Survey. In Britain, the science writer Grant Allen devised questionnaires to be sent to missionaries and explorers requesting that they provide data on the color sense of the natives they encountered. And finally, faced with this direct challenge to his claims, Magnus himself decided to conduct a survey of his own and sent questionnaires accompanied by color charts to hundreds of consulates, missionaries, and doctors all over the world.
When the results started coming in, they constituted-in one sense-the most spectacular confirmation of Gladstone’s and Geiger’s perspicacity. No one could any longer just brush off their findings as the overreaction of overly literal philologists, and no one could dismiss the peculiarities in the color descriptions of ancient texts as merely instances of poetic license. For the deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages from all over the world. The Nubians that Virchow and his colleagues probed in the Berlin Zoo had no word for “blue” at all. When they were shown a blue skein of wool, some of them called it “black” and others called it “green.” Some of them didn’t even distinguish between yellow, green, and gray, calling all three colors by the same word.
In America, Albert Gatschet wrote that the Klamath Indians in Oregon were happy to use the same term for “the color of any grass, weed or plant, and though the plant passes from the green of spring time and summer into the faded yellow of autumn, the color-name is not changed.” The Sioux from Dakota used the same word,
Similar stories emerged from the questionnaires sent back by missionaries and travelers from other parts of the world. When they spoke about colors, many of the savages-or “nature peoples,” as the Germans kindly called them-betrayed exactly the same confusions that Gladstone and Geiger found in ancient texts. Even Geiger’s bold evolutionary sequence, which he had deduced from the faintest etymological scraps of evidence, received a dramatic corroboration. Just as Geiger had anticipated, red was always the first of the prismatic colors to receive a name. Indeed, it transpired that there were peoples around even in the nineteenth century who had not yet progressed beyond the red stage. Ernst Almquist, the doctor of the Swedish expedition to the Polar Sea, reported that the Chukchis in Siberia were quite content with using just three terms-black, white, and red-to describe any color.
Further languages were discovered that corresponded exactly to the subsequent stages of development that Geiger had predicted: the inhabitants of the island of Nias in Sumatra, for example, were reported to use only four basic color words: black, white, red, and yellow. Green, blue, and violet were all called “black.” And some languages had black, white, red, yellow, and green, but no blue, just as Geiger had assumed.
Geiger, who had died in 1870, was not allowed to bask in posthumous glory, however. And no one was queuing up to pat the septuagenarian Gladstone on the back either. In fact, Geiger, Gladstone, and especially Magnus came under heavy fire, for it turned out they were as shortsighted as they were perspicacious. Their philological insights may have been vindicated, for languages across the world were behaving exactly as predicted. But the reports about the
What had seemed almost impossible to contemplate a few years before turned out to be a plain fact: people can spot the difference between different colors but can still fail to give them separate names. And surely, if that was the case with primitive tribes in the nineteenth century, it must have been the same with Homer and all the other ancients. The only possible conclusion was that, had Homer been administered a Holmgren test, he would have been able to spot the difference between green and yellow, just as he would have been able to tell apart purple wools from brown ones, had he been asked to do so by a German anthropologist.
But why then did he call his honey “green” and his sheep “purple”? The culturalists may have had their proof that the ancients could distinguish all colors, but they were less successful in formulating a convincing alternative explanation, for culture’s assault on the concepts of color still crashed against a solid wall of disbelief. Magnus now modified his counterargument and declared that it was implausible that those primitive peoples perceived all colors
At the time, it was impossible to confirm or to disprove such claims empirically, for while it is easy to test whether someone can spot the difference between two colors or not, it is far more difficult to devise experiments that can tell exactly how vividly this distinction appears to different people. Certainly it was impossible to decide the question on the basis of the available evidence, which was mostly gathered from questionnaires. As no decisive new evidence was forthcoming, the heated discussion gradually subsided over the following years and the question of the color sense remained in limbo for almost two decades, until the first attempt to conduct sophisticated experiments on the mental traits of natives in situ. Substantial progress had to wait for the 1898 Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits, and for a remarkable man who finally swung established consensus in favor of culture-much against his better judgment.
To most people who have heard of him, W. H. R. Rivers is the compassionate psychiatrist who treated Siegfried Sassoon during World War I. Rivers worked at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, where he was a pioneer in applying psychoanalytic techniques to help officers suffering from shell shock. Sassoon was sent to him in 1917 after being declared insane for publicly questioning the sanity of the war, throwing his Military Cross into the river Mersey, and refusing to return to his regiment. Rivers treated him with sympathy and understanding, and eventually Sassoon voluntarily returned to France. The affection, even devotion, that Rivers inspired in many of his patients seems to have lost none of its intensity years after the war. Sassoon, a man so fearless in battle that he was nicknamed Mad Jack, collapsed with grief at Rivers’s funeral in 1922. And some forty years later, in July 1963, a frail old man called in at the library of St John’s, Rivers’s old Cambridge College, and asked to see his portrait, explaining that he had been treated by Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917. According to the librarian’s account, the man stood before the picture at the salute and thanked Rivers for all he had done for him. The visitor returned on at least two other occasions, and every time he asked to see the portrait. On his last visit he was obviously in poor health and finished with the words “goodbye my friend-I don’t suppose we shall ever meet again.”
But Rivers’s vocation as the salve of shell-shocked souls came only later in life, after a distinguished career in two other fields: experimental psychology and then anthropology. It was the experimental psychologist Rivers who was invited in 1898 to join the Cambridge University anthropological expedition to the islands of the Torres Straits, between Australia and New Guinea. But while on the islands, he developed his interest in human institutions, and it was there that he began his seminal studies on kinship relations and social organization, which are widely regarded as laying the foundations for the discipline of social anthropology and are what led Claude Levi-Strauss to dub him the “Galileo of anthropology.”
The aim of the Cambridge Torres Straits expedition was to shed light on the mental characteristics of primitive
