Table of Contents
In letters written to a friend in 1790 and 1791, the young, German-trained French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) took vigorous humanist exception to recent 'stupid' German claims about the supposedly innate deficiencies of 'the negro'.[1] It was 'ridiculous', he expostulated, to explain the 'intellectual faculties' in terms of differences in the anatomy of the brain and the nerves; and it was immoral to justify slavery on the grounds that Negroes were 'less intelligent' when their 'imbecility' was likely to be due to 'lack of civilization and we have given them our vices'. Cuvier's judgment drew heavily on personal experience: his own African servant was 'intelligent', freedom-loving, disciplined, literate, 'never drunk', and always good-humoured. Skin colour, he argued, was a product of relative exposure to sunlight.[2] A decade later, however, Cuvier (1978:173-4) was 'no longer in doubt' that the 'races of the human species' were characterized by systematic anatomical differences which probably determined their 'moral and intellectual faculties'; moreover, 'experience' seemed to confirm the racial nexus between mental 'perfection' and physical 'beauty'.
The intellectual somersault of this renowned savant epitomizes the theme of this chapter which sets a broad scene for the volume as a whole. From a brief semantic history of 'race' in several western European languages, I trace the genesis of the modernist biological conception of the term and its normalization by comparative anatomists, geographers, naturalists, and anthropologists between 1750 and 1880. The chapter title — 'climate to crania' — and the introductory anecdote condense a major discursive shift associated with the altered meaning of race: the metamorphosis of prevailing Enlightenment ideas about externally induced variation within an essentially similar humanity into a science of race that reified human difference as permanent, hereditary, and innately somatic. The discussion pivots initially on the varied disputes over human unity or diversity and monogeny or polygeny which engrossed the science of man in Britain and France. The resolution or supersession of these debates with the application of evolutionist theory to man shaped the particular national trajectories taken by the discipline of anthropology for the rest of the century and beyond.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2008, hereinafter OED), the etymology of the English term 'race' and its European cognates is 'uncertain and disputed'.[3] The OED derives race ultimately from Italian razza, via French race, and the semantic history of the English term is entangled with continental meanings. Dictionary definitions say nothing per se about a word's history and inevitably lag well behind embryonic usages. But inclusion in a dictionary does register the prior normalization of a meaning. The OED's earliest citations date from the sixteenth century when, with reference to man, the concrete noun race signified a family, a kindred, or the posterity of a common ancestor, as in the 'race & stocke of Abraham' (1570). More generally, it meant a 'tribe, nation, or people regarded as of common stock', as in 'the Englishe race' (1572), or served as a synecdoche for humanity, as in 'the humane race' (1580).
The primary connotations of consanguinity and shared origin or descent are patent in the several translations of une race, 'a race', in an early French-Latin dictionary — they include familia ('house', 'family'); gentilitas ('kindred'); genus ('birth'); sanguis ('blood', 'descendant'); and stirps ('stock', 'stem', 'root', 'offspring').[4] The first French dictionary (Nicot 1606:533-4) explains that race 'signifies origin [extraction]', as in 'man, horse, dog, and other animal of good or bad race' or 'a noble race and house'. The OED cites parallel English usages from half a century earlier. This semantic conflation of a race with family breeding served to fortify the prerogatives of nobility over populace.[5] The first edition of Le dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (1694, II:364) defines race as 'progeny [lignée], lineage [lignage], origin, all those who come from a single [noble] family'. Applied to domestic animals, it connoted Latin species, 'sort', 'kind', 'species'.[6] This suite of usages hardly varies up to the fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie (1798, II:407) and recurs in the sixth (1835, II:553). The genealogical definition given for the English term race by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was similarly unchanged between the first edition of his Dictionary of the English Language (1756) and the revised eleventh edition (1799), published more than a decade after the lexicographer's death. But race/race were minor words in French and English before the late eighteenth century while their German equivalent Race or Rasse was a recent borrowing from French and rarely used (Forster 1786:159).
Importantly, however, the sixth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie (1835, II:553) also gives an extended signified for race: 'a multitude of men who originate from the same country, and resemble each other by facial traits, by external form. The Caucasian race. The Mongol race. The Malay race'. The OED likewise cites late eighteenth-century and subsequent uses of race to mean 'any of the major groupings of mankind, having in common distinct physical features or having a similar ethnic background'. These emergent meanings are lexical confirmation of a series of important shifts in the linguistic and ideological significance of race in western Europe from the mid-eighteenth century as naturalists appropriated the term to serve novel taxonomic ends.[7] The word's dominant scientific sense became narrowly biological while the permeable humoral body of classical conception solidified into the bones, nerves, flesh, and skin of the measurable, dissectible anatomical body (Wheeler 2000:26‑7).
[1] The works in question were by Soemmerring (1784, 1785) and Meiners (1785).
[2] Cuvier to Pfaff, 31 December 1790 and 19 February 1791, in Cuvier 1858:201-3, 215-16. See also Blanckaert 2003a:147-8; Stocking 1968:35.
[3] For discussions of the problematic etymology of race see, e.g., Boulle 2003; Dover 1951; Hudson 1996:247-8; Topinard 1879; Trevor 1951; Williams 1983:248.
[4] Estienne 1539:411. Latin-English translations are based on Lewis and Short 1879.
[5] Blanckaert 1988:25; Boulle 2003:12-13; Venturino 2003.
[6] Richelet 1732, II:536.
[7] Bernasconi 2001a; Blanckaert 1988:24-34; 2003a; Douglas 2005; Duvernay-Bolens 1995:10; Hudson 1996; Stocking 1968:35-41; Topinard 1879; Williams 1983:248-9.