Table of Contents
To search through nineteenth-century French anthropological writings about Indigenous Australians means ingesting a great deal of material that is highly offensive and injurious to Aboriginal people. In this discourse, Australian Aborigines were almost invariably assigned to the dernier échelon, the bottom rung, of the human racial ladder. This was their epistemological 'slot'.[1] The prevailing view about Aborigines that had become established in travel accounts and periodicals such as the Journal des Voyages was of a people barely human who at worst showed many simian characteristics and at best were living fossils, contemporary manifestations of Stone Age people. The scientific view as reflected in the anthropological literature, in particular the journals produced by the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, founded in 1859, scarcely departed from these gross representations.
Early French studies devoted in part or in whole to Australian Aborigines form part of the body of texts which constituted the French (and wider European) discourse of the science of race, raciologie in French terminology. The history of French anthropology in the nineteenth century is a growing field and a number of excellent studies has been produced but the focus of research is primarily on metropolitan thinkers rather than their indigenous subjects.[2] This chapter takes a different approach in looking at what happened when a particular group of Australian Aborigines fell under the lens of French anthropologists who for raciological purposes generally took them as representative. How did Aborigines fit the raciological theories of the day? How exactly were they represented in French anthropological discourse? And what do such representations reveal about the construction and practice of raciology? With these questions in mind, I tackle French anthropological discourse relating to Indigenous Australians through a specific episode: the presentation of three Aborigines from North Queensland to a small group of French anthropologists at the Société d'Anthropologie in Paris in 1885. The record of the meeting was published in the dense and voluminous Bulletins de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, the official publication of the Société along with the Mémoires. The story of the world tour of the Aboriginal troupe presented by the American impresario Robert Cunningham has itself been the subject of a touring exhibition in Australia and a recent book by Roslyn Poignant (2004).[3] The report of the Paris meeting was merely a sideline to that tour but it condenses many aspects of French anthropological interest in Australian Aborigines in particular and the study of non-European people as racial specimens more generally. It is an unwitting mise en abyme, a representation in miniature, of the ideology and practices of late nineteenth-century racial anthropology in France.
Influential figures in this anthropological milieu were Paul Broca (1824-1880), Paul Topinard (1830-1911), and Ernest-Théodore Hamy (1842-1908),[4] all of whom feature in this chapter. Broca presided over the French anthropological scene for twenty years after playing a key part in founding the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris and serving as its first secretary-general. Broca proselytized an anthropometrical approach characterized by a dogmatic empiricism which, for a time, was the dominant paradigm for the study of human others among members of the Société and beyond. Topinard and Hamy are important here not only because of their views and writings on the subject of Aborigines but because they were directly involved with the three Aboriginal Australians while they were in Paris and brought them to the attention of the Société. Topinard was a particular protegé of Broca's whose influence showed in Topinard's anthropological focus on the observable and the measurable. The difficulties this approach entailed when he came to synthesize the mass of information he had collected about Aborigines are discussed below.
If, in representational terms, the 1885 meeting of Aborigines and scholars typified raciological discourse and method, in practice it was atypical because it brought together elements in nineteenth-century French anthropology that were usually quite separate: namely the objects of study and those undertaking the analysis, the 'armchair' anthropologists. As Nélia Dias (1994:38) pointed out, the functions of collecting data (skeletal material, observations, photographs) and its analysis were not normally undertaken by the same person. In this case, when the analysts actually came face to face with those they were studying, the preconceptions about non-Europeans underpinning raciology stood out all the more clearly. Because I use the meeting to highlight aspects of raciological discourse and methods, my discussion moves back and forth between this exceptional Aboriginal-French encounter in Paris and the broader anthropological setting in which it occurred. In presenting the three Aborigines to the Société d'Anthropologie, the secretary-general Topinard drew on information provided in a memoir by two Belgian anthropologists, Emile Houzé (1848-1921) and Victor Jacques (1853-?), who had examined seven members of Cunningham's troupe when they were on exhibition at the Musée du Nord in Brussels. The Belgian memoir provides some illuminating comparisons and contrasts to the French report as does one by Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) who had examined the Queenslanders in Berlin, but to whom Topinard made scant reference.[5]
[1] I use in a different context the concept contained in the term 'savage slot' as coined by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) for the epistemological domain of anthropology itself.
[2] Elizabeth Williams's study (1987) is the first comprehensive history of French anthropology in the nineteenth century and a basic reference point. See also Blanckaert 1988, 1996; Hammond 1980; Harvey 1983; Poirier 1968; Renneville 2000; Staum 2005; Stocking 1968; Williams 1985.
[3] The exhibition 'Captive Lives: Looking for Tambo and his Companions', curated by Roslyn Poignant, assisted by Irene Turpie, was held at the National Library of Australia from November 1997 to March 1998. It toured Australia extensively until mid-2000 and is now permanently housed at the Museum of Tropical Queensland in Townsville. Poignant's book (2004) presents her meticulous research into the story of Tambo and the other members of the group: how the unscrupulous Cunningham formed his troupe; their tour through North America and Europe in 1883-7 with its tragic outcome for most of them; and their objectification by both popular and scientific curiosity, even as they themselves adapted as performers to the roles they were expected to play as 'professional savages'.
[4] Like many of their colleagues in the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, all three had trained in medicine.
[5] Houzé and Jacques 1884-5; Virchow 1884; see also Poignant 2004:125-36.