American Geographical Society

Review
Author(s): Philip L. Wagner
Review by: Philip L. Wagner
Source: Geographical Review, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 232-234
Published by: American Geographical Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/215987
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GEOGRAPHICAL

REVIEWS

ETNOGENEZI BIOSFERAZEMLI (ETHNOGENESISAND THE EARTH'S

496 pp.; maps, diagrs., indexes. LenBIOSPHERE).By LEVN. GUMILEV.
Izdatel'stvo
ingrad:
Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1989. 2.50 rubles. ISBN
5-288-00332-7.
Human behavior and its accommodations with environment are vastly more
diverse than those of any other living species. Yet the numerous human
communities distinguished culturally by specific modes of conduct and habitat management do not constitute valid taxonomic subspecies. Individuals
may participate, during a lifetime, in several cultural communities that over
long spans of time emerge, flourish, and decline without interrupting the
biological unity and continuity of the species as a whole. The population
entities involved amount to much more than organizational units, because
they each manifest their own behavioral and hence artifactualand geographical distinctiveness, even when partitioned among different social systems.
Furthermore, the foregoing entities correspond to something larger than
common world views, value systems, and technologies, or cultures in the
usual sense. They properly embrace, as most geographers perceive, their
particular landscapes, domestic biotas, material productions, and habitual
routines of conduct, in addition to a concrete human population, and live
out their own apparently unique histories.
But are the histories of such ethnic entities each altogether unique? Do
the processes or interactions that create, maintain, and finally dissolve them,
or sometimes merely fossilize them, not exhibit any regularity and generality?
As a biogeographical phenomenon, can their living dynamisms and life
cycles not be specifically and systematically related to the great movements
of energy and matter in nature?
In material perspective, human existence, livelihood, agency, and even
expression are set firmly in nature. However, the relationships of individuals
with their terrestrial surroundings, even when recognized as inevitably mediated by organization and technology, do not in isolation yield to fruitful
analysis. The relative similarity and consistency that observably obtain within
spatially extended populations, nevertheless, do make possible some degree
of interpretative, if not predictive, understanding of action and its consequences for environment. A certain amount of comprehension can develop
on the basis of investigations of what are called perceptions, customs, preferences, policies, and decision-making procedures.Yet the insights thus gained
are clearly insufficient for adequately explaining human or natural history,
much less for enlightened choice and secure control of human destiny.
Individual initiative and new enterprise cannot be productively conceptualized as immediate responses or adaptations to the natural or even artificial
environment, as a previous generation of geographers ruefully had to admit.

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GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS

233

Unfortunately, too, the invocation of economic and social dynamisms as

explanatory determinants has proved only a fairly dubious and inflexible,
or at least widely contested, interpretation of history, and, in current perspective, a grossly defective and faltering guide to choice and control. Human
motivation and volition seem intractable to orderly incorporation into both
historical and ecological syntheses, and furthermore they so confound attempts at unifying these two conceptual realms that they force reliance,
reluctantly, on unsatisfying dualistic thinking. Evidently, neither the ostensible relationship of the individual with nature nor the presumed relationship
of whole societies and their technologies with nature is sufficient to explicate
the human role in nature or, conversely, the effects of environment on
humankind. Are there other options?
Rather astonishingly, a hopeful affirmative answer to that question has
come from an experienced, well-established Soviet geographer, Lev N. Gumilev. On the basis of many years of concrete research on ethnic histories in
the field, in libraries, and in archives, he postulates the ethnic process as a
substantial biological characteristic specific to humankind. It reflects, he
maintains, the energetic initiative of rather exceptional individuals, exercised
at crucial moments of instability and in ecologically transitional or marginal
environments, to induce the acceptance of innovative stereotypes of conduct
by whole populations. But the ethnos that emerges as a product of the impulse
given by such passionately intense instigators is not an object or even a mere
state of things; it is a process of continual change, or compound of many
interrelated interactional processes involving human individuals, their creations and domesticates, and environments. It thus goes far beyond societal
and economic realms, and its spatial scope need not be at all congruent with
theirs.
The ethnos as process necessarily enacts a history. The roles and influences
of individuals, even those most passionately intense in character, vary systematically over the life span of an ethnos. The outbursts of energy personified in the latter individuals exert a powerful constructive influence on peers
and neighbors during the inception of the ethnos, but in subsequent phases
similarly endowed persons may engage mainly in disruptive or destructive
activity. The initial formative period, during which the activist element
moves a coalescing population to begin transforming and expanding its
habitat, is followed, Gumilev asserts, by an incubation or rising phase of
great creativity, then by one of consolidation and clarity. In turn, there ensue
a period of assertive individualism, a phase of regression, and an inert and
complacent civilized stage, on the heels of which comes one of obscurantism,
then a nostalgic backward-looking phase, and eventually, if the ethnos has
not yet been consumed by an adjacent ethnos, a sleepy and enduring homeostasis as an obscure ethnic relic.
Beside the constituted ethnos itself, there always arise subethnoses, representing the diverse and conflicting interests of included population ele-

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234

THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

ments. The interactions among these subunits are vital to the ethnic process
as a whole. Larger entities, or superethnoses, likewise appear, uniting many
ethnoses into something akin to the cultural worlds of North American
geographers, for something longer than a millennium. All the levels of the
ethnos phenomenon express, according to Gumilev, a natural, biological
reality, a form of the great energy cycle and material unfolding of nature.
The individual's role is conceived biopsychologically as a decisive factor in
natural process.
How remote this reasoning seems from the familiar principles of Marxism-Leninism! Yet Gumilev asserts that his scheme does not neglect or contradict those principles, but only supplements them with a vision essential
to the full and proper interpretation of history and human relationships
with nature. His solid book-length studies on the Hsiung-Nu, Khazars, ancient Turks, Huns in China, and Mongols, and his enormous command of
languages, literatures, and ethnological, archaeological, and geographical
learning, lend authority, if not always automatic credibility, to his sweeping
conceptions. If rather eccentric, his ideas have nevertheless found a respectful
reception in both the scientific and popular press in the Soviet Union and
have been able to withstand the critiques not only of his fellow geographers,
who appear at least to tolerate them, but also of historians, ethnologists, and
philosophers. One cannot help wondering if Gumilev's emphasis on organic
ethnicity represents a widespread, influential feature of recent Soviet thought.
Has such an outlook affected even President Gorbachev's approach to the
Lincolnean task of securing both liberty and unity?-PHILIP L. WAGNER
ENVISIONING INFORMATION. By EDWARDR. TUFTE.126 pp.; maps, diagrs.,

ills., index. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1990. $48.00.

"Flatland" (1884) by Edwin A. Abbott has been the inspiration for many
studies of dimension; "Envisioning Information" by Edward R. Tufte is one
of the most recent. The goal of this book is to examine, in the context of
visual design, how to escape the two-dimensional world of video screens
and paper text, because "all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands." The escape is to be a graphic one, illustrated
in an elegant array of contrasting "good" or "bad" examples.
The first and longest chapter, Escaping Flatland, seeks to show design
techniques that increase the resolution of data presented on paper and on
cathode-ray tube by increasing both dimension number and "density" of
data portrayed on a flat surface. The examples are well chosen; in those based
on statistical data, care is taken to demonstrate visually some sort of average
sense of the information conveyed as well as the visual variation from that
average. The intellectual content in the examples ranges across a variety of
disciplines. A horizontal perspective bird's-eye view of the Ise shrine in

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