Table of Contents
In December 1828, the leading comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) made a triumphalist presidential address (1829) to the annual general assembly of the Société de Géographie in Paris. He reminded his audience of the recent 'conquests of geography' which had revealed to the world the 'greatly varied tribes and countless islands' that the Ocean had thus far 'rendered unknown to the rest of humanity'. Cuvier's 'conquests' were not merely topographical: 'our voyagers' in Oceania were 'philosophers and naturalists, no less than astronomers and surveyors'. They collected the 'products' of lands visited, studied the 'languages and customs' of the inhabitants, and enriched 'our museums, grammars and lexicons' as much as 'our atlases and maps'. 'Saved for science' in archives, natural history collections, and lavishly illustrated publications, this copious legacy of the classic era of scientific voyaging between 1766 and 1840 propelled Oceania to the empirical forefront of European knowledge — not least in the natural history of man and the nascent discipline of anthropology which made prime subject matter of the descriptions, portraits, plaster busts, human bodily remains, and artefacts repatriated by antipodean travellers and residents.
History can be a potent antidote to the spurious aura of reality and permanence that infects reified concepts. This chapter and the previous one dislodge the realism of 'race' by historicizing it but do so from different perspectives. Whereas the first chapter is a wide-ranging intellectual history of the invention of the modernist concept of race and the normalization of its science, the present chapter is grounded in a regional subset of the field materials on which theorists drew to illustrate their deductions about human diversity.[2] I consider anthropological deployment of Oceanian examples by a variety of metropolitan thinkers but direct the most sustained attention to works by four major figures who each professed belief in the unity of the single human species and claimed to favour 'facts' and 'induction' over 'system'. They are Cuvier; the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788); the German comparative anatomist and pioneer anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840); and the British physician-ethnologist James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848).[3] These men reasoned in historical or taxonomic terms and from varied ideological perspectives: they debated human relationships to animals and the classification and ranking of human variation; they pondered the origins and development of what the new disciplines of anthropology and ethnology regarded as separate races or even separate species; while their conception and use of the idea of races spanned shifting contemporary spectrums of learned opinion and argument, from humanist to racialist, environmentalist to innatist, holistic to segregative, 'monogenist' to 'polygenist'.[4]
Bridging the global abstractions of such savants and the empirical specificity of voyagers' or residents' narratives were the regional anthropological taxonomies and speculative histories proposed by naturalists who had travelled widely in Oceania as members of scientific naval expeditions. Such men brought general theoretical precepts and a classifying mindset to bear on transient, often confronting personal experience of encounters with actual indigenous people.[5] Aside from the work of the Germans Johann Reinhold Forster (1729-1798) and his son Georg (1754-1794) who sailed with James Cook (1728-1779) on his second voyage of 1772-75, much of the early anthropology of Oceania published before 1850 was produced by French naturalists who are a primary focus of this chapter.[6] François Péron (1775-1810) was a zoologist on the Australian voyage of Nicolas Baudin (1754-1803) in 1800-04. The navigator-naturalist Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville (1790‑1842) undertook three voyages to Oceania between 1822 and 1840, the last two as commander. The naval medical officers Jean-René Constant Quoy (1790-1869) and Joseph-Paul Gaimard (1793-1858) served also as naturalists with Louis de Freycinet (1779-1842) in 1817‑20 and with Dumont d'Urville in 1826-29; their colleague Prosper Garnot (1794-1838) and the pharmacist René-Primevère Lesson (1794-1849) did so with Louis-Isidore Duperrey (1786-1865) and Dumont d'Urville in 1822‑25; while the surgeon-naturalists Jacques-Bernard Hombron (1798-1852) and Honoré Jacquinot (1814-1887) accompanied Dumont d'Urville in 1837‑40, together with the phrenologist Pierre-Marie Alexandre Dumoutier (1797-1871).
By probing the relationships between anthropological systems and Oceanic facts and the interplay of deductive and inductive modes of knowing, this chapter illustrates the reciprocal significance of discourse and experience, taxonomy and history for different camps of the burgeoning science of race.
