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How race became everything: Australia and polygenism

2008; Routledge; Volume: 31; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01419870701568908

1466-4356

Kay Anderson, Colin Perrin,

Australian History and Society

Abstract Abstract This paper seeks to explain the shift that took place in the mid-nineteenth century elaboration of a polygenist idea of race. Supplementing existing claims that increasing evidence about the diversity of humankind provided a context for this shift, the focus here is upon British colonial encounters in Australia. It is against the background of what was considered to be a distinctly human separation from, and capacity to rise above, nature that, we argue, the Australian Aborigine precipitated a crisis in existing ideas of the human. As consternation grew not only about their inclination but about their very capacity for improvement, and particularly for cultivation, the Aborigines challenged the basis upon which the unity of humankind had been assumed. They could not be comprehended, according to the prevailing conception of racial difference, as a mere variety of the human. And it is out of this incomprehension, we argue, that the rise of polygenism may be understood: as an attempt to account for the ontologically inexplicable difference of the Australian Aborigine. Keywords: RacehistorypolygenismAustraliacolonialismAborigines Notes 1. To be clear, the 'American Indian(s)' and the 'Australian Aborigine(s)' are referred to here only insofar as they are represented or imagined from the perspective of colonial and/or humanist 'discourse'. 2. As we will see, the polygenist idea of race was consistent with the claim that, owing to an innate deficiency, certain peoples were incapable of 'progressing' to a civilized state. And in this respect it is worth noting that, despite his extreme racism, even Long maintained this possibility: 'We cannot pronounce them [the Negroes] insusceptible of civilization, since even apes have been taught to eat, drink, repose, and dress like man' (1970 Long , E. 1970 [1774] The History of Jamaica , 2nd edn , London : Frank Cass [Google Scholar] [1774], p. 376). 3. This argument was, of course, explicitly (though not fully) overturned by the Australian High Court in Mabo v Queensland [No. 2], 1992; and it is notable that the claimants in that case were renowned gardeners. 4. For a legal account, see McNeil (1989 Mcneil, K. 1989. Common Law Aboriginal Title, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]). For a more general historical consideration of how the idea of improvement informed the development of Enlightenment notions of property rights, as well as their denial in respect of lands occupied by indigenous peoples, see Weaver (2003 Weaver, J. C. 2003. The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900, Montreal: McGill Queen's University Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 81–7, 133–77). 5. While Bain Attwood, for example, has followed the High Court's decision in Mabo in contending that 'the British Government determined in 1785 that New Holland [Australia] was a terra nullius' (1996 Attwood B. 1996 'Introduction: The Past as Future: Aborigines, Australia and the (Dis)course of History' , in B. Attwood In the Age of Mabo , Sydney : Allen & Unwin , pp. vii – xxxviii [Google Scholar], pp. viii–ix), David Ritter Ritter , D. 1996 'The "Rejection of Terra Nullius" in Mabo: A Critical Analysis' , Sydney Law Review , vol. 18 , pp. 5 – 33 [Google Scholar] has contended that the 'doctrine' of terra nullius was rather a convenient way for the High Court to identify and address the 'rationale' for Aboriginal dispossession: 'When Australia was originally colonised by the Crown', Ritter argues, 'neither terra nullius or any other legal doctrine was used to deny the recognition of traditional Aboriginal rights under the common law' (1996, p. 6). 'Such a doctrinal denial', he continues, 'would not have appeared necessary to the colonists' (1996, p. 6). Although Ritter himself tends to rely upon a generalized idea of race in order to maintain that 'the absence of Aboriginal land rights was not a matter for judicial decisions' (1996, p. 13), his argument is worth noting here, not only for its own problematization of the legal basis upon which accounts such as Attwood's have maintained that race provided a straightforward justification for colonialism, but also in the possibility of its 'radicalization' along the lines of our own argument. 6. In this respect, therefore, it is less to Edward Said's (1979 Said, E. 1979. Orientalism, London: Penguin. [Google Scholar]) description of the power of colonial discourse and more to Homi Bhabha's Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar] (1984 Thomas K. 1987 Victorian Anthropology , New York : The Free press [Google Scholar]) attempt to elicit its limits that our argument takes its theoretical inspiration. See also Perrin (1999 Perrin, C. 1999. "'Approaching Anxiety: The Insistence of the Postcolonial in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples'". In Laws of the Postcolonial, Edited by: Darian-Smith, E. and Fitzpatrick, P. 19–38. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. [Google Scholar]). 7. The argument presented in this paper draws upon, and summarizes, that in Anderson Anderson , K. 2007 Race , Australia and the Crisis of Humanism , London and New York : Routledge [Google Scholar], Race and the Crisis of Humanism (2007). 8. It is in questioning this separation that our argument draws generally upon a range of recent 'posthumanist' writings. Among many, see in particular Glendenning (2000 Glendinning , Simon 2000 'From Animal Life to City Life' , Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities , vol. 5 , pp. 19 – 30 [Google Scholar]) and Armesto (2004 Armesto , Felipe Fernandez 2004 So You Think You're Human: A Brief History of Humankind , Oxford : Oxford University Press [Google Scholar]). Their elaboration is beyond the scope of this article, and the reader is directed to Anderson (above) for a discussion of the sense in which such writings unsettle and thus call for a historicization of, the model of 'the human' as a uniquely nature-transcending being. This article engages that historicity with the project of race historiography. 