Latin American Geography || Recollections of Carl Sauer and Research in Latin America

American Geographical Society

Recollections of Carl Sauer and Research in Latin AmericaAuthor(s): Henry J. BrumanSource: Geographical Review, Vol. 86, No. 3, Latin American Geography (Jul., 1996), pp. 370-376Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/215500 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 17:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toGeographical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.92 on Fri, 9 May 2014 17:04:39 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ags

http://www.jstor.org/stable/215500?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


RECOLLECTIONS OF CARL SAUER AND RESEARCH IN LATIN AMERICA

HENRY J. BRUMAN

ABSTRACT. The identification of difficult hurdles in research, the need to define knotty problems early, and, by solving or attempting to solve problems, the advancement of the frontiers of knowledge should be a major part of the intellectual process at the doctoral and predoctoral levels. Independent research requires independent thought and action and can be hazardous to one's relationship with one's mentors. Examples are drawn from my rela- tionships with Professors Carl Sauer and Joseph Needham. Keywords: distillation, Joseph Needham, problem, Occam's Razor, Carl Sauer, tuba.

'fr. Sauer was a wonderful man, a fine role model, and an inspiration to several

generations of doctoral students at the University of California, Berkeley. We students tried to emulate him in various ways, consciously and unconsciously, but none of us could attain the intellectual heights he reached. In spite of that fact, we have to admit that Mr. Sauer was a human being with foibles, like the rest of us. He could be

opinionated, even intransigent. This was especially true with regard to some of his

pronouncements about the diffusion of plants. We have come reluctantly to the conclusion that Mr. Sauer tended to be a mite reckless at times in what he said about them. He was a real diffusionist who looked whenever possible for evidence of pre- Columbian contacts across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. And occasionally he went astray. A book by Elmer Drew Merrill on The Botany of Cook's Voyages... (1954) contains some fifteen pages of objections, approaching diatribes, about Mr. Sauer's statements on plant origins. Merrill, of course, was a professor of botany. He had been an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Philippines as early as 1902, and he conducted extensive research on the local flora.

In 1923, the year in which Sauer came to Berkeley to take charge of geography, Merrill became dean of agriculture and director of the university's Agricultural Ex-

periment Station. A certain animosity may have sprung up between the two men in those early years. This was a time when the Department of Geography was growing and needed to expand from its small quarters in South Hall. Where did it go? Into Ag- riculture Hall, onto the turf of Dean Merrill. Some sparks may well have flown at times, and Merrill took his satisfaction three decades later, in a purely professional way, with this publication. In 1993 I visited the Regional Oral History Project on the

Berkeley campus to see whether either man had recorded an oral history. Merrill did, without mentioning Sauer. Mr. Sauer did not, and more's the pity, because we

thereby lost information, not only about the early university but also about Califor- nia geography in the early decades.

*$ DR. BRUMAN is a professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, California 90024-4463.

The Geographical Review 86 (3): 370-376, July 1996 Copyright ? 1996 by the American Geographical Society of New York



SAUER AND RESEARCH IN LATIN AMERICA

Mr. Sauer's characteristic insights reached into the nature of geographical in- quiry. His main preoccupation was with the land, with phenomena that varied in space as the land varied, and with the elucidation of the progress through time of such variation, physical and cultural, qualitative and quantitative. He looked for pat- terns of process and sequence, but in the course thereof specifically sought the solu- tion of discrete research problems, not merely the compilation of projects. This is an important thought to keep in mind. He did not want to pursue, nor have his students pursue, projects that were mechanical or devoid of intellectual challenge. Even in the dissertation topics he proposed-or accepted, if they were proposed by doctoral can- didates-there had to be nuggets of a problem within the overall project,' whatever it was. Although I never heard him put it in these terms, I think Mr. Sauer would have agreed that the quest for new knowledge and insights is a basic aim of a dissertation, and no less so the most basic function of a university.

