SUNY SERIES, PHILOSOPHY AND RACE REPRODUCTION, Robert Bernasconi and T. Dencan Sharpley-Whiting, editors RACE, AND GENDER IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE EARLY LIFE SCIENCES
Edned by SUSANNE LETTOW
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Production by Dana Fooce 3. The Scientific Construction of Gender and Generation in the Marketing by Michael Campochlaro German Late Enlightenment and in German Romantic Ubnry ofCongras CauJogjnS·In·P.blicadon D... Naturphilosophie PETER HANNS R£ILL 65 Reproduction. ract. and gender in philosophy and the early life sciences I edited by Susanne l..enow. 4. Zeugungl Fortpftallzung: Distinctions of Medium in the pages cm.-(SUNY series. Philosophy and race) Discourse on Gener.ltion around 1800 Includes bibliognpbical "!".,,nees and index. JOC£LYN HOLLAND 83 ISBN 978·1-4384-4949-4 (aIk. paper) I. Race-Philosophy 2. Human rtproduaion-Philosophy 3. Scs 5. Treviranus' Biology: Genera.ion. Degeneration. and the Philosophy 1. Len:ow. Susanne. editor of compilation. Boundaries of Life HTI521.R4562014 305.800 I -dc23 JOAN ST£IG£RWALD 105 2013005360
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 y vi CONTENTS
PART II. ARnCULAnONS OF RACE AND GENDER
6. Skin Color and the Origin of Physical Anthropology (1640-1850) RENATO G. MAZZOLINI 13 1 7. The Caucosian Slave Race: Beautiful Circassians and the Hybrid Origin of European Identity SARA FICAL 163 8. Analogy of Analogy: Animals and Slaves in Maty Wollstonecraft's Defense of Women's Rights • PENELOPE DEUTSCHER 187 9. Reproducing Difference: Race and Heredity ftom a Iongu' Juri, Perspective STAFFAN MULLER-WILLE 217 10. Heredity and Hybridity in the Nannal Histoty of Kant, Girtonner, and Schelling during the 1790. ROBERT BERNASCONI 237 11. Sexual Polarity in Schelling and Hegel ALISON STONE 259 About the Contributors 283 Index 287 7
THE CAUCASIAN SLAVE RACE Beautiful Circassians and the Hybrid Origin of European Identity
SARA FIGAL
Consider the rollowing triangulation around a female figure: l. Travd writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century (unreliable, yet widely read) identifY the most beautiful women in the world as the "primitive" Georgians and Circassians &om the Caucasus mount:lins, additionally noting their high value on the Dnoman slave market; J 2. European mntasies of beautiful captives-often CirClSSians- languishing in a Sul,an's harem inspire novels, plays, and operas during the eighteenth century, even while the fictions reinrorce a disapproval of Ottoman "decadence" and the religion of Islam;' 3. In an era obsessed with origins, German scientists officially dub the "white" race of Europeans "Caucasian," citing the superior beaury of Georgian and CirClSSian women as proof that the origin of white Europeans--and of the human species overall-should be located in the Caucasus mountains.)
With ,hese points as orient:ltion, I would like to examine the figure of the fetishized female from the Caucasus, the CirClSSian or Georgian slave, who became an unlikely ioon ror racial theorists and their narratives of European superiority.' I focus particularly on those literary ,ropes of beaury and breeding that were translated by scientific discourse into empirical evidence ror theories of human difference.
