Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
had been told in my infancy, if the earthquake surprise you in a house,
place yourself under a doorway that communicates from one apartment to
another; if you be in the open air, and feel the ground opening beneath you,
extend both your arms, and try to support yourself on the edge of the crev-
ice.” Humboldt reflected: “Thus in savage regions, or in countries exposed
to frequent convulsions, man is prepared to struggle with the beasts of the
forest, to deliver himself from the jaws of the crocodile, and to escape from
the conflict of the elements.”
33
Here was evidence of a vast human capacity
for environmental adaptation rather than control. As George eliot's narrator
puts it in
Middlemarch,
inhabitants of earthquake countries seem to possess
the wisdom that comes of long experience of crisis: “We are told that the
oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes,
but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty
more to come.”
34
Humboldt's Reverberations
Humboldt helped establish earthquakes as a phenomenon inviting a syn-
thetic study of the physical, zoological, and human aspects of a region. As
one anthropologist would remark in 1909, earthquakes could demonstrate
“how closely related geography, ethnography, and linguistics are.”
35
Twenty
years later, a geographer would lament the more recent tendency to consider
the physical and human aspects of earthquakes separately. He reminded his
readers that earthquakes could start avalanches and forest fires, create the
conditions for epidemics, and influence every aspect of a society from its
religious views to its economy.
36
Humboldt also called attention to the dig-
nity and humility with which some non-europeans faced seismic disasters.
in this spirit, edward Tylor—perhaps the most influential British anthropol-
ogist of the nineteenth century—wrote admiringly of the earthquake myths
of “primitive” peoples. indeed, Tylor's belief in an evolutionary hierarchy
of cultures precluded any clear divide between scientific and mythical ex-
planations. in his view, anthropomorphic myths were a form of poetry that
served to explain the natural world to those who could not understand the
“technical language” of science. He lamented that “the growth of myth has
been checked by science, it is dying of weights and measures, of proportions
and specimens.” it was the poet's task to relate “the being and movement
of the world to such personal life as his hearers feel within themselves.”
37
inspired by Tylor's work, the Austrian anthropologist Richard Lasch took
up a comparative study of practices meant to ward off seismic disturbances.
