“Any race of people that allows itself to be graded on a scale designed by European science will appear to be a culture of higher primates”

The expression “Any race of people that allows itself to be graded on a scale designed by European science will appear to be a culture of higher primates” crystallizes Smilla’s critique of European ethnology: a hierarchy cannot neutrally measure cultures when its scale already carries the values of the culture that designed it. The line rejects the apparent authority of scientific comparison and insists that the resulting portrait says as much about the classifier as about the people classified.

Intellectual Context

Smilla recalls encountering ethnological clichés at the university, including the claim that European mathematics owed a debt to ancient folk cultures, illustrated by admiration for the geometry of the pyramids. She regards this supposed generosity as condescension: technological culture remains positioned as the standard of superiority, while Egyptian surveyors’ practical rules are dismissed against integral calculus. The comparison turns recognition into another means of ranking.

She then invokes Jean Malauri’s claim in The Last Kings of Thule that studying the Polar Eskimos could illuminate human progress from the Neanderthal stage to the Stone Age. The passage is written with affection, Smilla observes, but its benevolent tone does not prevent it from carrying unconscious prejudice. The expression names the consequence of that framework: a people who accept a European-designed scale will be represented as an inferior stage of European development.

The Scale and Its Consequences

The sentence does not simply object to an inaccurate placement on a ladder of progress. It challenges the ladder itself. Any system that compares cultures in order to decide which is more developed, Smilla argues, projects Western culture’s own assumptions and disavowed fears. The scale presents its judgments as universal, but its authority derives from the culture that created it.

The expression’s force lies in its reversal: the degrading result is not proof of the measured people’s inferiority but evidence of the measure’s design. Scientific language can make a hierarchy appear descriptive and impartial even as it reduces living cultures to stages in a European story of advancement. Smilla’s criticism therefore concerns both the conclusion and the power to define the terms of comparison.

Lived Knowledge Against Classification

Against abstract grading, Smilla sets a method of encounter: to understand another culture, a person must live within it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, and learn its language. Such understanding, if it comes, is wordless rather than an explanatory mastery. The moment the unfamiliar is made into an object of explanation, it is also held at a distance.

This distinction matters to Smilla’s own relation to Qaanaaq and Inuit life. She feels an urge to explain her connection to them, but recognizes that describing the place can make her lose what was never entirely hers. The expression thus also limits the authority of the speaker: rejecting European classification does not grant an outsider effortless possession of another culture. Respect requires attention to lived experience and to the distance that explanation can impose.

Narrative Significance

The line gathers the passage’s movement from academic examples to a broader criticism of cultural judgment. Its sharp image of a people rendered as “higher primates” makes visible the violence concealed within affectionate or ostensibly scientific description. At the same time, the surrounding reflection refuses to replace one totalizing account with another: understanding is approached through language, presence, and hospitality, not secured by a final explanatory scheme.

As a statement of Smilla’s outlook, the expression links her suspicion of institutions and categories to a more intimate discipline of perception. It challenges the right to rank cultures from outside while acknowledging that even the wish to describe a culture can become a form of separation. The result is not a new universal scale, but a demand to notice who made the scale, what it excludes, and what kind of encounter it prevents.