The emergence of an embryonic biological concept of race in the 1770s has been ascribed to both the 'natural system' of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and the rival 'natural history' of Buffon.[7] Most naturalists on eighteenth-century voyages to Oceania followed Linnaean taxonomic principles but the region does not figure in his terse classification of Homo sapiens into four geographically defined varieties (1758:20-2). Unlike Linnaeus, Buffon (1749a) segregated man from the other animals as a unique species while his exhaustive geographical survey of 'Varieties in the Human Species' (1749b, III:371-530) drew heavily on travellers' narratives. The shortage of such material on Oceania limited his discussion of the people of that region and dictated significant reliance on the perspicacious writings of the late seventeenth-century English voyager William Dampier (1652-1715). However, in his later Supplément (1777:539-55), Buffon addressed in detail the descriptions of the 'South Sea Islanders' and the 'inhabitants of the Austral lands' published in recent explorers' accounts and in the compendium of voyage texts dating from the sixteenth century assembled by his friend Charles de Brosses (1709-1777), the French littérateur and president of the Burgundian parlement. Brosses's work (1756) included a speculative program for discovery, commerce, and settlement in the Terres australes, 'Austral lands', that helped inspire the great French and British circumnavigations of the 1860s.[8]
Buffon's essay on man has often been interpreted as a methodical classification of humanity into varieties or races: Blumenbach and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) said he had listed six; the historian of anthropology Michèle Duchet discerned a 'spectral analysis of the human species' into 'four principal races'.[9] Such readings are overly categorical since Buffon avoided systematic labelling or formal taxonomy. Rather, the bulk of the work describes the myriad 'nuances' of the multiple 'kinds', 'varieties', 'races', 'nations', or 'peoples' known to him within the single human species.[10] Slotted into this painstaking catalogue between 'the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Pégu and Aracan' (in what is now Myanmar) and the 'peoples of the Indian peninsula' is a sixteen-page segment discussing the inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago, some western Pacific Islands, New Guinea, and New Holland (mainland Australia).[11] The section concludes with Buffon's reflection that the inhabitants of Formosa and the Marianas Islands 'seem to form a separate race different from all those nearby' while the Papous and other Islanders from around New Guinea were 'true blacks and resemble those of Africa'.[12] With hindsight, these remarks might be seen to anticipate the later racial differentiation of Micronesians and Melanesians.
Yet this anachronistic reading misconstrues both Dampier and Buffon. There is no classificatory sub-text to Dampier's ethnocentric descriptions of the 'great variety of Savages' he had seen on his voyages. There is only comparison rather than implied categorical opposition between the 'Indians' he met in present-day Micronesia, the Philippines, and Indonesia and the 'Negroes' he encountered along the New Guinea coasts. He regarded both as savages with the human potential to become civilized through commerce, though he clearly took relative Negro inferiority for granted. These fairly evenhanded assessments are in sharp contrast to his very negative published impressions of the inhabitants of the west coast of New Holland whose indifference to material inducement led him to question their capacity to become civilized.[13] This was an early statement of a commonplace nexus drawn by Europeans between lifestyle, material desires, and alleged lack of perfectibility, very often to the detriment of Aboriginal Australians.
It is equally inappropriate to attribute methodical binary intent to Buffon, notwithstanding his presumption of an overarching human division into 'the white race' and 'the race of the blacks', his vaunting of 'the most white', his absolute denigration of Negroes, and his paraphrase of Dampier's harsh words about the people of New Holland.[14] At this point, Buffon later claimed (1777:462, 478), he had sometimes used race with the 'extended sense' of 'resemblance' rather than in its 'narrow' genealogical sense. But in practice, his a priori dichotomy of white and black races repeatedly dissolved into overlapping 'varieties' and 'nuances'. The 'descriptions' of Dampier and other travellers provided his evidence 'that the islands and coasts of the [east] Indian Ocean are peopled by men very different from each other' — 'Indians', 'Chinese', 'Europeans', 'true blacks', and others. It was the multiplicity of actual human 'differences' which most impressed Buffon and which he correlated exhaustively with climate, geography, and lifestyle to produce a broadly humanist conclusion: that 'humankind is not composed of essentially different species' but that present diversity was entirely the product of the lengthy operation of (in principle reversible) 'external and accidental causes' on what was 'originally only a single species of men'.[15] His subsequent reading of recent voyagers' texts on the South Sea Islanders and the people of New Holland only confirmed this judgment (1777:555): 'the great differences' — the main human 'varieties' — were 'dependent entirely on the influence of climate' and specifically on 'temperature'. Temperature determined not only 'the colour of men' but also their nutrition which served as a 'second cause' with profound effects on the (biological) 'nature' of human beings. Here, Buffon was alluding to the theory of environmentally generated, organic, but still theoretically reversible degeneration of species that informed his work on the natural history of man from the 1760s.[16]
[1] 'The new southern world' (Blumenbach 1781:52, original emphasis). Latin-English translations are based on Lewis and Short 1879.