163 164 SARA F1GAL THE CAUCASIAN SLAVE RACE 165
The "CauClSian" race was identified and named at the end of the eigh as fair-skinned and dark-eyed, and they were fetishized as the priz.ed posses teenth century by a German scientific community intent on systematically sions of Ottoman harems. Beyond lurid European Janwies of the seraglio explaining human variation fOr the emerging fields of narural history, com and in the real world of human traffic, Circassian girls were regularly caprured parative anatomy, and physical anthropology. Debates about whether race by traclers-or sold by parents to traders-who knew they fetched the highest was a "real" category exisdng in narure or a conceptual heuristic for scien prices on the slave market in Const2minople.' While harem stories made fOr tific thinking circulated among a group of German philosophers and naru enterraining reading and postures of cross-cultural outrage, there was little to ral scientists thar included Immanuel Kant, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, suggest an obvious reinscription of the Circassian beauty as the genealogical Georg Fomer, Christoph Meiners, and Johann Gottfried Herder. Scholars source of the European ract:. now generally credit the "invention of race" to this group, although Kant and From the vantage point of history, considcring how racial theories were: Blumenbach are usually singled out as the most significant contributors.' It is translared into arguments fOr Europeon cultural and political hegemony true that, in 1795, Blumenbach settled on names fOr five primary races in the throughout the world, this choice fOr the originary body of the CauClSian third edition of his Dt gmtris humani varittau nativa {On the n.rural voriety ideal seems prcpostcrous. It locates the gencCiltrix of Caucasian identity at of mankind}, using the term Caucl1Sian fOr the first time {along with Mongo home outside of Europe, beyond the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire. lian, Ethiopian, Amtrican, and Malay}. Blumenbach also proposed that the The Circassians and Georgians. those Caucasians with whom we shall be CauClSian should be considered the "primeval" race, &om which the other most concerned, lived outside of the community of "civilized" cultures; they fOur had developed over time.' So why did he locate the origin of the species were described by Europeans as wild and primitive. I. Finally, they existed out in the Caucasus mountains? side of orthodox Christendom and were identified by travel writers as animist This question has been asked several times in recent decades, both in heathens with vestiges of Christian and Muslim in8uence." Their ambiguous the context of the history of science, as with Stephen Jay Gould's revised otherness-their dist2nce from all values ascribed to the superior European edition of Tht MismtllSUrt of Man (I996), and in the context of whiteness whire Christian male--are hardly attributes that one would expect to find studies, as with Bruce Baum's Tht Rist and FaD oftht CaW:l1Sian Raet (2006).' central to a narrative of European racial identity. Both of these works recognize that the naming of the CauClSian race was a How, then, could such a conceptual move be possible? And not only response to a tangle of ideas-fOr the most part unscientific-about beauty. possible, but accept2ble to a scientific community heovily invested in Euro & David Bindman has noted, Europeans believed that "the peoples beyond pean distinctiveness? Postcolonial theorists have advanced dynamic ideas of the eastern border of the Holy Roman Empire-the Circassi.ns and oth hybridity and creolization as a radical challenge to historically enuenched ers-were of exceptional contentment and beaury," a belief that contributed ideols of "authenticity," and, in this light particularly, it is intriguing to rec to the nineteenth-century underst2nding of an Aryan race.' While investiga ognize that the eighteenth-century construction of the racial "authentic" is tions of eorly race theories have pursued the long-term consequences of this based at the outset on a circulating set of tales and references involving reli theoretical shift that emphasiz.ed aesthetic superioriry as "n.tural" evidence gious, linguistic, and biological amalgamation. fOr explanations of racial diffi:rentiation, none to date has fully investigated what Gould calls the "mental machinery"-in this case, the culrural and liter ary cat2lysrs--that produced the Caucl1Sian nomenelarure. "THE HANDSOMEST WOMEN OF THE WORLD": The tale told by late eighteenth-cenrury scientists and philosophers of BEAUTY AND DESIRE "white" racial identity emphasized a set of attributes that included European geography, white skin color, and both cultural and physical superiority. It is Although the women of the Caucasus belonged to a culture that was decid surprising, then, that the: figure at the center of this constructed narrative of edly non-European, their beauty was legendary, the sruff of myth and erotic origins and heredirary transmission is the beautiful Circassian &om the Cau funrasy. In Europe during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even nineteenth casus mountains. European readers of travelogues and novels were familiar cenruries, these women-identified interchangeably and imprecisely as Geor with this figure: Circassian and Georgian women in particular were celebrated gians or Circassians-were celebrated in texts by German {and French and 166 SARA AGAL THE CAUCASIAN SLAVE RACE 167