COCONUTS

It maybe useful for me to go back to my own experience and point out why my dissertation was chosen, where some nuggets of problem were, and what happened to them. First of all, my topic, as much negotiated as chosen, was "Aboriginal Drink Ar- eas in New Spain" (1940). That is really an extraordinary title! What is a drink area? For initiates to geography it must mean an area of frequent or habitual consumption of one or more traditional beverages and an analysis of environmental and cultural factors related to their use. In the dissertation, the main emphasis was on alcoholic beverages because of the importance of alcohol consumption in many native socie- ties in Mesoamerica.

The topic was suggested by Mr. Sauer, partly, I think, because my bachelor's de- gree was in organic chemistry and I was thus less likely to make purely technical er- rors. The topic was attractive, because it combined areal analysis with botany, anthropology, fieldwork in remote areas, history, archival work, paleography, for-

eign languages, and biochemistry. And it contained many research problems. Where was pulque made aboriginally? How could one find out? What about plants used for alcoholic drinks today that may not have been present aboriginally, like the coconut? The literature contains many disagreements about these and related matters. Could there have been coconut wine? Nobody knew, and I had quite a dispute about the origin of the coconut with Mr. Sauer himself, a dispute that lasted more than a dozen years-during which we hardly spoke to each other!

What was Mr. Sauer's point? He believed that coconuts were native to South America, following the thinking of 0. F. Cook of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who had written extensively about their origin (Cook 1901, 1910). Coconuts were

supposed to be native to the neighborhood of salt springs in the interior of tropical South America. Mr. Sauer was among the few scholars who supported Cook's thesis. I tried to reason with my professor, pointing out that in American native traditions there is practically no mention of coconuts, whereas in Southeast Asia there were many local uses and traditions, some of which went back a millennium or more, and

371



THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

that in Southeast Asian locales the crop is so important that, after rice, it is the single most important plant used. I conceded that most of the close botanical relatives were American, but I believed that coconut palms had probably developed early enough for ancestral forms to have migrated to the Eastern Hemisphere by natural means, perhaps over an Antarctic connection. After all, fossil coconuts have been found in

Tertiary strata in New Zealand (Berry 1926, 181-184). Mr. Sauer and I discussed these matters at length, and at one point he suggested that I not publish any of myviews because they were premature.

At that point I rebelled. I did publish most of my coconut materials shortly after I received my doctorate in 1940 (Bruman 1944b, 1945, 1947). Mr. Sauer never brought up the subject again, and neither did I. In the late 1950s, after I had been chairman of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, for a while, he and I gradually resumed our correspondence. Finally, in 1961, when Joe Spencer and I arranged for Sauer to spend some time at UCLA and give his seminar on the origins of domesticated plants, we got backon speaking terms. Some years later, when the signature on his letters changed from "Carl 0. Sauer," or "COS," to "Carl," I knew I had been forgiven. Of course I had forgiven him long before. He was an in-

spiring man and a brilliant scholar, human foibles and all. Merrill wrote at great length about coconuts in The Botany of Cook's Voyages

(1954) and patted me on the back, probably without realizing that I had been Sauer's student. Most workers in the field would agree, now, that the early home of the coconut palm as an important item in human cultures is indeed Southeast Asia, that its

presence there goes back thousands of years, and that its importance in native Amer- ica was zero or close to zero. The hedging is necessary because coconuts were present in a few spots in native America before the coming of the Europeans. Oviedo reports finding them during the first Spanish explorations, in about 1514, along the newly discovered Pacific Coast of what is now Central America, on the shores of the Gulf of Panama, Burica Point, and Cocos Island, which they named after the palms (Oviedo y Valdes 1851-1855, 1: 335-336). Oviedo himself took part in some of these explorations. The Spaniards already knew of the coconut as a trade item from India and Af- rica. There were no credible reports of the aboriginal occurrence of coconuts on Caribbean shores, so it would appear that they had not yet had time to cross the Isth- mus of Panama and establish themselves on the other side. Whether the coconuts arrived solely through the action of currents and waves, or whether Pacific Basin dwellers with nautical skills carried them in canoes part or all the way, is still uncer- tain.