[2] For a catholic sample of critical reflections on the significance of overseas field experience in the science of man in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Beer 1996; Bravo 1996; Bravo and Sörlin 2002; Gardner 2006:105‑27; Liebersohn 2006; Smith 1969; Staum 2003:85-121; Stocking 1987:78-109.
[3] Blumenbach 1775:40; 1795:322; Buffon 1749a:4-7; 1749b, III:529-30; Cuvier 1817a, I:94; Cuvier et al. 1807:135, 137; Prichard 1813:3; 1836-47, I:9.
[4] The terms 'monogenist' and 'polygenist' date from the 1850s but are used here as useful labels for the extreme positions adopted by naturalists during the preceding half century in heated debates over the unity of the human species; see Chapter One (Douglas), this volume.
[5] See also Douglas 1999a, 1999b, 2003, 2006, n.d.
[6] Other partial exceptions to French predominance in the early anthropology of Oceania — though none could match the comparative span of French experience in the region — were the German Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff (1774-1852), physician-naturalist on the first Russian circumnavigation of the world in 1803-6; the French-born German naturalist and littérateur Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838), naturalist on the subsequent Russian voyage of 1815-18; the Englishman Charles Darwin (1809-1882), naturalist on HMS Beagle's global surveying voyage of 1831-36; and the American philologist and ethnologist Horatio Hale (1817-1896), a member of the United States Exploring Expedition to the Pacific in 1838‑42 (Chamisso 1821, 1986; Darwin 1839; Hale 1846; Langsdorff 1813; see also Beer 1996; Liebersohn 2006:58-76, 273-88). William Ellis (1794-1872) and John Williams (1796-1839) of the London Missionary Society pioneered the prolific genre of missionary ethnography which dominated Pacific anthropology in the second half of the nineteenth century but few other such works were published before 1850 (Ellis 1829, 1831; Williams 1837; see also Herbert 1991:155‑203; Sivasundaram 2005).
[7] See Chapter One (Douglas), this volume.
[8] Brosses's interest was avowedly inspired by a letter on the 'progress of the sciences' written in 1752 to Frederick II of Prussia by the French polymath Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) who promoted the search for the Terres australes as the most urgent and worthy object of royal scientific patronage ([Brosses] 1756, I:i, 2-4; Maupertuis 1768:375-86). See Dunmore 1965-9, I:45‑50; see also Ryan 2002 on Brosses's seminal contribution to the emergence of the anthropology of Oceania in France in the mid-eighteenth century.
[9] Blumenbach 1795:297; Darwin 1871, I:226; Duchet 1995:271, original emphasis.
[10] For parallel interpretations of Buffon, see Bernasconi 2001:x; Blanckaert 2003:135-8; 2006:458‑61; Montagu 1997:69.
[11] Buffon 1749b, III:395-411.
[12] Throughout this chapter, as in the Introduction, I retain the French forms Papou or Papoua because inconsistent contemporary French usages do not always translate exactly into English 'Papuan'.
[13] Dampier 1697:297, 325-6, 456-7, 464-9; 1699:128; 181; 1703:145-9; 1709:4, 122-6, 148. Dampier (1699:176; 1709:23) used Indian in the conventional contemporary sense of an inhabitant of the East Indies, the West Indies, or the Americas generally: 'the Indian kind, of a swarthy Copper colour, with black lank Hair'. See Douglas 2006:7-9.
[14] Buffon 1749b, III:408-10, 433, 453-4.
[15] Buffon 1749b, III:410, 528-30.
[16] See Chapter One (Douglas), this volume; Douglas 2005:337-8.