Table of Contents
In the five decades after World War II, a critical historical conjuncture — the defeat of Nazism, the Cold War, decolonization, the civil rights movements in North America and Australasia, and the anti-apartheid movement — authorized antiracism to the extent that the word 'race' itself, in its naturalized scientific sense of a broad, hereditary human grouping, became all but unsayable in public and academic discourses in both the West and the Soviet bloc. Biologists and anthropologists denied the physical or cultural reality of races and predicted the demise of the concept. Postcolonial scholars made hybridity a privileged metaphor and censored race from their vocabularies for fear of sustaining abhorrent racial theories or imputing racism to actually or formerly colonized people. Human variation was uncomfortably euphemized as ethnicity, identity, religion, or culture. Yet the notion that racial differences are materially true and determine the physical, intellectual, moral, or social qualities of identifiable groups has hardly been challenged in popular opinion or conservative politics across the globe, while many indigenous people have appropriated the word race as a weapon in their lexicons of identity and understand the euphemisms in racial terms.[1] With the Cold War finished but the ongoing legacies of racist regimes still evidently scarring the lives of victims and their descendants, with racial discrimination and persecution ongoing and racial scapegoating resurgent in the West, race has attracted renewed scholarly attention during the last decade or more and historians and philosophers are again charting the emergence, spread, illogic, and pernicious consequences of racialist thought.[2]
Notwithstanding this spirit of invigorated critical inquiry and some admirable scholarship on the history of race, anthropology, and geography,[3] general histories of race tend to be inadequately grounded in rigorous vernacular reading of the original works of Euro-American thinkers whose broad, labile gamut of positions on human differences is often collapsed under the homogenizing rubric of racism. There is a parallel dearth of systematic comparison of diverse national discourses on race.[4] In the twin contexts of these unexpected deficiencies in the comparative history of ideas and the near-total absence of detailed work on the history of race in Oceania as a broadly conceived region,[5] the essays in this collection open up important new terrains for critical historical inquiry — on the science of race, Oceanic studies, and the intersections of the two.
Two striking elements of the idea of race are its slipperiness and the ontological realism it acquired during the nineteenth century, maintained in the face of fierce scientific and moral opposition during the late twentieth, and retained in conventional understandings virtually worldwide into the twenty-first. This volume challenges the naturalness of race by exposing its historicity and the tensions, incongruities, and fractures within or between shifting rival discourses on human similarity or difference. In the process, we probe the ambiguous conception of the modernist scientific notion of race in western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century; its subsequent normalization as an abstract system of knowledge, or raciology; its relationship to missionary and colonial praxis; and its instability, imprecision, and tenacity.
As historians of a potent and momentous concept, we treat ideas neither as purely abstract or discursive nor as a reflex of social relations and politics but as historically entangled with embodied human actions, including that of thinking — the word 'bodies' in the title is not mere rhetoric.[6] The persons and actions that primarily concern us are conceived in terms of a dynamic feedback loop linking metropoles with antipodes: savants rarely travelled but read, measured, dissected, thought, talked, wrote, and published; travellers, missionaries, and colonial naturalists or anthropologists observed, collected, recorded, and sometimes theorized in the light of prevailing ideas and their own interactions with indigenous people; and the products of these engagements fed novel concepts of human difference that both participated in and percolated into wider public spheres. By this logic, the idea of race was enmeshed in the interplay of unstable discourses and particular European experiences of encounters with non-European people, places, and things. Current ideas about human diversity were enacted and often transformed in such encounters which generated much of the evidence on which theorists relied to illustrate their deductions.
Our aim is not to explain racial thinking in causal terms but to convey an open-ended sense of the fertile, provisional, material transactions of persons, ideas, discourses, contexts, and their permutations, combinations, and performances. Spurning such an approach, the cultural geographer Kay Anderson chided me, along with George Stocking, Jr., Nancy Stepan, and other historians, for 'overgeneralisation' and for having hazarded 'no explanation' of the shift from Enlightenment humanism to nineteenth-century innatism. Yet this is a deliberate strategy, not an oversight. As an historian, I reject facile monocausal explanations such as Anderson's quite inadequate contention, based almost exclusively on a reading of anglophone literature, that 'race's founding' can be reduced to a 'crisis of humanism' precipitated by British colonial encounters with Aboriginal 'intractability'.[7] While we acknowledge that science is neither hermetic nor autonomous, we refuse to explain away the science of race as a simple effect of particular European discourses or social, political, or colonial circumstances. Contending that the interrelationships of science and society are not merely reflective, linearly causal, or even dialectical, we see the science of race and colonialism as parallel but porous domains of praxis, each with its own 'internal rhythm' and linked by complex, ambiguous intersections and exchanges.[8]
This grounded method for doing intellectual history requires detailed empirical ballast which in turn dictates a regional, rather than a global focus. Our regional focus on Oceania has both historical and pragmatic warrant: it acknowledges the considerable salience of indigenous Oceanian people in the natural history of man and the emergent science of race,[9] out of all proportion to their limited political, material, or demographic import to Europe; and it fits the research interests of the contributors. The term 'science of race' refers to systematic efforts made in various branches of natural history — particularly comparative anatomy, physiology, and zoology — to theorize physical differences between human groups as innate, morally and intellectually determinant, and possibly original. Such endeavours coalesced in the new disciplines of biology and anthropology which drew major stimulus from the rich stocks of information and objects repatriated from Oceania by scientific voyagers from the late 1760s.
