| Summary: | This chapter assesses how the concept of civilization was strategically important to Thomas Robert Malthus's argument in the Essay on the Principle of Population , even as it stood for many things. The chapter considers his personal contact with humans living “inside” the forces of nature, the legendary Sami reindeer herders in northern Norway. While touring Scandinavia in 1799, Malthus and his companion sought out a visit to an encampment of Sami herders, then called Lapps. Through his diary entries, one can see how he viewed the experience as a trip across a divide between civilization and a region of otherness or alterity, where people dwelled in nature in ways he would attempt to comprehend. In his greatly expanded edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population of 1803, Malthus made no mention of the Lapps and he also excluded more conventional Norwegian pastoral production, regarding the cattle he saw there as belonging to a primitive stage of economic life. Beyond that, he was not able to recognize “hunter-gatherer” techniques and tools as evidence of knowledge-gathering of any value; he looked upon the unfamiliar environment as merely barren, with nothing to teach him. Ultimately, his remoteness from Indigenous knowledge and local strategies of combining various forms of subsistence activities meant that he could only categorize them as desperate measures.
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