English and Rwsian) writers, whether in travel litel':lture, anthropological Chardin expands on his superlative evaluation of the Georgian women, find treatises, natural history texts, novels, plays, or philosophical essays, as the i~g something that transcends the ordinary in their "Angels Faces." This special most beautiful human beings in the world." Two works of nonfiction from gIft of nature exerts a power on the beholder, whose observation-which, in the late seventeenth century illustrate what would become a customary per the case of a travel writer like Chardin, aims to be dispassionate-is suddenly spective. The first of these "is Fl':lnl'Ois Bernier's NDUJJtlk division tk fa tl!TTt par complicated by a "falling in Love." Lest we attribute this "love" to a pious Ie diJPrtntes apica ou raca qui I'habitmt (New Division of the Earth Accord respect fur the angelic, it is well to read on, as Chardin continues that these ing to the Different Species or Races of Men, 1684), generally regarded as overwhelming beauties "have an extraordinary addiction to the male sex" that the first text in which the tenn me< functioned as a dominant classification contributes to the "torrent of uncleanness" marking their culture." His fasci scheme fur patterns of difference among human peoples. The text is an early nadon wavers between two exuemes of female charaaerization: the Georgian witness to what would develop and circulate throughout Europe as the leg woman is at once angelic and licentious. inspiring love and demanding sexual endary figure of the "Circassian beauty": gratification. She is uuerly irresistible to all who would gaze on her, wielding a power that doesn't require actual presence but can be fdt even when mediated It cannot be said that the native and aboriginal women of Persia are by Chardin's text. For there is no doubt that readers who were able to "behold beautiful, but this does not prevent the city of Is&han from being 'em" only through Chardin's descriptions were entl':lnced, and they paid their filled with an infinity ofvery handsome women, as well as very hand homage by extending textual rribute in citations over the next centuries. some men, in consequence of the great number of handsome slaves Chardin's lingering note on the potent seduction of Georgian beauty, who are brought there from Georgia and Circassia. The Turks have relatively contained in its tone, is repeatedly cited by later race theorists as also a great number of very handsome women; ... they have ... authoritative justi6cation of these women's preeminence in human racial his. an immense quantity of slaves who come [0 them from Mingrelia, tory, producing the "superior" stock of Europeans while also relining vari. Georgia, and Circassia, where, according to all the l.evantines and all ous lesser lines with gracious generosity. When we read later ciCltions of this the travellers, the handsomest women of the world are to be fuund." seductive beaucy, quoted in otder to validate the iconic stafW of the Geor~ gian/Circassian fi:male fur the Caucasian I':lce, we are witnessing both the Bernicr's attention to degrees ofbeaucy characterizing the world's various peo fate of a text and the invention of a biological legacy. For Chardin's text was ples suggests, wimout theorizing or analyzing, that an aesthetic evaluation distilled and blended with geogl':lphical, philosophical, popular, and natural of physiological difference is a meaningful element in the differentiation of scientific conceptual systems and writing uaditions in order to produce a human groups. The aesthetic quality-containing no small measure of erotic normative, scienti6c discourse of heritable racial traits. appeal, to gauge from his description of fi:male beauties-finds irs supreme In all likelihood, Chardin's text would not have fuund the resonance it example in the women of the Caucasus. In this, he is not alone. At about the did-at least in regard to theories of optimal breeding lines in the Caucasll5- same time, the great travel writer John Chardin described various peoples of were it not fur myriad other writer.; who echoed his judgment. And it is not the Caucasus, reporting this about the Georgians in particular. only in Chardin's text that observations on Circassian and Georgian beauty wax to what becomes at times significant digression. Other author.;, too, The Complexion of the Georgians is the most beautiful in all the seem to get carried away. disrr;J.cted by their own voluptuous descriptions. As East; and I can safi:ly say, That I never saw an iII-favour'd Coun an example of the endurance of the legend and the ongoing intetruption of tenance in all that Country, either of the one or other Sex: but I erotic distl':lction in an otherwise sober chronicle of travels in faraway lands, have seen those that have had Angels Faces; Nature having bestow'd we might look to a text written in 1793 by the officer, book dealer, and upon the Women of that Country Graces and Features, which are sometimes·writer Hermann Henrichs. As the tide makes clear, Henrichs's not other where to be seen: So