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Notes on ‘Race’ and the Biologisation of Human Difference

2005; Routledge; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00223340500312054

1469-9605

Bronwen Douglas,

Australian Indigenous Culture and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Bronwen Douglas, ‘Seaborne ethnography and the natural history of man’, Journal of Pacific History, 38 (2003), 6, fn. 14. Tom Ryan, ‘On “reflectivity”, “accuracy” and “race”: a note on an underarm footnote’, Journal of Pacific History, 39 (2004), 251–3. I saw an early draft of Ryan's rejoinder but was given no opportunity prepublication to respond to the final version. Non-Antipodean readers of the Journal (and, indeed, many Australians) might well be perplexed by Ryan's subtitle. They will be relieved to know that it refers not to my personal hygiene but to an incident in a cricket match in 1981 which signifies ‘foul play’ in terms of some New Zealanders’ sensitivities about Australians. 2 Bronwen Douglas, ‘Inventing race: the science of man and the Pacific connection, 1750–1850’, in Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (ed.), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the science of race 1750–1940 (forthcoming). 3 Indeed, I locate the emergence of what Ryan calls ‘more deliberately rational and scientific’ thinking about Oceania earlier than he does, with Dampier rather than Brosses. See Douglas, ‘Seaborne ethnography’, 7, cf. Tom Ryan, ‘ “Le président des Terres Australes”: Charles de Brosses and the French Enlightenment beginnings of Oceanic anthropology’, Journal of Pacific History, 37 (2002), 158. 4 Ibid., 158 and fn. 5; idem, ‘On “reflectivity” ’, 252. 5 Douglas, ‘Seaborne ethnography’, 6; see also idem, ‘Science and the art of representing “savages”: reading “race” in text and image in South Seas voyage literature’, History and Anthropology, 11 (1999), 162. 6 Ryan, ‘On “reflectivity” ’, 251–2. 7 Ibid., 251. 8 Idem, “ ‘Le président’ ”, 166–76. It is by no means unusual for historians of ideas to imply an unproblematic naturalisation of the modern idea of race with respect to the 18th century; see, e.g., the excellent paper by J.H. Eddy, Jr, ‘Buffon, organic alterations, and man’, in William Coleman and Camille Limoges (ed.), Studies in History of Biology (Baltimore 1984), VII, 22–39. In this context, I reiterate my 2003 reference to Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: gender in the making of modern science (Boston 1993), 115–25, where the word ‘race’ appears repeatedly as a gloss for contemporary terminology in her discussion of 18th-century ideas of human difference. 9 Ryan, ‘On “reflectivity” ’, 252. 10 Idem, “ ‘Le président’ ”, 167 and fn. 48. 11 [François Bernier], ‘Nouvelle division de la terre, par les differentes especes ou races d’hommes qui l’habitent, envoyée par un fameux voyageur à Monsieur ***** à peu près en ces termes’, Journal des Sçavans, 12 (1684),148, 153; Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Vénus physique (n.p. 1745), 119, 122, 123, 136, 140, 142, 148, 158, 167. In the key second part of Vénus physique, Maupertuis twice used race with its original connotation of common ancestry or descent (‘races of dogs, pigeons, canaries’; ‘races of squinters, cripples, gout sufferers, consumptives’) and once with the long-established generic meaning of ‘human race’ (‘la race des hommes’). In contrast to his sparing use of race, espèce appears eighteen times, variété fourteen, nation seven, and peuple ten. In the fifth edition, to which Ryan refers, the heading of the second part changes from ‘On the origin of the blacks’ to ‘Varieties in the human species’. Idem, ‘Vénus physique’ (5th edn, 1748), in Oeuvres, ed. Giorgio Tonelli, 4 vols (Hildesheim 1965–74), II, 97. All translations are my own. 12 Maupertuis, Vénus physique, 123, 125, 134, 137, 151, 153–4. The phrase espèce humaine, ‘human species’, does not appear until the fifth edition. See fn. 11. 13 Ibid., 121–3, my emphasis. Cf. Ryan's contention that Maupertuis ‘recognised basic physical differences between the races of Europe and Africa, and between these and the races of Asia and America’. “ ‘Le président’ ”, 168, my emphasis. 14 [Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon], ‘Variétés dans l’espèce humaine’, in Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, 15 vols (Paris 1749–67), III (1749), 371–530. 