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Schuver as ethnologist It is striking that Schuver, who up to 1880 had been mainly involved in producing war reports, thereafter wrote the travel accounts that have been so useful to anthropologists. His observations on customs and practices were written with such care that his reports were still being used seventy years later by Ernesta Cerulli for her Peoples of South-West Ethiopian and its Borderland (1956). [54] Schuver's vocabularies of the various languages and dialects spoken in the Sudan still retain their importance for linguistic research. Schuver took his ethnographical tasks very seriously, and tried to work in a thoroughly scholarly manner. This is not to say that his travel books contain none of the opinions typical of the nineteenth century. We can see from the French version of his travel books, which Schuver himself translated and which is longer than the English version, that he was obviously drawing comparisons between the ritual usages he described and those of the ancient Greeks, Romans and Persians. It was as if he saw himself surrounded by living history. His frequent references to Brahmanical religious practices leads us to suspect that he also regarded these as an age-old survival. It would appear that his starting point was an historical development of religion in which an original animism and polytheism is always eventually replaced by monotheism. Schuver regarded present-day African religion as naïve and innocent. [55] Here the idea of a primitive, child-like purity comes to the fore: this may be touching, but is doomed to be lost in the process of attaining maturity. For Schuver, civilisation is also an organic process and, furthermore, dependant upon race. He did not exclude the possibility that a numerous black race, with a common language and links with Islam, would one day establish a lasting monarchy, as the Arabs had done in the time of Mohammed. [56] The fact that Schuver regarded the military and administrative power of Islam as necessary to the process of state formation, does not mean that he took a positive view of Islam as an African religion. In his view, conversion to Islam had led only to hypocrisy and tyranny, and never to justice, morality and brotherhood. [57] In his notes he sometimes expressed negative opinions on Islamic people, even tending towards caricature in his descriptions. This did not necessarily mean that he held anti-Islamic views. Many of the subjects on which he wrote were treated, characteristically, with irony and ridicule. It would be more accurate to say that Schuver was a convinced atheist, with little respect for the whole phenomonon of religion, and he saw its drawbacks sooner than the advantages. Schuver believed that there are two sides to the development of civilisations. On the one hand, human beings gain in intelligence and the ability to work together collectively, while on the other they lose contact with nature, create artificial needs, and also lose the isolation that may be the only guarantee of happiness. [58] Enlightenment ideals (Reason, and the desire for progress) and the ideas inherent in Romanticism (naturalness and the concept of alienation) are linked here in the typical manner of the late nineteenth century. | |