that 'tis impossible to behold 'em Kuru Gtschichu des Prinun Hmldius. und des g Henrichs, who has seen meso "Beauries" himself. ossures us mar ro see mem The erotic effect of "beaury" anributed to me women of me Caucasus is is to be ravished. Like Chardin, his narrarion attests ro a loss of control in clearly a titillating pleasure fOr Henrichs. as it is fOr Chardin and Bernier. the viewing moment. As observer cum writer, he is compelled in the end to Such descriptions cerrainly left meir mark on subsequent readers, who nans describe not merely me beaury he h .. seen, bur me eRects of mis beaury on mined and amplified me legendary promises of pleasure mrough cenruries himself. In an encounrer mar otherwise should be read .. an "orientalizing" of echo and ciration. We do well. however. to remember mat mese women accounr of a European traveler mrough easeern lands, wim all of me power were nor merely objects of fantasy or erotic commodities in a metaphorical imbalance weighred in his favor, Henrichs acknowledges me viewer's possive sense. Circassian females were. in fact. me most highly prized and highly reg sra It is likewise both unproblematic and self-evident to Chardin that a mixing The ways in which Chardin's hierarchy of clear blood and physical beauty of the blood of two distinct peoples produces a visible sign of that mixture on imersects with social rank and power in the Persian world is revealing of a the body of the offspring. Thus. he maintains that while the original Persian critical asymmetry in the gender dynamics of this theory of breeding. Char stock is extremely ungainly. certain subgroups have improved their collec din observes that the elite and powerful men of Persia are nearly all the prod tive beauty through a century of consistent and deliberate interbreeding with uct of a Persian father and a mother !Tom the Caucasus: Georgian or Circassian women: There is scarce a Gentleman in Persia, whose Mother is not a Geor In the other Pans of the Kingdom. the Persian Blood is now grown gian, or a Circassian Woman; to begin with the King, who com clearer. by the mixture of the Georgian and Circassian Blood. which monly is a Georgian, or a Circassian by the Mother's side; and is certainly the People of the World. which Nature favours most. whereas. that mixture begun above a hundred Years ago. the Female both upon the Account of the Shape and Complexion. and of the kind is grown fairer. as well as the other. and the Persian Women are Boldness and Courage; they are likewise Sprighdy. Cnurdy. and now very handsome. and very well shap·d. tho' they are still inferior Amorous. Z7 to the Georgians: As to the Men. they are commonly Tall. Straight. Ruddy. Vigorous. have a good Air. and a pleasant Countenance.'" Writing a century befure scientists were prepared to attempt a systematic The beauriful women !Tom the Caucasus appear by such account to be lirue theory of hereditary traits and racial types. Chardin simply presumes as com more than a priICd breeding stock selected to improve the appearance of the mon knowledge that physical characteristics unique to a particular people powerful male lines in Persia. Indeed. Chardin declares. "had it nor been fur are rransmitted-and transmuted-through patterns of reproduction. There the Alliance before mention·d. the Nobility of Persia had been the ugliest Men is nothing in his tone to suggest that he is proposing anything surprising in the World." Without Circassian mothers. they would have been ugly. but when he observed that an "ugly" people may be made more lovely by a steady their Persian fathers would still have guaranteed their statuS as the nobility infusion of fureign "blood." One noteworthy detail in Chardin's account. of Persia. Beauty or lack thereof does not affi,ct their statuS in the world. By nonetheless. is the valence of the term clear. Wbile in subsequent race theory. contrast, [he Georgian and Circassian women who possess a coveted beaury descriptive words like ckar and purr: come to designate racial lines that are not but nothing else have no social signature of their own; they are represented "contaminated" or "muddied" or "mixed" with other types generally consid simply as a commodity for sexual pleasure and optimiICd reproduction. ered inferior. Chardin uses clear as a positive sign of the results of crossbreed In intriguing ways. the idealized view of Circassian beauty and the lurid ing. We might associate clarification here with the removal of. rather than the fantasies of harem slave girls are buried in the fuund.tions of European iden preservation of. ethnic or "racial" particularities: clearer blood fur Chardin tity by physical anthropologists. racial theorists. traveling "ethnographers: manifests itself through bodies that. through a process of mixing and refining. and proponents of a "medical police" intent on bringing eighteenth-cenrury are less ethnically singular and thus more beautiful. dreams of perfi:ctibility to bear on the human species. Ir is they who build on At the same time, however, the Georgian and Ciccassian women remain Chardin's shift in focus from erotic fantasy to sexual reproduction and who a kind of standard. an ideal type toward which other groups may breed (shed cire the breeding value of the Circassian beauty as a factor in the physical