Interpretations of a Transcultural ‘Other’
Intellectual history is rife with examples of where the subtle mindset of an individual author, group, or society at large, can be ascertained through a deeper examination of their idiosyncratic readings of a foreign ‘Other’. Influential ideas have been made and remade through selective interpretations of unfamiliar cultures, which subsequently become re-imagined into something quite different.
This blogpost details two understudied historical instances of such a process. It argues that global intellectual historians can benefit from appreciating the complexity of these moments of transcultural interaction, moving away from limiting frameworks which see only cultural appropriation or problematic denigration. These case studies prompt historians to consider: under what circumstances might historical actors open their minds to the influence of different cultural contexts? What can re-formulated ideas of ‘over there’ tell historians about developing patterns of thinking ‘at home’?
Firstly, in the early American Republic, different philosophical frameworks were adopted to understand and classify the various indigenous peoples found in North, Central, and South America. Their imaginative conceptions of their hemisphere’s ancient past became adapted for political and ideological ends. The discovery of indigenous earthworks along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in the late 1770s and 1780s forced Americans to think about their country’s ancient history, resulting in a period of ‘mound mania’ and an increasing number of experts in ‘moundology’.
American intellectuals immediately severed any connection between these monumental tumuli and the contemporary indigenous nations found in the trans-Appalachian West. Philosophical inquirers soon began a speculative search for the origins of this mysterious so-called ‘Mound Builder’ race. Jeremy Belknap, addressing the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1792, summarised prevailing opinion on the earthworks: the ‘form and materials of these works seem to indicate the existence of a race of men in a stage of improvement superior to those natives of whom we or our fathers have had any knowledge’.
Contemporary Americans re-formulated intellectual authorities in developing their use of this mysterious ‘Other’ to suit their political priorities. They latched on to the Mexican Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero’s concept of an indigenous American civilisation – the Toltecs – and suggested that this was the race which built the impressive earthworks. Following their construction of the North American mounds, the Toltecs allegedly migrated southwards where they constructed the remarkable Inca and Aztec civilizations.
The moundville site, occupied from around 1000 A.D. to 1450 A.D.
Anthropological, historical, philological, and scientific studies legitimised widespread ideas about the inferiority of North American Indians, especially when contrasted with the more sophisticated indigenous Aztec and Inca empires. Such ideas were then increasingly used to justify dubious Indian land cessions. European Enlightenment philosophy informed an evolutionary framework which posed contemporary North American Indians as savages, in contrast to those peoples found in the historically cultivated South American empires.
In the first decades of the 19th century, Americans remained anxious to forge their own identities and older civilisational story, after the colonial generation had broken away from the Old World politically. Corresponding with Thomas Jefferson, as the recent President continued to pursue the Toltec theory, Henry Marie Brackenridge and James Wilkinson promoted an idealistic connection with the Incas and Aztecs to claim direct lineage with historical New World civilisations. Such views fed into perspectives on contemporary political developments, as the Toltecs were used to encourage support for emerging South American independence movements and hemispheric republican solidarity.
Finally, the British counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s used ideas of Indian religion and philosophy to oppose conventional society. This was a mere generation after Indian independence from Britain and partition in 1947, allowing this youth-dominated group to view their former colonial possession with a fresh perspective. Other global ‘hippie’ movements similarly romanticised indigenous, African, or Eastern cultures, yet the intellectual legacies of Empire meant that this transcultural interaction took a unique form in Britain.
Colonial-era texts proliferated amongst London’s ‘alternative society’, and Brits found India particularly accessible as they did not need visas and it was possible to make the entire journey overland via the cheap coaches which departed from the capital. Some had attended imperial-minded public schools, their families had connections to the Raj, and their ideas of India had been informed by Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book duology or Boy’s Own adventure stories. They also continued to benefit from colonial networks, infrastructure, embassies, and millions of hospitable English speakers across South Asia.
Ideas taken from Hinduism and Buddhism, usually presented through white Western interlocutors like Hermann Hesse, Paul Brunton, Aldous Huxley, and Ram Dass, mapped onto newfound countercultural intellectual priorities. Gandhian non-violence and vegetarianism were imported into embryonic experiments in communal living, and British proponents of tantra yoga found this better suited to the ‘permissive age’ than their parents’ participation in Anglican or Catholic churches.
Psychedelically induced feelings of oneness with the universe were used by British hippies to connect practices of transcendental meditation with their LSD trips. This was criticised by Ravi Shankar, who protested that chillum-smoking sadhus were far from average Indians at the time. British hippies likewise prioritised a reified image of ‘India’ which ignored its rapid militarisation and problems with political violence. This imagined India influenced popular cultural consumption, but others like George Harrison and the spiritual communities at Centre House and Gandalf’s Garden remained permanently changed by their interaction with Indian religious philosophy.
These intellectual conceptions of a foreign ‘Other’ offer a framework for understanding the motivations and insecurities of people ‘at home’. A closer look at the complexities of each case study proves that this was far more than a process of cultural denigration. Late 18th-century Euro-Americans might have dismissed indigenous North Americans as primitive, but they did so by turning to South American intellectual authorities and celebrating a foreign ‘Other’ which better suited their contemporary political priorities. British countercultural Indophilia cannot be detached from centuries of colonialism on the subcontinent, though for many of its anti-Establishment participants it mapped on to new ways of understanding their places in the world. Such interactions between foreign cultures can better be described as cross-fertilisation, whereby intellectual expansion ‘at home’ occurs through complicated engagement with – rather than simple appropriation or essentialism of – ‘over there’.
Robert James Taylor is a second-year DPhil candidate in History and Senior Scholar at New College, researching the post-1945 British counterculture and its use of Indian ideas.
