This is my working hypothesis for my current chapter: because “pacification” preceded “civilization,” we should look to Europeans’ encounter with “the New World” to explain the emergence of the idea of civilization in both main senses of the term: as a noun to describe a process, and as a noun to describe a society.
Keep in mind that “civilization,” when it enters the English language, comes in as a noun to describe a process, in a way that parallels the use of the earlier term “pacification,” which we encounter in both Spanish and English in the mid-15th century. However, we do not have a corresponding noun of the same form to describe the society that exists or that comes into existence as a result of “pacification.” Accounts of the Spanish conquest of Mexico or government reports on the Viet Nam war, for example, may talk of “pacified villages” or a “pacified countryside,” but they do not aggregate the peoples subjected to this term under the collective noun of “a pacification.”
But with “civilization,” things are a little different. The word comes into English as a term for a process imposed by some people upon another people, and ends up being as well a catch-all noun to describe a whole society. But which society? The society that does the civilizing, or the society that has undergone the process of civilization?
A 15-20 foot Mayan stele carved in high relief, excavated in Mesoamerica in 1885, now in the American Museum of Natural History. Photo by John Burnett.
In American usage, the answer is both, with some caveats. As Caroline Winterer pointed out in her chapter on Enlightenment-era interest in the pre-conquest history of Mexico, American thinkers were glad enough to regard the Aztec “calendar stone” as the work of a great, vanished civilization, in order to argue for the incapacity of contemporary indigenous North Americans to display a similar level of technological sophistication. Any great indigenous civilization in the Americas must by definition be a “lost civilization” or a “vanished civilization” in order to be celebrated and studied.
At the same time, some Indigenous North Americans embraced the term “civilization” and applied it to themselves. In arguing against their forcible removal to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi, the Cherokee argued that, having adopted all the markers of “civilization” valued by the whites around them, they would suffer greatly as a sophisticated and “civilized” people thrown among the “savages” to the west.
In opposition to the Indian Removal Act, The Cherokee Phoenix newspaper frequently reprinted articles from political sympathizers that touted the Cherokee as “civilized” or as successful adopters of “civilization.” In August of 1829, for example, the Cherokee paper reprinted a long essay originally published in the Massachusetts Journal that argued the Cherokee had both a natural right as “a civilized people” and a legal right as recognized by past treaties of the United States to remain in their ancestral lands.[1] A week later the newspaper reprinted another sympathetic essay, originally published in The Connecticut Mirror, arguing that both the agricultural practices and the “mechanic arts” adopted by the Cherokee provided evidence that “the Indian character may be tamed, and the Indian himself civilized and enlightened.”[2]
Whether the Cherokee believed that they had ever stood in need of “civilizing,” they leveraged this claim of “civilization,” particularly in reference to the adoption of anglo American economic and social practices, to advocate for the right to remain on their land. “It is now admitted by all, we believe,” an 1828 editorial in the Phoenix observed, “that we are an improving people; that we are on a constant and gradual march towards a civilized state.” For that reason, the editorial argued, it was not wise “to leave our infant institutions, our houses, our farms, and go and unite ourselves with our brethren (many of whom are still savages) and try a system of civilization, uncertain and unprecedented.”[3] Civilization, so lately attained, could be lost if the Cherokee were to be forced to move across the Mississippi and live among “savages” there.
But even as they portrayed themselves as “on the march” towards civilization, and as “a civilized people,” the Cherokee did not here call themselves “a civilization.”
There is a slippery irony to the term civilization in American thought: to become completely “civilized” is to lose the claim to being “a civilization.” Civilizations are those that do the civilizing. But the marker of a successful work of civilizing is not the production or calling forth of a new civilization, but the utter obliteration of what makes the civilized different from the civilizers.
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[1] “The Cherokee Indians,” The Cherokee Phoenix, and Indians’ Advocate, New Echota, Ga., Aug. 19, 1829, pp. 1-2.
[2] “The Indians,” The Cherokee Phoenix, and Indians’ Advocate, New Echota, Ga., Aug. 26, 1829, pg. 1.
[3] “Indian Emigration,” The Cherokee Phoenix, Apr. 24, 1828, pg. 3.
3 Thoughts on this Post
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I’m curious to hear about how your historical findings might relate to Norbert Elias’s arguments about the “civilizing process” in early modern Europe.
I am trying to hold off on even thinking about that until I write my way into the 20th century, but that’s probably the wrong approach. But yes, it’s somethig I have to contend with. But the short answer is that I would rather put Elias within the frame than let him do the framing, if that makes any sense.
It might also be interesting to look at the term “civilizing mission” (la mission civilisatrice) and when it was first used. It’s definitely there with 19th-cent. colonialism (esp. though not only the French version), but I don’t know how far back it goes.