15 Ibid., 371–2, 453–4, my emphasis. 16 ‘Maupertuis insisted that “race” is a descriptive rather than a fixed category … Nor is there any necessary correlation between race and degree of civilisation’; ‘It was Buffon's view that climate is the primary cause of “race” or human variety’. Ryan, “ ‘Le président’ ”, 168. Ryan similarly misattributes a ‘concept of “race”’ to Brosses with reference to his indeterminate use of the concrete collective noun race to label ‘frizzy-haired blacks’ whom, he conjectured, were ‘the first inhabitants of the torrid zone: … a more brutish and ferocious kind [espèce] of men than the others … [which] long ago drove it from its possessions in Asia, … & have little by little destroyed the race’. [Charles de Brosses], Histoire des navigations aux terres australes … , 2 vols (Paris 1756), II, 378–9, my emphasis; Ryan, “ ‘Le président’ ”, 175. 17 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate nativa (3rd edn, Gottingae 1795), 297; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd edn, London 1882 [1871]), 175. Michèle Duchet discerned in Buffon's work a ‘spectral analysis of the human species’ into ‘four principal races’. Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières (2nd edn, Paris 1995 [1971]), 271, orig. emphasis. 18 Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: the fallacy of race (6th edn, Walnut Creek CA, 1997 [1942]), 69; see also Robert Bernasconi, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Bernasconi (ed.), Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols (Bristol 2001), I, v–xi. Online . Accessed 14 Aug. 2005. 19 [Buffon], ‘Variétés’, 395–411; Ryan,“ ‘Le président’ ”, 168. Buffon devoted separate sections of his 1777 Supplément to information provided by recent voyagers — notably Cook — on the ‘Islanders of the South Sea’ and the ‘Inhabitants of the southern lands’. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière: supplément, IV, Servant de suite à l’histoire naturelle de l’homme (Paris 1777), 539–55. 20 Le dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, dedié au roy, 2 vols (Paris 1694), II, 364; Robert Estienne, Dictionaire Francoislatin, contenant les motz & manieres de parler Francois, tournez en Latin (Paris 1539), 411; Jean Nicot, Thresor de la langue francoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (Paris 1606), 533–4. 21 [Bernier], ‘Nouvelle division’, 148–50, 153; see also Pierre H. Boulle, ‘François Bernier and the origins of the modern concept of race’, in Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (eds), The Color of Liberty: histories of race in France (Durham, NC 2003), 13–16; Siep Stuurman, ‘François Bernier and the invention of racial classification’, History Workshop Journal, 50 (2000), 1–21. 22 Blumenbach, De generis humani, 296. 23 [Buffon], ‘Variétés’, 379. 24 Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: race, history and culture in Western society (London 1996), 54; Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les autres: la réflexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris 1989), 126. 25 Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth, 68; see also Philip Sloan, ‘The gaze of natural history’, in Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (ed.), Inventing Human Science: eighteenth-century domains (Berkeley 1995), 135. 26 Nicholas Hudson, ‘From “nation” to “race”: the origin of racial classification in eighteenth-century thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1996), 253–5. Hudson noted that ‘race’ was a ‘conveniently ambivalent’ term for late 18th-century savants seeking a portmanteau category for both despised and approved human groupings, because its original meaning of ‘breeding’ applied equally to animals and nobles. 27 Buffon, Supplément, IV, 455–6, 462. 28 Duchet remarked the ‘lack’ of ‘precision’ in Buffon's use of the term races in the ‘course’ of his 1749 inventory of human varieties but contended that he ‘really defined’ race at the end of the essay. However, Buffon at this point made no mention of races and referred only to variétés de l’espèce. Duchet extrapolated this usage as ‘a clear-cut distinction’ between the concepts race and espèce but her reasoning, like Hudson's, was premature. Duchet, Anthropologie, 253–4, 270–1. 