Imperial Anthropology – Week 9 Flashcards
Key Themes:
- Origins
- Measuring men
- Darwin and the Apes
- Picturing “Savages”
Studying “Others”:
- Anthropology grew out of natural history as a fusion of various modes of enquiry into “other” people (i.e. not Europeans)
- The study of Europeans was called history, sociology, economics etc..; “we” were not the subjects of anthropology
- Nevertheless, anthropology was founded on an assumption of universalism, we’re all human
- Tension with ethnology, which was the study of diversity
Biblical (ethnological) tradition:
- Assumed Monogeny
- Literally “one race” (“genus”); hence monogenist, monogenism
- A literal reading of the Bible shows that all humans are one, species, descended ultimately from Adam and Eve
“Developmental tradition”:
- Biblical story assumed that history/change = decay
- Grenco-Roman materialism made the opposite assumption
- People acquired new skills and qualities as they spread across the Earth encouraging new challenges. Hence the ascent from primitive brutality to civilisation.
Histories of humanity:
- Despite their differences, the biblical (ethnological) and developmental (evolutionist) tradition were diachronic, i.e. they shared the assumption of change over time
- Physical anthropology (polygeny) was synchronic (i.e. people did not change over time)
Samuel Morton (1799-1851):
- Philadelphia physician, who took over 1,000 skulls (mostly of Native Americans)
- Morton measured the skulls (craniometry) and used his measurements to provide scientific evidence to support polygenesis
Polygeny:
- The Polygenic theory was first advanced by Isaac de La Peyrere, a French Protestant writer, in 1665, in a book called the pre-Adamites
- La Peyrere argued that there had been other humans outside the Garden of Eden, one of whom Cain married after murdering Abel
- Polygenetic theories were partly stimulated by the discovery of the New World; La Peyrere argued that its peoples were not descended from Adam
Studying “others”:
• Historically, anthropology grew in response to European expansion; its job was to interpret and explain the “otherness” of the peoples Europeans encountered as they spread
Travel:
- European expansion, trade and colonisation, increased demand for anthropolical data
- Also provided opportunities for anthropologists
James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848)
- British naturalist, doctor and an evangelical Anglican (from a Quaker background)
- Used his knowledge of natural history to defend the literal truth of scripture, that humanity was all one family
- Researchers into the ‘Physical History of Man’ (1813) was one of several publications which aimed to prove Genesis correct
- Prichard was hugely influential in Britain
- 1839: spoke at the British Association “On the Extinction of Human Races”
- He predicted the extermination of most “savage” races and argued that: “it is of the greatest importance, in a philosophical point of view, to obtain much more extensive information on their physical/moral character”
The London Ethnological Society:
- Grew out of the earlier Aborigines Protection Society. Dominated by monogenests, anti-slavery campaigners, and missionaries
- Shared philanthropic and scientific goals
Not real Science?
- Some anthropologists rejected the work of the Ethnological societies as unscientific
- Rival anthropological societies were founded (in Paris 1859, and in London 1863)
- Dominated by polygenists: Pierre Paul Broca (1824-80) in France and James Hunt (1833-69) in UK
Anthropological Society of London:
- Home of British polygenesis, which traced to Robert Knox whose ‘Races of Man’ (1850) argued for permanently distinct human types
- James Hunt (1833-69), one of his followers founded the Anthropological Society
- Membership dominated by medical doctors and army officers (40% stationed in the colonies, especially India), then scientists or academics, then clergymen.
- John Beddoe (1826-1911), a president of the Institute, recorded in his memoirs that the audience always responded warmly to a defence of British Imperialism
Darwin and Evolution:
- Darwin goes public, first edition ‘On the Origin of Species’ published 1859
- Plausible argument for evolution = natural selection
- Darwin wrote almost nothing about human evolution
Darwin and Race:
• Darwin came from an anti-Slavery family and was strongly opposed to slavery
Rejection of Darwin:
• Polygenists and physical anthropologists initially rejected Darwin’s ideas; too monogenist and too speculative
Acceptance of Darwin:
- Darwin’s ideas combined with important new fossil finds and the vastly expanded geological time scale, led to increasing interest in origins of humanity
- Charles Lyell ‘The Antiquity of Man’ 1863
Evolutionary Progress:
• Darwin’s theories were interpreted as a continuation of earlier traditions of “progressive development” (e.g. The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844)
Armchair Anthropology:
- Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) devised an evolution of religion sequence that ran from primitive animism through polytheism to monotheism
- John Mclennan (1827-81) traced the evolution of marriage, from primitive promiscuity, through polyandry to monogamy
- Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-81), USA, produced a more general scheme in which humanity progressed from “lower savagery” through three phases of “barbarism” up to civilisation
Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1826-1911)
- President of the Anthropological Institute, who was a Lieutenant General in the Grenadier Guards
- An urgent need for anthological studies because: “the manners and customs of uncivilised races are changing with a rapidity unprecedented in the world’s history and the continued existence of some of these races becoming a question of only a few years”
- Britain was: “a nation which from its vast colonial possessions is placed more continuously in contact with savage races” and therefore has a special responsibility for collecting anthropological data
The Anthropological Institute:
- James Hunt died in 1869
- In 1871, Thomas Huxley engineered a merger between the British Ethnological and Anthropological Societies
- The new Anthropological Institute embodied “classical evolutionism”, a post-Darwinism synthesis of mono- and polygenist traditions
Picturing the “savages”
Great Exhibition:
- Crystal Palace, London 1851
* Crystal Palace, rebuilt in Sydenham, South London, after it closed in 1851
Later Exhibitions:
• Success of the 1851 exhibition led to numerous imitations around the world
Exhibiting people:
- Live “savages” were a popular show in London and elsewhere in the nineteenth century
- R.A. Cunningham’s “Boomerang Throwers”,
Thomas Huxley:
• 1869: proposed to the colonial office: “The Formation of a systematic series of photographs of the various races of men comprehended within the British Empire”
• 1870: presented a new classification of human types to the Ethnological Society. Five Races:
1. Australoid
2. Negroid
3. Xanthochron
4. Melanchroi
5. Mangoloid
• Unlike earlier classifications, he used a variety of physical characters (skin colour, hair type, eye colour, and skill shape), not just skulls
• Did not rank his groups by intelligence or ability, nor did he provide an explicit evolutionary account of their descent. Concentrated on geographical distribution of peoples
• Descriptions were still racist. He noted that the Negro forehead revealed “a good deal of the feminine, or childlike character”
• Huxley’s paper represented a revival of Prichard’s work, in that emphasised variety and that the “types” included many intermediate gradations
Huxley’s “photometric instructions”
- Subjects photographed naked
- Camera at fixed distance from subjects
- Measuring scale included in the photograph
- Two-full length photos, one-full frontal, the other in profile
- In photographs of females, the position of the arm should be “so disposed as not to interfere with the contour of the breast which is very characteristic in some races