ding the marks of their thicker blood and uglier bodies). but which itself quality of various peoples. never seems to deviate from iu aesthetic norms. Somehow, the Georgians and Circassians are unaffected by the mixing; they are donors only. The pos sibility of maintaining this imbalance must be ·credited" to the slave trade. INVENTING THE CAUCASIANS whereby innumerable girls were raken and circulated as breeding stock. while sufficient "originals" remained in their primitive isolation in me Caucasus to A crucial part of this stoty involves the history of racial classification. which mainain a critical mass of suppliers. was initially codified around the end of the eighteenth century. European 174 SARA AGAL THE CAUCASIAN SLAVE RACE 175 scientists posited a system of racial identity that generally explained the cur the European was the yardstick against which others were compared and con rent state of each group as the product of two fOrces: a process of degenera trasted."" It is all the more startling. then. to realizc that. in the conceprual tion and separation from a (no longer ClCtant} original stock. and a process of soup that produced the racial schematization of the Caucasian, the European at least potential development-ideally. improvement-<>fboth cultural and "yardstick" does not apply. Instead. we are foreed to make sense of the fact physical attribures. along paths distinctly different fOr each race. that the Caucasian is one of the least sable--and least investigated-of the It is important to keep in mind that the Caucasus Mountains were and identity categories produced at the end of the eighteenth ""nrury. Rather still are a highly fraught dividing line between Asia and Europe: territories in than marking a fixed identity, Caucmian is better described by Homi Bhab Caucasia are variably considered to be in one or both continentS. Through ha's meaphor of a "third space," a discursive condition in which signs and out histoty. the region has been less a bordet than a blending 'Wne between symbols of culture.remain in Rux, continually subject to translation." This Christian Europe and Muslim Asia. Further. the Caucasus is and was one Rux is evident from the initial location of European racial identity within of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions on earth. Jean Char this unstable territory. A angle of Justifications include biblical tradition, din remarked while traveling through Georgia. "You shall meet here in this historical geography, and conclusions drawn from the physical beauty of the Countty with Armenians. Greeks. Jews. Tutks. Petsians. Indians. Tartars. Jus inhabitantS themselves, especially the women. and their capacity to transmit covitcs and Europe:ansi and the Armenians are so numerous, that they exceed this beauty through reproductive lines. the Georgians."" It would seem that. with the designation Caucmian. the The label Caucasian is first used by Christoph Meiners, the professor of origins of the European were not so European after all. W.ltw all of the Sagas. and the history of the most ancient peoples indicate that the today. In the present sate of our knowledge. it is therefOre difficult Caucasus and the planes that nretclt south from the Caucasus are the cradle to excuse the statement of a recent authority, who still persists in of at least half of the human species."" the title Homo Caurasi= as applied to the peoples of Europe. It is Beyond myth and legend. however. the location of racial origins in the not true that any of these Caucasians are even "somewhat typical." Caucasus was jUstified by the beaury of body transmitted through genera As a /act. they could never be typical of anything. The narne covers tions by its inhabitants. Meiners noted further on the Caucasian race: "This nearly every physical type and /amily of language of the Eur-Asian 'I line is no longer entirely pure and unmixed in the Caucasus; nonetheless, continent. except. as we have said. that blond. tall. "Aryan" -speaking the Caucasian peoples. and particularly the women. are the most beautiful one to which the name has been specifically applied. It is all /3Ise; in all of Asia.")1 In his first edition. Meiners declared they were the most not only improbable. but absurd. The Caucasus is not a cradie--it is beautiful in all the world; by 1793. he was ready to sepatate the white race rather a grave-of peoples. oflanguages. of customs. and of physical into Asiatic and Celtic subdivisions." Nonetheless. Meiners repeats both of types. Let us be assured of that point at the outset." these points-that the Caucasians. and patticularly the Circassians and Geor gians. produced supremely beautiful women. and that the Caucasian peoples The indignation with whiclt Ripley attacked the implication of Caucasian were no longer as "pure" as they once were-in various writings over many origins for Europeans attests not only to the vicious tone of the ~ism" years. In 1788. he translated and printed an anonymous Frenclt article for his mat dominated race discourse in me 18905, but also to the resilience of the own Giittingischts historUcha Magazin entitled "On the Peoples of the Cau earlier theories of Circassian beaury and European lineage that were written casus," whiclt stressed that. while the region was now suclt a mix of