In one archive I found a seventeenth-century manuscript dealing with a Spanish shipwreck on the humid northwestern shore of Ecuador (Herrera y Montemayor n.d.). The starving sailors who survived were wandering down the coast in the gen- eral direction of Peru when they came to a single coconut palm. They asked local In- dians whether there were other such palms along the coast, and the response was

negative. The Spaniards were certain that the palm had been created especially by God to save their lives, and they gave thanks. This lone occurrence would support the

372




thesis that under some conditions coconuts could float in the sea and establish themselves, unaided, on remote shores.

It would appear that coconuts came to the Caribbean area from eastern Africa, by stages, during the first half of the sixteenth century. The Vasco da Gama expedition of 1498 had found them in Mozambique, quite possibly the first encounter of Euro-

peans with coconut groves since the time of Marco Polo (Ravenstein 1898, 27). By the first decade of the sixteenth century, Portuguese sailors were bringing coconuts around the Cape of Good Hope as a matter of routine and planting them on the shores and islands of the Gulf of Guinea. By 1505 it was standard practice to load a supply of coconuts on returning ships for ballast and emergency food and drink, as well as for sustenance in the growing slave trade. Thus coconuts were introduced into the Atlantic drainage by the Portuguese and were extended by them, along with Afri- can slaves, to Cape Verde, mainland and islands, and to the coast of Brazil, especially Bahia and Recife. From there they were probably carried, along with black slaves, to the Spanish Caribbean.

In 1947 I published a letter by Antonio de Guijo, a lieutenant of Hernan Cort6s, which shows that the Spaniards themselves extended the range of planted coconuts, taking them from Panama to the Colima coast of Mexico in 1539. In the letter of transmittal, Guijo, in effect, says, "I have heard that in the part of New Spain where

you are there are none of the coconut palms that give such a bountiful and useful fruit here along the shores of the Gulf of Panama. I am sending your Excellency two dozen coconuts. Plant them shallow in the vicinity of the sea and theywill sprout and

grow. I think they will be useful" (Bruman 1947,572). That they took hold is shown by the account of Alonso Ponce (1873, 2: 108) from the Colima area, fewer than fifty years later, who reported the widespread distribution of coconut groves.

STILLS AND NATIVE DRINKS

This leads me to the next item that was a problem in my dissertation: the banana. Were bananas present in aboriginal America? There was scattered use of banana- sugar cane wine during the colonial period. I reported this at the 1973 meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, which Mr. Sauer attended. My main conclusion was that some strains of bananas were growing in South America before the coming of the Europeans but that they had arrived relatively recently. Mr. Sauer, I think, agreed with my conclusion that we really do not know. Inferential evidence of their aboriginal presence abounds, but so does inferential evidence for their absence. Work on this topic is still needed.

A third difficulty was the Huichol still. One of the fundamental questions of any extended analysis of aboriginal alcoholic beverages in the New World is that of the

presence or absence of distillation as a technique. One thing was clear: Aboriginal stills had very limited distribution, if they occurred at all. They definitely were not present north of the Rio Grande.

It was Carl Lumholtz, the Norwegian anthropologist, who, in the 189os, first trav- eled southward on horseback along the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico on a

373




pioneer ethnological expedition. He reported seeing a primitive still type among the Huicholes of Zacatecas and Nayarit and published engravings and cross-sectional sketches of the device in Unknown Mexico (Lumholtz 1902). He thought that the still was probably a native invention but questioned why the Huicholes were the only tribe to have it. These Indians had been farmers for only a few centuries; they were not a very sophisticated group technologically; and their ancestral lands were in east- central Mexico, in and around San Luis Potosi, where they had been nomadic hunt- ers and gatherers until various factors-including, probably, the Mixt6n War in the 1540s-caused them to move to the sierra to the west.