9. A number of world historians have seen agriculture as the developmental threshold that provided the basis for the emergence of the great regional traditions of human civilization (see, for example, Clark 1969 Clark, G. 1969. World Prehistory: A New Outline, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]; Smith 1995 Smith B. 1995 The Emergence of Agriculture , New York : W. H. Freeman [Google Scholar]; Atkins, Roberts and Simmons 1998 Atkins, P., Roberts, B. and Simmons, I. 1998. People, Land and Time: An Historical Introduction to the Relations between Landscape, Culture and Environment, London and New York: Arnold. [Google Scholar]). For Maisels (1990 Maisels, C. 1990. The Emergence of Civilisation: From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture, Cities, and the State in the Near East, London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), for example, it was plant and animal domestication that enabled a succession of interrelated changes in the scale and complexity of human societies, and in the development and diversification of humanity across the surface of the earth. For geographers Whitmore and Turner Whitmore, T. and Turner, B. 2001. Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar] 'cultivation is a direct expression of the human-environment condition' (2001, p. xi). And for MacNeish 'no civilisation has existed without an agricultural base, either in the past or today. Truly, agriculture was the first great step forward by human beings' (1992 Macneish, R. 1992. The Origins of Agriculture and Settled Life, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. [Google Scholar], p. 3). 10. As we have indicated, these included Voltaire and Edward Long, as well as Lord Kames. See note 2 and accompanying text. 11. James Hunt, Knox's protégé and founder of the polygenist Anthropological Society of London, also pointed out that '[t]here are many indications in Dr Prichard's writings that even he was becoming alive to the difficulty of his own theory' (1866, p. 326). 12. By 1811, Governor Macquarie was able to report to the Colonial Secretary 'that the country at large is in a progressive state of improvement' (cited in Gascoigne 2002 Gascoigne, J. 2002. The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar], p. 75). Although, as Warwick Anderson (2002 Anderson , Warwick 2002 The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia , Melbourne : Melbourne University Press [Google Scholar]) for example has pointed out, the colonization of south-eastern Australia was no confident act of mastery, but rather a difficult and anxious exercise of reconciling the mismatch British colonists perceived between themselves and a land in which they felt acutely alienated. In the context of the Enlightenment obsession with improvement, it should also be noted that the development of agriculture in Australia was always more than a means of survival, and a practice bound up with the mastery of nature (see, for example, Ryan 1996 Ryan, S. 1996. The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]). Governor Arthur Phillip, soon after the colony's founding, for example, observed: There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement on the land arising gradually out of tumult and confusion; and perhaps this satisfaction cannot anywhere be more fully enjoyed than where a settlement of civilised people is fixing itself upon a newly discovered and savage coast. (Phillip 1789 Phillip, A. 1789. The Voyage of Governor Phillips to Botany Bay, London: John Stockdale. [Google Scholar], p. 144) 13. Working with Cuvier's notion of 'species' as populations bound by the faculty of procreating fertile offspring, Smith went on to question whether 'the offspring of Aboriginal women and whites became infertile' (1848, p. 114). This issue of mixed race reproduction in relation to the species question was one of the more extraordinary developments in the monogenist/polygenist debate, and in the North American context was to grow especially heated (see Stanton 1960 Stanton, W. 1960. The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America 1815–59, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 73–80). 14. Here, we are compelled to leave aside the European discourse of race, which includes figures such as Carl Vogt (whose Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth, was edited by James Hunt), who stated: We find that there is an almost regular series in the cranial capacity of such nations and races as, since historical times, have taken little or no part in civilisation. Australians, Hottentots, and Polynesians, nations in the lowest state of barbarism, commence the series; and no-one can deny that the place they occupy in relation to cranial capacity and cerebral weights corresponds with the degree of their intellectual capacity and civilization. (Vogt 1864 Vogt , C. 1864 Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth J. Hunt , London : Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts [Google Scholar], pp. 91–2) 15. Knox too remarked upon the extent of human diversity in the following terms: That the southern hemisphere of this globe should differ in many respects from the northern in its fauna and flora, will cause no surprise to men in quest of truth; but that it differs so widely as it really does, is not generally known, and still less believed. When I describe the Bosjeman and Hottentot, the Australian and Tasmanian, then will be the proper time to unfold this great fact: that the races of everything living … differ from the northern. (Knox 1850 Knox, R. 1850. The Races of Man: A Fragment, London: Henry Renshaw. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 125–6)