Islandia is a rare bird, a great utopian novel and a brilliant treatise on cross-cultural interpretation. Having gained some cachet after its publication in 1942 among readers of sci-fi and fantasy, it was reprinted in 1958, 1966, 1970, and 1975, this last with a cover in psychedelic colors.[1] But it seems to have fallen into oblivion. That is a shame.

Its author, Austen Tappan Wright (1883-1931), was a Harvard educated lawyer who worked in the Boston law office of Louis Brandeis until he left in 1916 to take up a faculty position in the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained until he moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1924. His life was cut short by an auto accident.

Wright’s father, John Henry Wright, was a classicist and the dean of the Harvard Graduate School, his mother, Mary Tappan Wright, a novelist. His younger brother James became a distinguished geographer. Each brother concocted an imaginary society in his childhood. His daughter Sylvia estimates that it was around 1908 that Austen Wright began transforming his into Islandia (and accompanying texts giving information on its natural environment, history, and social characteristics), returned to it in the 1920s, and finished it shortly before his death. Sylvia edited the 600,000-word manuscript, cutting it by about a third to be published at a thousand pages (S. Wright 1970, ix-x; A. Wright 1942).

Islandia was written during a period of US literary history that Brad Evans described with the phrase “before cultures” (Evans 2005), a time in the United States when turn-of-the-20^th-century folklore collectors, regional writers, and literary essayists were focusing on local ways of life different from industrial civilization—but doing so without using the word “cultures.” Like the authors Evans discusses, Wright doesn’t speak of culture, pluralized (nor of “anthropology,” for that matter, although he mentions a Cornell University archaeological expedition to Islandia). Wright’s brother doubted that he used literary or scholarly sources to create Islandia (Powell 1957,11) and we know almost nothing about what he may have read that influenced him. His comparative ranking of Islandia and the modern world—Islandia, although less advanced as a civilization was nonetheless to be preferred to modernity because it had a more highly integrated culture—chimes perfectly with Edward Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” (1924), which he might have read, and with Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), which appeared after his death. On the other hand, his discussions of race, language, and odd customs suggest that he was widely read in turn-of-the-century socio-evolutionary anthropology.

Evans interprets this period of American literary history in terms of the “lag” that Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn noted in their mid-century compendium of definitions of “culture.” Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952, 99) pointed out that after E. B. Tylor’s 1871 definition of culture, which became (and to some extent remains) canonical, there was little attention to the term until the 1920s, when it began to attain prominence in Boasian anthropology. With Bronislaw Malinowski’s depiction of the Trobriand Islands and Margaret Mead’s study of Samoa, what George Stocking called “the ethnographic sensibility of the 1920s” became central to the anthropological project (1989). At its center, the “armchair” scholars of past decades were displaced by “trained fieldworker[s]” advancing knowledge of global cultural diversity through lengthy residence in local communities not yet overwhelmed by the advance of Western civilization. Indeed, Stocking notes that this image of the fieldworker was “projected with considerable success outward to … the general intellectual and literate public” (Stocking 1989, 209-10).

John Lang, the first-person narrator of Islandia, can fairly be likened to an anthropologist in the field. Yet he is not a trained cultural anthropologist, but a colonial official, sent to Islandia in 1907 as the first US consul there, after the isolated and long isolationist country had been induced by a treaty with the Germans to open itself to outside representatives from the Western powers.

Lang was chosen for the post because he had some knowledge of the Islandian language, which he gained from his friendship with an Islandian student, Dorn, who became his close friend at Harvard. But Lang, who describes himself as an aimless young man, has no allegiance to American economic and political interests. Rather, from the moment of his arrival in Islandia, he becomes fascinated by the problem of interpreting a culture that seems to him unreal, strange, queer, alien—all terms the narrator uses. Moreover, Lang experiences and analyzes serious culture shock, followed by a gradual acculturation to Islandian ways, only to be followed by reverse culture shock when, after two years, he returns to the US which, he realizes, he needs to reexperience in order to decide whether to live there or in Islandia for the rest of his life.

To give but one example of the astuteness of Wright’s thinking about cross-cultural interpretation, consider the mutual misunderstandings that arise when two people, a marriageable but unmarried man and woman, hold hands. Lang meets Dorn’s sister, Dorna, and the two are instantly attracted to each other. On a walk, Lang offers Dorna his hand to help her ascend a steep set of stairs. Although she needs no help, Dorna takes his hand and then neither knows how to let go. Lang excitedly reads the situation in terms of the romantic gesture that hand-holding would have been in the US. Dorna reads the situation as customary American behavior, deferring to Lang’s gesture to be polite. It takes several moments and some discussion to clear up the matter—at which point, they finally let go.  

