Holger Pedersen and "Race"

[Alexis Manaster-Ramer]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Alice Faber wrote:


[inter alia]
>
> I'm having a little trouble following the above, because I'm reading from my
> paperback English translation (copyright 1931). I think it's important when
> committing exegesis, which is, after all, what we're doing with this close
> textual reading, to bear in mind that this is a *translated* work.

Yes, I would love to be able to brave the snow and get the Danish
out of the library but am not allowed to by my doctors.  Still,
Pedersen is supposed to have vetted the English translation.
But there ARE a few places where I definitely need to see the
Danish for myself.  If anybody out there reading this has
the Danish version with them and would not mind helping out,
please let me know by email to my address above.

> I don't see Pedersen's criticism of M"uller's racial criteria as strong,
> though he does criticize it (p. 117, for those scoring at home).

Good enough. I won't quibble about "strong" on this page.  Would you agree
that elsewhere in the book, esp. the last chapter he does use rather
emphatic language about the invalidity of using such racial criteria?

> And he does
> refer to linguistic criteria for Hamitic and Semitic.

Thank you.  But let us go further: do you agree he uses no
OTHER criteria for Semitic and Hamitic but linguistic ones?

> Given the state of
> knowledge at his time (he lists three subgroups of Hamitic, Egyptian, Berber,
> and "South Hamitic" [=Cushitic, roughly], but no Chadic).

Not quite. He mentions "Haussa" twice and refers to Lepsius's
work on Hausa as a Hamitic language, which he regards as a
possible but still unproven thesis. But Hausa is a Chadic
lg and as far as I know the only reasonably well-known one at the
time.

> He correctly raises
> the question of whether Hamitic and Semitic are co-ordinate branches.
>
He does more, doesn't he?  He raises the question of whether Hamitic
is a branch, i.e., a valid taxon at all, thus anticipating Greenberg
by a half-century.  This is particular important because it show just
how far Pedersen was from accepting ANY version, even a purely
linguistic one, of the theory of a "Hamitic" language group.  This
bears directly on the racism issue raised by Wald,for obvious reasons,
and shows yet again how wrong he is.

[snip]

> I'm bringing something different to Pedersen than either Alexis
> or Benji is. In the section on Semitic and Hamitic, I find many gratuitous
> references to Christianity (and some non-gratuitous references, as well). This
> is, of course, partly Pedersen and partly me, and others might disagree about
> how gratuitous these references are. The questions Benji is encouraging us to
> ask are whether these references would have been perceived as gratuitous in
> the mid 1920s when Pedersen wrote, and if not what cultural presuppositions
> might have motivated Pedersen to make these references. I'm really out of my
> depth when it comes to this kind of analysis, so I'll leave it at that.
>
The answer is obvious: Pedersen is addressing conceptions and ideas which
he expected his readers to have, but he is NOT endorsing them.  On the
contrary, he seeks throughout to refute any ideas about any connections
between language and race much less religion.

> I think it's worth saying that Pedersen's work is an admirable state of the
> art description of historical and comparative linguistic knowledge for its
> era. There is little of substance that is inconsistent with the knowledge of
> its day, beyond the simplification that is inevitable in an introductory
> survey. There are many prescient remarks.

Ah, how nice to hear that someone agrees.  Indeed, I can see how anyone
could disagree.

> However, much in it is outdated. We
> have, after all, made progress in the past 60 years. What bothers me in some
> instances is the *tone*, a tone that reflects cultural assumptions that I find
> objectionable.

I don't say there are not.  But what do you have in mind?  And
would you not agree that he does a brave and masterful job of
combatting many (though not all) of these cultural assumptions, a half
century
before most Africanists and other linguists, historians, etc.,
were forced kicking and screaming to give them up by the
combined forces of Greenber, other scholars, and the growing
disguist with racism and a priorism that swept through many
social/human sciences decades AFTER Pedersen's book was
written?

> This is not to say that Pedersen knew that his work would have
> such an impact 60 years down the road, or that he would have written
> differently, if he had known.
>
 I am sure he assumed that comparative linguistics would progress
much more smoothly than has been the case and so like Jefferson
re the American Constitution I am sure he thought he would quickly
be supplanted.

AMR