religions. into me earliest definitions of "race" as a scientific category. customs. and languages that the particular origin (UrrpruntJ of eaclt people Ninetecnthpcenrury attempts [0 disentangle the construction of the was impossible to distinguish. "the Georgians alone ate an exception: they European ITom the Caucasus were not limited to arguments about physical have remained unmixed (unvmnischt). and we thus know them still today type or cultural praCtice. Hegel. in his Encyrlopatdia oftht Philo,ophiral Sd as a unique people." This exemplary-"unmixed"-people is celebrated fur mw of 1830. praised the capaciry of the Caucasian race-and no other-to ther as independent. the leaders are regarded as regional protectors. and the create world history. but stressed the IUll0wing condition: "In this. however. Georgians-while themselves unmixed-are the Volks-Stiimmt or the genea we have to distinguish two sides. the Western Asiatics and the Europeans; 'Iogical source of their neighbors." In yet another essay. he declares unequivo this distinction now coincides with that of Mohammedans and Christians.no cally that "the blood of the Georgians is the most beautiful in the Orient. The gesture here occludes the hybrid origin of the Caucasian. in part byover and I might well say in the entire world."'· The Circassians. noted Meiners simplifYing the peoples grouped within the racial designation as clearly either In another essay. are distinguishable by such a blossoming beaury that one Christian or Muslim. The particulars that comprise the original argument must ask why such a blessed people never produced "a genuinely enlightened for "Caucasian" idendty are retracted to the degree that the "Caucasian" no nation" on their own soil:" longer has ties to the person from the Caucasus; nevertheless. the term-with Meiners's ambivalent perspective reveals a gradual shift in his thinking all ofits ecltoes--remained inact. that redirected European racial associations away from the Caucasus and But back to our defining momcnt-thelate eighteenth century. Meiners's toward blonde and blue-eyed Celts-a shift embraced and developed by later ambivalence notwithsanding. most of his contemporaries at the end of the nineteenth-cenrury raciologists. William Ripley's Lowell lectUres at Colum eighteenth century continued to refer to Caucasian beaury as evidence of how bia University in 1896. reassembled into book form in 1899. are heir to this deserving Caucasian women were of preeminence in human racial history, legacy: and they referred regularly to the ongoing value of what we might underst3Dd in eugenic terms as reproductive improvement of entire peoples when bred Byzantine harem tales of Circassian beaury have not f.ailed to influ with beautiful Circassians. Although Meiners had introduced C",,,,asum as ence opinion upon the subject of European origins. Not even the a term of racial classification in his early writings. the official designation of cltarm of mystery remains in support of a Caucasian race theory the white European race as Caurasian is historically ascribed to Blumenbach. 178 SARA F1GAL THE CAUCASIAN SLAVE RACE 179 Blumenbach's first book, a widely read teXt on human difference entitled, the Nogay Tartars and, on the other end, by an extremity identified with Ob.,. J;t natiirlichm Vmchktknhdtm im Mmschmgachkchtt (On the natural beauty and the Georgians. In each case, a particular people is named in order variety of mankind), initially proposed four major races when it appeated in to clarifY and embody the concept that Blumenbach is working out via his dissertation form in 1775; he adjusted the number to five by the time the scientific theories and aesthetic evaluations, as if the ugliness of the Tartars book was reissued in 1781 and refined his nomenclature when he signifi and the beauty of the Georgians were indisputable and dispassionately cited cantly revised the text for printing again ,in 1795." Only in this version did /2as rather than culturally relative judgments. Lavater, in his Physiognomischt he introduce the term Caucasian. On Iht naturrl/ varitty ofmankind reOeets a Fragmrntt (1775-1778), demonstrates the degree to which the Circassians conremporary reliance on "evidence," compiled from geographical and ethno (and the Tartars) functioned syncchdocally when he said of the high degree cultural descriptions provided by the plethora of travel narratives published of variation among African peoples that "they also have their Tartars and during the century, as skin color, hair texture, and skeletal (primarily cranial) their Circassians," demarking thereby the dramatic range from ugliness to difference; the later edition incorporates these observations with theories of uncontested beaU(f."9 natural teleological development. After decades of writing on the subject of Blumenbach made a similar conceprual move when constructing evi human variety, why would Blumenbach adopt the term Caucasian in 17951 dence to argue that all human races belong to one species based on their abil Skeptical of Meiners's methods and sweeping claims about non-European ity to produce /ertile offspring together. He wrote: "This definition ofspecies cultures, he did not cite Meiners as a source for this new terminology.'" As may be conveniently illustrated ( ... J. Take ... a