Bronowski's Easter Island
I was helping with clearing a house of old books and the Jacob Bronowski book The Ascent of Man (1973) fell into my hands and it opened at a picture of Easter Island moai, on an ahu with two pages of text about Easter Island.
It is a book about the BBC TV series of the same name. shown the same year. I vaguely remembered watching it. You can read about Bronowski here: Jacob Bronowski - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Bronowski.
He was a scholar on the history of science. The series and the book are mostly about that.
“He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen-part 1973 BBC television documentary series, and accompanying book, The Ascent of Man, which led to his regard as "one of the world's most celebrated intellectuals".”
This is the quote which I read with some astonishment.
“… Even so primitive a culture as Easter Island made one tremendous invention, the carving of huge and uniform statues. There is nothing like them in the world, and people ask, as usual, all kinds of marginal and faintly irrelevant questions about them. Why were they made like this? How were they transported? How did they get to the places that they are at? But that is not the significant problem. Stonehenge, of a much earlier stone civilisation, was much more difficult to put up; so was Avebury, and many other monuments. No, primitive cultures do inch their way through these enormous communal enterprises. The critical question about these statues is, Why were they all made alike? You see them sitting there, like Diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye-sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to under- stand them. When the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise. But it did not. An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition, like a caged animal going round and round, and making always the same thing. These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilisation which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. That is the failure of the New World cultures, dying in their own symbolic Ice Age. “
“Easter Island is over a thousand miles from the nearest in- habited island, which is Pitcairn Island, to the west. It is over fifteen hundred miles from the next, the Juan Fernandez Islands to the east, where Alexander Selkirk, the original for Robinson Crusoe, was stranded in 1704. Distances like that cannot be navigated unless you have a model of the heavens and of star positions by which you can tell your way. People often ask about Easter Island, How did men come here? They came here by accident: that is not in question. The question is, Why could they not get off? And they could not get off because they did not have a sense of the movement of the stars by which to find their way. Why not? One obvious reason is that there is no Pole Star in the southern sky. We know that is important, because it plays a part in the migration of birds, which find their way by the Pole Star. That is perhaps why most bird migration is in the northern hemisphere and not in the southern. “
“The absence of a Pole Star could be meaningful down here in the southern hemisphere, but it cannot be meaningful for the whole of the New World. Because there is Central America, there is Mexico, there are all sorts of places which also did not have an astronomy and yet which lie north of the equator. “
There is no other reference to the Pacific or Polynesia in the index and the origin of Ernest Rutherford is not mentioned in the half page acknowledgement of him.
Let’s work through it:
“… one tremendous invention, the carving of huge and uniform statues.”
I happen to consider Easter island wood carvings greater art than the moai, but if you don’t know them, you wouldn’t.
“Stonehenge, of a much earlier stone civilisation, was much more difficult to put up; so was Avebury, and many other monuments.”
More than a touch of Eurocentric certainty over their superiority here, through Stonehenge being earlier. Avebury no – its erection was not more difficult. “... many other” – one can feel the dismissive wave of the college common room here.
“… looking at the sky with empty eye-sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them.”
Clearly the makers, not the statues, are the ones implicated here in not understanding astronomy. It is simply nonsense to say Polynesians and indeed oceanic people had no knowledge of astronomy. And it was well known by 1973. Some of the ahu have pretty clear astronomical alignments – perhaps not known then - but that is the ultimate put down in the reverse. And the moai eye sockets often held eyes – which a minimum of research would have revealed.
“An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition, like a caged animal going round and round, and making always the same thing. … etc. etc.”
Well - a gross distortion of the quite varied culture of Easter Island. That culture to the extent now known - for some substantial part of that must have been lost in the gross colonisation of the island.
“… where Alexander Selkirk, the original for Robinson Crusoe, was stranded in 1704”
Good grief, an utterly miniscule item of Pacific history gets space.
“Distances like that cannot be navigated unless you have a model of the heavens and of star positions by which you can tell your way. People often ask about Easter Island, How did men come here? They came here by accident: that is not in question. The question is, Why could they not get off? And they could not get off because they did not have a sense of the movement of the stars by which to find their way. Why not? One obvious reason is that there is no Pole Star in the southern sky. We know that is important, because it plays a part in the migration of birds, which find their way by the Pole Star. That is perhaps why most bird migration is in the northern hemisphere and not in the southern. “
Well “by accident” certainly was a question, Andrew Sharp to the affirmative but the debate he fomented had resolved by that time, best illustrated in Lewis’s 1972 “We the Navigators”. Resolved strongly against accident having any central role. Stars and navigation by then were known to have a very central role. Bronowski was utterly ignorant of one of the most cerebral Pacific debates of the time. Why could they not “get off” is all about Bronowski - his thinking that they must have wanted to - being beyond his conception as a place to live, it is his limitation alone. Pole star – all entirely northern hemisphere centric. Little bird migration in the southern hemisphere – what bosh.
“… , mark a civilisation which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. That is the failure of the New World cultures, dying in their own symbolic Ice Age. “
Polynesia is the remotest part of the Old World but put that aside. One wonders if he had ever heard of rongorongo. This is an extraordinary dismissal of the cultures of two American continents and the Pacific. It says far more about Eurocentric academic self-satisfaction, about some idea of intellectual and cultural superiority, frankly racism.
Why am I riled about a book published half a century ago? Well it was looked up to for a long time. This part was poor scholarship then. It’s the condescension. If he was a humanist, to him only part of humanity count.
History is inevitably written with the biases
of the present. Let’s hope our present distortions are less gross than this.