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condemned europeans for their brutal treatment of natives. his insights
were well noted by theorists like Darwin
38
and Boas.
39
Yet gerland's conclusions were ambivalent. On one hand, he recognized
that europeans' barbaric treatment of natives cast doubt on the very notion
of “civilized peoples.” Not only were colonialists at risk of becoming bar-
barians themselves. even in the metropoles europeans were threatened by
symptoms of what would soon be termed degeneration: “We have grown
pampered in our bodily existence, accustomed to a host of comforts that we
can not do without; we are mentally far more sensitive, and a downfall of
that which is holy to us crushes us as well.” it was, he judged, time to “stop
speaking of a particular incapacity for life of the
Naturvölker,
since we would
succumb far faster than they to the disaster they have suffered.”
The Extinc-
tion of the Primitive Races
was thus, in part, an allegory of modernization
and its discontents. gerland's ambivalence was underscored by repeated
comparisons between colonial subjects and the germanic tribes in the face
of Roman culture. he could not help but agree with J. g. Seume's aphorism
that “we savages are better men.”
40
On the other hand, gerland did not doubt that the “struggle for exis-
tence” would end with the triumph of the colonial order.
Naturvölker
were
vulnerable because of their exquisite adaptation (in a Darwinian sense) to a
particular natural environment. By definition, these were populations who
adapted to nature instead of controlling it; hence their catastrophic confron-
tations with modernity. At the end of his analysis, the fundamental distinc-
tion between
Kulturvölker
and
Naturvölker
remained intact: the former were
able to transcend the conditions imposed by nature, while the latter were
bound by them.
The New Humanism
What then did colonial anthropology have to do with geophysics? gerland's
reinvention of geography,
Erdkunde,
as a strictly physicalist, instrument-
based, and highly mathematical discipline might seem typical of what
Andrew Zimmermann has described as the antihumanist turn in german
anthropology in the late nineteenth century. Like Zimmermann's antihu-
manists, gerland replaced “hermeneutic notions of understanding and in-
terpretive empathy with models of objective observations borrowed from
the natural sciences.” According to Zimmermann, this move “devalued the
human both as an inquirer and as a subject of inquiry.”
41
For gerland, how-
ever, the abandonment of hermeneutic inquiry—the turn to a dehuman-
ized geography—was meant to ensure that the human would
not
be thus