man and a woman most Bruce Baum interprets the debt, Blumenbach "worked to distance his own widely different from each other; let the one be a most beautiful Circassian anthropological thinking from that of Meiners while recovering the term woman and the other an African born in Guinea, as black and ugly as possible Caucasian for his own more refined racial classification."" In his previous ( .. . J."" Their progeny, Blumenbach assures us, by definition, testifies to the writings on racial divisions, Blumenbach used designations such as EUITJ/"an species identity of both parents, and also demonstrates a blending of extreme and Whitt. He justified his introduction of Caucasian to the nomenclature traits. Beyond the species argument, which is Blumenbach's focus in this seg by pointing out that the area around Mount Caucasus "produces the moSt ment of text, his example betrays the /2ct that ·ugliness" docs not require beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian."" a fixed point; ugliness, even at its extremity, may be exemplified by Nogay This superior beauty, by sheer force of assertion and repetition, was thus Tartars or by Afticans from Guinea. However, the apex of human beauty rhetorically shifted from the realm of opinion and put to work as a /2ct that remains the female of the Caucasus throughout his writings. Not only 'do functioned as evidence and illustration of numerous conceptual offshoots of these women embody an aesthetic ideal (which Blumenbach acknowledges is racial theorizing, including Caucasian identity. For example, when arguing a conStruct of European bias), they are also valuable to the species insoru as that the "racial /2ce" was, in instances of mixed-race breeding, a composite, such Circassian and Georgian /emales may be used to "improve" less beauti Blumenbach offered as a typical example the blending of what he took to be ful peoples. extremes: These kinds of racial /2ce, just like the colour of the skin, become PROTO-EUGENICS, EXOTIC DESIRE, AND WHITE WOMEN mingled and as it were run together in the offspring from the unions of different varieties of mankind, so that the children present a The identification of Circassians as exemplaty breeding stock is present in countenance which is a mean between either parent. Hence . .. [he • range of eighteenth-century texts that seized on one of the era's moSt per offspring of the Nogay Tartars is rendered more beautiful through sistent prcoccupadons, namdy. me improvement of the human, be it as an unions with the Georgians." individual or as a collective people, racc, or species, In musing on the physical and moral improvement of human kind at mid-century, the French physician Blumenbach's example underscores a conceprual arc of species-description and hygienic theorist Charles Augustin Vandermonde attributed the culrural that is anchored on one end by an extremity identified with ugliness and flourishing of great cities to their hybrid populations. Specifically, he praised 1BO SARA FIGAL THE CAUCASIAN SlAVE RACE 181 Turkey as one of the gre,nest states in the world and he IOcused on its "beauti customs allow such unions). There is al work here an anticipation of sexual ful blood." This. Yandermonde stressed. was the admixture of many IOreign selection theory, in the insinuation of a universal male sexual desire for a peoples over many centuries. but he laid special emphasis on the "prodigious beau Europe. When we consider how rhe woman /Tom rhe Caucuus becomes rhe 4. During rhe eighteenrh century. references to women of rhe Caucuus ideal white woman. whose body is physical proof of rhe Eut!)peaR connection draw /Tom travel reports of borh Georgia and Circassia. such rhat rhe to a lost. original human ideal type. rhe story is f.tr more complicated. In the two regions become fOr all praerical purposes indistinguishable fOr texts ease of rhe "Circassian beaury," rhe enslaved sexuali to Georgian or CifQSSian beauty include Alexander Pope. Abbe Prevost. 26. Sir John Chardin. Sir John Chardin; Trav,/s in P",ia. Ncvcr bifrm trans- Charles Augwtin Vandermond.. Henty Fielding. Christoph Martin laud into English [. . . J (London: np, 1720),2: 119. Wieland. Johann Wincltclmann. Peter Simon Pallas. Christian Lavater. 27. Chardin. Trav,/s in Pmia. and Alexander Pushkin. Baum. ]b, Ris, tlnd Fttfl ofth, CauCtlSittn !Itt". 28. Chardin, Sir John Chardin's Tmv,/s in Pmia, 119-120. And let us not overlook the appearance on the popular front. with such 29. Chardin, ]b, Tmv.!sofSir John Chardin, 191. works as ]b, Ftlir Cirr:tlSSian: A Dmmtttk Pnformanc. published in Lon 30. Vanessa Agnew, "Pacific Island Encounters and the German Invention don in 1720 and reprinted into the ninetecnth century. This piece was of Race," in Islands in History and &pmtntation. cd. Rod Edmond and initially issued anonymously-it is quite racy-by Samuel Croxall. the Vanessa Smith (London, New York: Roudedge, 2003), 91 . Archdeacon of Hercfurd. author of an enormously popular Ftlbks of 31. Homi Bhabha, ]b, Location ofCultu,.. (London. New York: Roudedge, A60p (London: np. 1722). 1994).37. 13. Franl'Dis Bernier. "A New Division of the Earth," in .]b, I,utl of&'" cd. 32. Christoph Meiners, Gruntlrifl,ur Gt>chichtt ,ur Mmschhtit (Lemgo: Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Loll (Indianapolis: Hackell Publish Mcyersche Buchhandlung, 1785). ing. 2000). 