturation by characterizing the “mentalities” typical of “foreign” cultures. His notion of “mentality” is culturally specific and not neutral like a mental faculty, but it still refers to a general cognitive and emotional capacity for response to and action upon the world. While he names “social psychology” as the field responsible for the study of how such mentalities are acquired at the level of the individual mind (258-59), he nevertheless asserts that anthropology's task is to discover the existence of “common” kinds of human behavior. For Boas, a central agenda of anthropology must be to determine the “forms of thought and action” typical of a given culture in order to extrapolate such findings to a general understanding of humanity.

Not only does Boas decline to relinquish the characterization of mind to psychology, but he also claims the study of mental culture—education and acculturation—as a priority for anthropology. In fact, no single discipline has yet offered a definitive explanation of “acculturation” in the larger sense that I have been documenting here, although scholars in many fields have been actively engaged in such research—education, anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, critical theory, feminist theory, philosophy, literary studies, and various hybrid fields such as social psychology, psychological anthropology, and cognitive science, to provide a short list.¹⁰ Boas's simultaneous rejection of a “common basis” of culture and call for the discovery of universal forms of behavior, then, arises in part from a disciplinary agenda. In other words, the contradictions typical of liberalism no longer stem from a project to conjoin science and morality, or emotion and rationality, but, in this case, from anthropology's attempt to maintain a disciplinary hold on the study of mental laws—the hallmark of psychology—despite an ethnographic focus on cultural particularity.

Thus ethnographic knowledge has not relinquished but only revised the universalizing aims characteristic of the interest in acculturation as education, while continuing to pursue the pedagogical effects and policy applications of cross-cultural study. As Boas's speech demonstrates, the necessity of generalization is both scientific and didactic—without a “science of morals” how can one establish the relevance of the ethnographic understanding of culture to the “home-stayers”? Boas does so by promising a “prize” that is also familiar from the liberal pedagogical transactions I have been analyzing: the ultimate goal of anthropology should be a competence in both individual and cultural modification, based this time on the knowledge of cultural diversity. If other cultures are different, then our ways should no longer be seen as permanent and natural, Boas urges. My epigraph from Emile Durkheim, another influential theorist of liberal pedagogy, presents the possibility for such cultural transformation on the individual level as the result of what we might call a pedagogical reciprocity: we are transformed as we learn, and as we teach. Anthropology also aspires to alter the “categories” and “standards” of the observer; ethnography is another way that the “teacher” becomes different through “educational” encounters. Boas does not specify on this occasion how the knowledge of what is common to humanity should be applied, except to imply that it would provide criteria for determining how new (and better) ways of living can emerge. This anthropological education in the progressive meaning of cultural diversity seeks to produce a generalized cultural shift in mentality, and gives a new form to the mental culture that Mill and Martineau set out to describe, inculcate, and administer. Boas leaves it to future research to discover the general laws of culture, while Mill and Martineau begin with the presumption that they already possess such universal principles, but all three rely on versions of a social scientific and liberal confidence in human educability and the advancement of knowledge. Thus the ethnographic culture concept remains fundamentally liberal and always reaches toward the mind as both ground and horizon of explanation. The study of culture becomes, according to this history, a pedagogical project to induce and direct social change.

Notes

1. Although Martineau does not engage in an overtly “anti-tourist” polemic, her account of the “prejudiced” versus the “philosophical” traveler participates in the construction of what James Buzard has described as the “acculturated” traveler who has acquired personally and socially valuable, and marketable, experiences (6-10).

2. In employing the word “acculturation” I wish to designate the general process of acquiring the particular systems of classification and customs of one's culture, rather than the more specific acquisition of attributes that would earn one the label of “cultivated” or “cultured.” For another usage of “acculturation” to mean a dominated culture's adaptation to a dominant culture, see Dumont (14).

3. My account of the “pedagogic action” and effects of the ethnographic culture concept draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his “Systems of education and systems of thought,” and, with Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. While I will construct here a trajectory in liberal pedagogical theory from Locke to Martineau, I also recognize that there are important differences in their versions of liberalism.

4. On the role of proto-ideas in the epistemology of science, see Fleck 23-27.

5. Margaret J. M. Ezell documents the popularity of Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education in the eighteenth century, both in Britain and on the continent (237); she argues that Locke's identification of childhood as a “stage of human development” and his “recognition of the child as an individual human being” constitute “radical breaks with seventeenth-century thought” (240-41), although his sense that “character was shaped largely by education and surroundings” were shared by such writers as Evelyn, Aubrey, Eachard, and Milton (232).

6. Locke's work was also an important element of the philosophical and political thinking that Utilitarianism adapted, and his sense of the hedonistic and egoistic motivations of human action resembles, and may have provided a model for, the Utilitarian calculus. For an analysis of passages in An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) that seem to indicate a proto-Utilitarian understanding of individual egotism and happiness as the greatest good, see Brogan. In Book I of the Essay, Locke provides evidence drawn from travel narratives to demonstrate that various peoples around the world lacked concepts that had been presumed to be innate. Aarsleff notes that Locke's library included a great deal of travel literature, and argues for the general importance of Locke's critique of the doctrine of innate ideas to the rise of comparative anthropology (258-59).

7. By listing these three elements separately, I am attempting to specify the different levels at which the process of acculturation is taking place, but I also understand these elements to overlap; every pedagogy has an implicit politics, and cognition can only be neutral in its most abstract and general sense.

8. Tylor's own usage of “culture” exemplifies this transition. According to Stocking, despite his evocation of the “complex whole,” Tylor's idea of “culture” is still “only slightly developed beyond its earlier English verbal sense of ‘cultivation’; it had to do primarily with change and progress, not continuity or stasis” (“Matthew Arnold” 82-83).

9. Linda H. Peterson points out that this educational goal also presupposes “a sexless model of the human mind” (176), and analyzes the importance of this assumption that logic and reason are universal for Martineau's project to engage in modes of “sage” writing usually associated with male authors and intellectuals.

10. The interdisciplinary field of psychological anthropology seems to address itself most specifically to the problem of acculturation as I have defined it here. For a survey of work in this field, see Schwartz, ed., New directions in psychological anthropology.

I am grateful to James Buzard, Joseph Childers, Elaine Hadley, and the anonymous reviewer for their criticisms and suggestions in response to an earlier draft of this essay.

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