Imperial Anthropology – Week 9

Question 1

Key Themes:

Answer 1

1. Origins
2. Measuring men
3. Darwin and the Apes
4. Picturing “Savages”

Question 2

Studying “Others”:

Answer 2

• 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

Question 3

Biblical (ethnological) tradition:

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

“Developmental tradition”:

Answer 4

• 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.

Question 5

Histories of humanity:

Answer 5

• 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)

Question 6

Samuel Morton (1799-1851):

Answer 6

• 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

Question 7

Polygeny:

Answer 7

• 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

Question 8

Studying “others”:

Answer 8

• 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

Question 9

Travel:

Answer 9

• European expansion, trade and colonisation, increased demand for anthropolical data
• Also provided opportunities for anthropologists

Question 10

James Cowles Prichard (1786-1848)

Answer 10

• 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”

Question 11

The London Ethnological Society:

Answer 11

• Grew out of the earlier Aborigines Protection Society. Dominated by monogenests, anti-slavery campaigners, and missionaries
• Shared philanthropic and scientific goals

Question 12

Not real Science?

Answer 12

• 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

Question 13

Anthropological Society of London:

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

Darwin and Evolution:

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

Darwin and Race:

Answer 15

• Darwin came from an anti-Slavery family and was strongly opposed to slavery

Question 16

Rejection of Darwin:

Answer 16

• Polygenists and physical anthropologists initially rejected Darwin’s ideas; too monogenist and too speculative

Question 17

Acceptance of Darwin:

Answer 17

• 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

Question 18

Evolutionary Progress:

Answer 18

• 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)

Question 19

Armchair Anthropology:

Answer 19

• 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

Question 20

Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers (1826-1911)

Answer 20

• 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

Question 21

The Anthropological Institute:

Answer 21

• 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

Question 22

Picturing the “savages”

Great Exhibition:

Answer 22

• Crystal Palace, London 1851

* Crystal Palace, rebuilt in Sydenham, South London, after it closed in 1851

Question 23

Later Exhibitions:

Answer 23

• Success of the 1851 exhibition led to numerous imitations around the world

Question 24

Exhibiting people:

Answer 24

• Live “savages” were a popular show in London and elsewhere in the nineteenth century
• R.A. Cunningham’s “Boomerang Throwers”,

Question 25

Thomas Huxley:

Answer 25

• 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

Question 26

Huxley’s “photometric instructions”

Answer 26

• 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