Chronologically, we probe racial thinking in general and with specific relation to Oceania during a key era — the heyday of the scientific concept of race from its emergence in the second half of the eighteenth century until the outbreak of World War II. These two centuries encompassed important transitions in both global discourses and regional interactions. Globally, inchoate Enlightenment ideas about varieties within a common humanity metamorphosed into a ubiquitous but contested science of race which reified races as tangible markers of inherent somatic differences. Regionally, an uneven but steady contextual shift saw residence or settlement overlap and finally displace voyages as the dominant setting for European engagements with and knowledge of Oceanian people. The first of these transitions is the major theme of Part One; while the second weaves through Parts Two to Five.
[1] On these themes, see Cowlishaw 2000; Gould 1996; Harrison 1995; Kaiwar and Mazumdar 2003; Kohn 1996; Littlefield, Lieberman, and Reynolds 1982; Malik 1996; Montagu 1997.
[2] A sample of books on aspects of the history of race published or republished during this period includes Bernasconi 2001b; Bernasconi and Cook 2003; Brantlinger 2003; Eigen and Larrimore 2006; Ellingson 2001; Gould 1996; Hall 2002; Hannaford 1996; Kidd 2006; Meijer 1999; Montagu 1997; Moussa 2003; Peabody and Stovall 2003; Schiebinger 2004; Staum 2003; Stoler 1995, 2002; Wheeler 2000; Wilson 2003; Zimmerman 2001; see also Bernasconi's valuable facsimile editions of key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts on race (2001a, 2002, 2003, 2005).
[3] See especially the work of Claude Blanckaert (1988, 2003a, 2003b, 2006) and George W. Stocking, Jr. (1968, 1973, 1987, 1988) and recent studies of the significance of field encounters for the human sciences by historians of geography (e.g., Bravo 1996; Bravo and Sörlin 2002; Nordman 2006).
[4] See, e.g., Anderson 2007; Brantlinger 2003; Schiebinger 2004; Todorov 1989. Though these works have their virtues, the authors have in different ways sacrificed a precise, discriminative, comparative reading of contemporary texts to derivative analysis of an overarching discourse, presumed deductively to determine or explain aspects of racial thinking. On the other hand, while Nancy Stepan’s (1982) pioneer general history of the science of race in Britain is sufficiently empirical and often insightful, it is also marred by inaccuracies of reading and interpretation.
[5] Bernard Smith's groundbreaking studies (1969, 1992) traced the genesis of racial thinking with respect to Australia and the Pacific Islands while Nicholas Thomas (1989; 1996; 1997:133-55; 2002) wrote brief but perceptive histories of the racial classification of Pacific Islanders. See also several recent histories of race in Australia (Anderson 2002; Anderson 2007; McGregor 1997); and incidental references to racial ideas in works on the science or the art of particular voyages in the region (Copans and Jamin 1978; Duyker 2003, 2006; Fisher and Johnston 1993; Jones 1988; Liebersohn 2006; Richard 1986; Stocking 1968:13-41).
[6] Caneva 1998; cf. Young 1977.
[7] Anderson 2007:22-4, 67, 109-12, 197‑202, original emphasis. Anderson's only access to my thinking and sole reference to my work are to an unpublished conference paper — an ancestral version of the first two chapters of this collection.
[8] The phrase is Claude Blanckaert's (2003:43); see also Kohn 1996:2-3; Stepan 1982:xiv-xvi.
[9] See also Anderson 2007; Copans and Jamin 1978; Frost 1976:810-22; Marshall and Williams 1982; Smith 1969; Williams 1979. There is growing scholarly interest in the significance of Oceanic field experience in the construction of scientific knowledge generally (e.g., Anderson 2000; Ballantyne 2004; Gascoigne 2007; Home 1988; Liebersohn 2006; Lincoln 1998; Mackay 1999; MacLeod and Rehbock 1988, 1994; Raj 2000; Renneville 1996; Schaffer 2007; Staum 2003; Vetter 2006).