How did the Huicholes come to possess the still, which seems so extraneous to the rest of their culture? I became embroiled in a dispute over this question, not with Mr. Sauer but with a man of even weightier academic credentials, the late Professor Joseph Needham of Cambridge University. Professor Needham, a member of the Royal Society, received many medals and numerous honorary degrees, and his entry in Who's Who spans a full page. In 1977 he asked me for reprints of my articles on coconuts and the Huichol still. I had run out of reprints, so I sent him the citations, which I hoped would be sufficient. He was just completing his multivolume work on Science and Civilisation China (1954-1988). That is one of the great scholarly achieve- ments of this or any other generation-a wonderful piece of work.

In the volume on technological apparatus, including stills, he mentions mywork on the Huicholes (Bruman 1944a) but considers my reconstruction of how the device came to Mexico dubious (Needham 1980, no). I do not think he looked at all as- pects of my argument about the still, which was tied up with the history of the coconut in Mexico. Coconuts arrived in the Colima area of Mexico in 1539, as already mentioned, and we know that they have been present there ever since. In 1564 the Spanish explorer Miguel L6pez de Legazpi was sent across the Pacific to take posses- sion of the Philippine Islands, which Spain claimed by right of discovery during Magellan's expedition. A government was organized, the Church was established, and soon trading galleons were annually plying the Pacific between the Philippines and Mexico. By 1570 the Mexican terminus had been firmly established at Acapulco. This administrative and commercial contact, funded by Mexican silver pesos, was maintained almost without interruption until the early nineteenth century, when independence came to Mexico.

The sailors in this long-lasting trading enterprise were commonly young Filipi- nos who, because of the length of the voyage and its inevitable rigors, had a tendency to jump ship when the galleons arrived in Mexico. Crossings usually took from about two months to more than six months. Toward the end, food and drinking water were in short supply, the crew and officers suffered from scurvy and other deficiency dis- eases, and fatalities occurred. Because galleons returning to the Philippines tended to be undermanned, laws were put into effect making it a crime to refuse reemploy- ment on them, with the result that many Filipino sailors left the coastal areas and sought refuge among Indian groups in the sierra. The Spanish name whereby the galleon traffic across the Pacific was known was la nao de Filipinas or la nao de China,

374




and the Filipino sailors were often simply called chinos, even though they were not Chinese. Chino is still a fairly common name in western Mexico, and is found even

among the Huicholes.

Coconut-palm brandy has been made in Colima since the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. While studying its manufacture in Colima, I found that the word tuba was used for the alcoholic liquid before distillation. When I visited the Huichol Indians on muleback in 1938 and found a Huichol still with internal receiver in operation in one settlement, I asked what they called the fermented material before distillation, and the answer was tuba. In the mid-192os a study of a simple Fili-

pino still with internal receiver was published in the Philippine Journal of Science (Feliciano 1926). In principle the Filipino still is identical with that of the Huicholes. Tuba is mentioned as a Tagalog word for a fermented liquid before distillation. Thus the word leaves a trail from the Philippines to the Colima coast to the Huichol sierra, most likely the track the undocumented sailors took. Professor Needham was not convinced by my reconstruction. Some eleven years ago he published a little book entitled Trans-Pacific Echoes and Resonances: Listening Once Again (Needham and

Gwei-Djen 1985). In this summary he fails to mention the Huichol still but thinks it

likely that the Mongolian still was brought to the interior of Mexico by Chinese navi-

gators several thousand years ago! At this point I think one should invoke an old philosophical principle known as

Occam's Razor, which has several forms, the most useful in the present case being the rule that when one must choose between two or more conflicting theories that at-

tempt to explain a phenomenon, one had best choose the simplest one, or at least that explanation with the most supporting evidence. And, on this basis, the thesis that the Huichol still is of Filipino origin wins by a mile. Why invoke mythological Chinese sailors when you do not need to? The lines of evidence for a Filipino origin are plentiful. They can be followed historically in archival documentation, in tech-

nological design, in nomenclature, in motivation. Even the remote geographical lo- cation of the primitive still away from the coast in refuge areas in the mountains is

explained, by flight from persecution. There is, in fact, no doubt about it at all. The documents cited and in part quoted in my paper on "Early Coconut Culture in West- ern Mexico" (Bruman 1945) are incontrovertible.