29 [Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon], ‘L’asne’, in Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, 15 vols (Paris 1749–67), IV (1753), 396–9. 30 Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, ‘Des époques de la nature’, in Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière: supplément, V (Paris 1778), 252. 31 Duchet, Anthropologie, 271–3. 32 Buffon, Supplément, IV, 462–3, 478–80. 33 Jean-François Féraud, Dictionnaire critique, de la langue française, 3 vols (Marseille 1787–8), II (1787), 148. 34 Buffon, Supplément, IV, 484. 35 Ibid., 462; [Buffon], ‘Variétés’, 446–8, 528–30; idem, ‘De la dégénération des animaux’, in Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, 15 vols (Paris 1749–67), XIV (1766), 314–16; Duchet, Anthropologie, 256–8, 274–6; Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 33–8. 36 [Buffon], ‘Variétés’, 371–9, 523–4, 530; idem, ‘Dégénération’, 311, 313; Duchet, Anthropologie, 271; Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 31. 37 Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, ‘Sur la classification anthropologique et particulièrement sur les types principaux du genre humain’, Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1 (1860–3), 131–2, fn. 2, orig. emphasis. 38 See especially Immanuel Kant, Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen zur Ankundigung der Vorlesungen der physischen Geographie im Sommerhalbenjahre 1775 (Königsberg 1775); idem, ‘Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace’, Berlinische Monatsschrift, 6 (1785), 390–417; see also Bernasconi, ‘Introduction’; Timothy Lenoir, ‘Kant, Blumenbach, and vital materialism in German biology’, ISIS, 71 (1980), 87–96; Thomas Strack, ‘Philosophical anthropology on the eve of biological determinism: Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster on the moral qualities and biological characteristics of the human race’, Central European History, 29 (1996), 291–9; cf. Sloan, ‘Gaze’, 148, fn. 79. Georg Forster published a diatribe against Kant's use of Rasse, an indeterminate term that Forster disliked and considered ‘synonymous’ with Varietät, ‘variety’. It was ‘borrowed’ from French, he said, where it had the ‘indefinite’ sense of ‘ancestry’ and was ‘tacitly’ subordinate to ‘species’. He thought it should be applied sparingly and only to people — such as ‘the Papuans and the black islanders of the Southern Seas’ — whose morphology was ‘idiosyncratic’ and origin ‘unknown’. Georg Forster, ‘Noch etwas über die Menschenrassen’, Teutsche Merkur, Nov. 1786, 159–60. I thank Christa Knellwolf for help in translating Forster's paper. 39 Maupertuis, Vénus physique, Préface, 134, 165. 40 Ibid., 153–60. For an exposition of Maupertuis's theory of the production of morphological diversity in human beings through the operation of ‘internal hereditary mechanisms’, see Donald Grayson, The Establishment of Human Antiquity (New York 1983), 145–6; see also Bentley Glass, ‘Maupertuis, pioneer of genetics and evolution’, in Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus, Jr (eds), Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859 (Baltimore 1959), 59–78. 41 Maupertuis, Vénus physique, 119, 128, 158, 167. Ryan, in contrast, appears to claim that Maupertuis attributed variations in human skin colour to adaptation to climatic extremes. Ryan, “ ‘Le président’ ”, 167–8. 42 [Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon], ‘Histoire générale des animaux’, in Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, 15 vols (Paris 1749–67), II (1749), 164; Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 7, 29. 43 Ibid., 18; idem, ‘L’asne’, 386; Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 4–12; Sloan, ‘Gaze’, 131–3. 44 Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 12–22. 45 [Buffon], ‘Dégénération’, 313–16; Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 22–39; Sloan, ‘Gaze’, 133–9. 46 Ryan, ‘On “reflectivity” ’, 253. 47 See Douglas, ‘Science’, 163, where I argued that ‘a case for disjuncture and change’ in the history of ideas should not ‘elide continuities and genealogical links … [or] imply discursive homogeneity and consistency on either side of the notional shift’; and advocated ‘precise attention to ambivalence, discrepancy, contestation, flux, and national and other variations within and between contemporary discourses, texts and genres of representation’.