Islandia is a remarkable exploration of cross-cultural interpretation, from the tiniest details to the broadest understanding of worldview. What makes the novel all the more remarkable (yet also period-typical) is that Wright erects this edifice on a foundation of socio-evolutionary racialist anthropology. Islandia is the southern tip of the Karain continent. (“Karain” is an anagram of “Afrikan,” minus the “f” and Islandia might well be the territory that became the Union of South Africa in 1910.) The Islandians are “an obscure Caucasian race with perhaps some dark intermixture” (Wright 1942, 4). They are protected by mountains from the threatening yet inferior peoples of the north, including “a vast population of Negroes, primitive and savage,” called the “aboriginal Bants”; “the bloodthirsty Demiji” who are “nomads and grazers of almost pure Arab stock”; and the half-breed Karain, who represent a “higher civilization … formed out of the intermixture between the Negroes and Arabic settlers.”[2] From time to time “the more turbulent” Karain “organize the blacks and make trouble” for the Islandians, raiding, looting, and raping (Wright 1942, 8). Although for most of the novel, this racial classification is not overt, it surfaces in a pivotal episode when the two Islandian women Lang most loves are threatened by a Bant raid.

As to socio-evolutionary assumptions, consider first that the Islandians are considered by US officials and the writers of “school geographies” to be “primitive” because they are pagan, their economy is based on non-mechanized agriculture, they have no trade, and the society is ruled by a peasant oligarchy (Wright 1942, 4). To this picture Lang adds a juicy ethnographic detail: when the tall and powerful Dorn played on Harvard’s football team, their “opponents regarded him as a savage and were always surprised because he played a clean game” (Wright 1942, 6).

From the perspective of the Islandians, however, it is their enemies to the north who are the true primitives. The Islandians are white, their enemies, black; the Islandians have a civilization (with literature, monumental architecture, advanced medicine, knowledge of birth control, etc.), their enemies are savages, pastoralists at best.

But in a final twist, Wright suggests that the Euro-Americans, more highly civilized than the Islandians, may be as capable of savagery as any people. Lang tells Nattana, a woman who lives near the northern border, that she no longer need fear northern raiders because the Germans have established a protectorate to the north of Islandia. To justify his assertion he adds, “they are civilized,” to which Nattana, who vividly remembers her grandfather’s stories of women and children hiding from Dimiji raiders, responds: “They are just another group of men across the mountains, and every group that has been there has wanted to get over into Islandia” (Wright 1942, 107). Indeed, after the Bant raid, it is suggested that the Germans facilitated the Bant aggression by turning a blind eye to it, since, after all, it could work in favor of their own interest in opening Islandia to outsiders (Wright 1942, 693).

We should hardly be surprised that Wright was able to combine, in one novel, established socio-evolutionary racialist anthropology with the emergent ethnographic sensibility of the 1920s. The same combination continues to the present moment, no matter how we try to transcend it. It has been almost 40 years since Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) coined the term “savage slot” and enjoined anthropologists to abandon it. Doing so has proven impossible, given the way anthropology continues to be constituted in relation to the other social sciences in the research university as the discipline concerned with the many people the others categorically ignore. Despite its socio-evolutionary and racist implications, the savage slot is a residual, but (alas) foundational, category, a kind of negative intellectual space underpinning the modern formation of social scientific knowledge. As James Clifford once wrote of “culture,” the savage slot invokes “a deeply compromised idea” we anthropologists “cannot yet do without” and still remain anthropologists (1988, 10).[3]

As to Islandia, at times one winces when reading passages that have such “a distressingly racist cast” (Jacobs 1991, 88).[4] At other times one wonders how Austen Tappan Wright was able to imagine such excellent cultural anthropology.

Works cited

Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Davenport, Basil. 1942. Introduction to Islandia: Its History, Customs, Laws, Language, and Geography.New York and Toronto: Farrar and Rinehart.

Evans, Brad. 2005. Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kroeber, Alfred L., and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1952. Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge: Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

Jacobs, Naomi. 1991. “Islandia: Plotting Utopian Desire.” Utopian Studies 6(2):75-89.

Powell, Lawrence Clark. 1957. The Islandian World of Austen Wright. Los Angeles: Merle Armitage.  

Sapir, Edward. 1924. “Culture, Genuine and Spurious.” American Journal of Sociology 29 (4): 401–29.

Segal, Daniel A. 2000. “‘Western Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education.” The American Historical Review 105 (3): 770–805.

Stocking Jr., George W. 1989. “The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition.” In Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, edited by George W. Stocking Jr., 208–76. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

———.  2001. “Delimiting Anthropology: Historical Reflections on the Boundaries of a Boundless Discipline.”  In Delimiting Anthropology, Occasional Essays and Reflections, edited by George W. Stocking Jr., 303-29. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard Fox, 17–44. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Wright, Austen. 1942. Islandia. New York and Toronto: Farrar and Rinehart.

Wright, Sylvia. 1970. “Introduction.” In Islandia by Austen Wright, v-x. New York: New American Library.

This piece was edited by Nicholas Barron and Ira Bashkow.

---

Notes

[1] https://archive.org/details/islandia00wrig/mode/2up

[2] These details come from Basil Davenport’s 40-page summary of Wright’s hundreds of pages of additional material about Islandia (Davenport 1942, 7).

[3] Stocking’s description of the historical formation of the disciplinary structuring of social-scientific knowledge is apt: “as the various human sciences gradually differentiated themselves … during the nineteenth century, the peoples who became the primary subject matter of anthropology dropped through the boundary spaces between the gradually separating disciplines” (2001, 311). For the disciplinary division of subject matter between history and anthropology in the North American research university, which enforces the maintenance of the savage slot into the 21^st century, see Segal 2000.

[4]Naomi Jacobs is the only person I found who has published substantial scholarly work on Islandia.