MORAL OF THE STORY

The moral to be drawn from the coconut-Sauer episode, it seems to me, is that one had best publish honestly-arrived-at research results, even if someone else disagrees with one's conclusions. If, despite rigorous checking, one should commit an error, an

opportunity for correction will probably present itself in the future. One should not knuckle under, even to intimidation by one's superiors, when the matter is one of sin- cere opinion based on hard work. My defiant act cost me twelve years of friendship with Papa Sauer. Everything was eventually smoothed over, and in the intervening years my opinion on the subject has met with some acceptance. From the Huichol still episode, I would say the lesson to be drawn is, defend your research results, do

375




not let alien trombones drown out your thunder. For graduate students the lesson is, stick up for your opinions; for professors, be mindful of the vulnerable nature of

your students' sensibilities.

NOTE

1. Byproblem I mean a hindrance to further research, a difficulty or obstacle that needs to be sur- mounted, perhaps requiring additional information, or a new insight into the interrelationships of the available data.

REFERENCES

Berry, E. W. 1926. Cocos and Phymatocaryon in the Pliocene of New Zealand. American Journal of Science, 5th ser., 12: 181-184.

Bruman, H. J. 1940. Aboriginal Drink Areas in New Spain. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Ber- keley.

. 1944a. The Asiatic Origin of the Huichol Still. Geographical Review 34 (3): 418-427. ---- . 1944b. Some Observations on the Early History of the Coconut in the New World, Acta

Americana 2 (3): 220-243. . 1945. Early Coconut Culture in Western Mexico. Hispanic American Historical Review 25

(2): 212-223.

. 1947. A Further Note on Coconuts in Colima. Hispanic American Historical Review 27 (3): 572-573.

Cook, O. . 1901. The Origin and Distribution of the Cocoa Palm. Contributions to the National Her- barium 7: 257-293. 1. 91o. History of the Coconut Palm in America. Contributions to the National Herbarium 14: 271-342.

Feliciano, R. T. 1926. Illicit Beverages. PhilippineJournal of Science 29 (4): 465-473. Herrera y Montemayor, D. I. de. n.d. Viage que Don Iuan de Herrera y Montemayor hizo el afo de

M.DCXVII de Mexico al Reyno del Piru, y aduersos successos del. Unpublished manuscript x-7-503, Biblioteca Nacional de Mexico, Mexico City.

Lumholtz, C. 1902. Unknown Mexico. 2 vols. New York: C. Scribner's Sons. Merrill, E. D. 1954. The Botany of Cook's Voyages and Its Unexpected Significance in Relation to An-

thropology, Biogeography, and History. Chronica Botanica, 14 (5/6). Waltham, Mass.: Chronica Botanica.

Needham, J. 1954-1988. Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univer- sity Press.

. 1980. Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Apparatus, Theories, and Gifts. In Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 4, sec. 33. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Needham, J., and L. Gwei-Djen. 1985. Trans-Pacific Echoes and Resonances: Listening Once Again. Singapore and Philadelphia: World Scientific.

Oviedo y Valdes, G. F. de. 1851-1855. Historia generaly natural de las Indias. 4 vols. Madrid: Real Aca- demia de la Historia.

Ponce, Fr. Alonso. 1873. Relaci6n breve ... escrita por dos religiosos, sus companeros. 2 vols. Madrid: Viuda de Calero.

Ravenstein, E. G. 1898. A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497-1499. Hakluyt Society Publication 94. London: Hakluyt Society.

376



Documents

Latin American Geography || Recollections of Carl Sauer and Research in Latin America