4. 33. As Nell Irvin Painccr notes wryly, "Western Europeans had long traced 14. Chardin. ]b, Tm",/s ofSir John Charrlin into P",ia and th, Ellst-Indus. their o.... lgin....., ~ morphous Eurasian regions" but always located these ]brough tb. Black 5.a, and th, Country ofCofehis (London: np, 1691). ancestors in a clearly pre-Muslim antiquity. "Why Arc White People 190. Called 'Caucasian'!" Promdingr ofth. Fifth Annual Gifdno uhrman em 15. Chardin. Tmv,/s, 191. Itr Inltmational Confi,..ntt at Yok Univ",ity: ·Colkctiv, D'gradation: 16. Hermann Henrichs. Kuru G.schkhte,us Prinun H.mcuus, und tks g'gm Slavtry and th, Constntction of!lttu"November (2003), 25, http://www. wartigm Zustttntks von G,orgUn (Flensburg, Leipzig: Korten. 1793),9. yale.edulgldeventsfracefPainter.pdf. 17. Henrichs, Kuru Geschichu, 39-40. 34. Christoph Meiners, Grundrifl,ur Gmhichtt ,ur Mtnschhtit: Zwtytt sthr 18. Franl'Dis Marie Arouet de Voltaire, "On Inoculation with Smallpox," vtrb.ss,rt, Ausgab, (Lemgo: Mcyersche Buchhandlung, 1793). Philosophictll utt"" Or. utt'" &garrling th, English Nation. trans. Pru 35. Baum, ]b. Ris.and FaD ofth. Caucasian !lttct. 87. dence L Steiner (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2007), 33. 36. Meiners, Grundrifl ,ur Gtschichtt,ur M,nschhtit, 47. 19. Bernier. "A New Division of the Earth," 4. 37. Ibid., 74. 20. Anonymous, "Die kleine Sklavin. cine wahre Geschichcc," Di. Bim, o,ur 38. Ibid., 75. n= kkin. Schriftm 3 (Kiinigsberg: np. 1809): 129-180. 39. This is a [ext that Meiners translated from the French (author anony 21. N= York Dtlily TImes, August 6,1856,6. mous) and published in his magazine: "Ueber die Volkerschaften des 22. Sec Linda Frost, "The Circassian Beauty and the Circassian Slave: Gender, Kaukasus," Giittingisch6 historUchts Magazin (1788): II 0-111. Imperialism. and American Popular Entertainment," in Frraktry: Cul 40. Christoph Meiners, "Historische Betrachtungen fiber die Fruchtbarkeit, tural Spmacks ofth, Extraorrlinary Body. ed. Rosemarie Garland Thom oder Unfruch[ba[keit de[ Bevolkerung, oder Entvolkerung der verschie son (New York. London: New York University Press. 1996). 248-262. denen Erdtheile," Nrots Gottingischts historUchts Magazin (1794):550. 23. Linda Frost. Ntvcr On, Nation: F... aks, Savag", and Whitmtss in U.S. 41. Meiners, "Historische Betrachtungen," 555. Popular Cultu .... 1850-1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 42. William Ripley. ]b, !lttw ofEurope A Sociological Study (New York: D. Press. 2005). Appleton and Co., 1899),437. 24. In October 2008, a website advertising Georgian tourism attractS Eng 43. Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, "Anthropology." from the Encyclopat Iish-spcalting travelers with a heady list of citations culled from texts dia oftht Philosophical Sdtnw. in ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L produced oYer nearly two millennia tha, all allest to the beauty of the Lott, ]b, Itka of!ltttt, op. dt., 42 population. Sec http://www.mcitours.gel!mc publicatlons&.... 22. 44. Blumenbach's dissertation (presented in Latin as Dt gtncris humani vari 25. Renato G. Mazzolini, "Skin Color and the Origin of Physical Anthropol .tatt nativa libtr) was first published as book in 1775, reissued in 1781 ogy (I640-1850)," in this volume. and again in 1795. 186 SARAFIGAL 45. On the connections between Blumenbach and Meiners. see John Zam mito. "Policing Polygeneticism in Germany," 1775: (Kames.) Kant and Blimenbach. in 7h. Gmnan Invtntion ofRae •• ed. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany. NY: State University of New York Press. 2006). 35-54. 46. Baum. 7h. Riu and FaD ofth. (AuctUUtn Rae.. 88. 47. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. D. gtnnis humani vamtatt nativa liba-. in 7h. Anth",pological T"atis" ofjohann Fmdrich Blumtnbach. trans. and ed. Thomas Bendyshe (London: np. 1865).269. 48. Blumenbach. D. gtnnis humani. 233. Blumenbach cites here M. de Pey< sonel. Traitt sur k comma", de f4 m" Noi,." (Paris: np. 1787). 49. Johann Caspar Lavater. Physiognomy. or. 7h. Cornsponding Analogy BtIWttn th. Conformation for th. &atuTtS and th. Ruling Passions ofth. Mind, trans. Anonymous (London: np. 1827). 115. 50. Lavater. Physiognomy. 363. 51. Charles Augustin Vandermonde. EIsai sur f4 manilrt: de pa:ftctionntr l'spu. humaindParis: np. 1756). 111. 52. On the role of French medical practitioners in discussions of pub lic health. sex. and heredity. see Sean M. Quinlan. 7h. Grtat Natio" in Dulin.: Sa. Modernity. and H.alth Crisa in Revolutionary Franc. c. 1750-1850 (A1dershot. Burlington: Ashgate. 2007); see also Anne C. Vila. Enlighttnmtnt and Pathology: S.nsibility in th. Litmzturt and M.d; cin. ofEightunth-Ctntury Franc. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1998). 53. For an overview on Frank and proto--eugenic theories, see Sara Eigen Figal. H",dity. Rae.. and th. Birth ofth. Modern. 105-127. 54. On Frank and eighteenth-century ideas on racial improvement. see Sa", Eigen. "Policing the Menschen-Racen," in 7h. Gaman Invtntion ofRae•• ed. Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany. NY: State University of New York Press. 2006). 185-202. , 55. Johann Peter Frank. Systtm tin" vollstandigtn m.dicinischtn Poliz