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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 6 SKIN COLOR AND THE ORIGIN OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY (1640-1850) RENATO G. MAZZOLINI ince the second half of the nineteenth century. the historiography of Sphysical anthropology has concentrated on idenrifying the chronologi­ cal sequence of the variously inOucntial studies that gave rise to the systems used to classilY the hum.n races. Derived from this endeavor is an emphasis placed by the bulk of this historiography on the emergence: of the conce:pt of race:. Concomitantly. this notion of race: was arbitrarily extended in works by scholars belonging to historial periods in which the term (or.anyequivalent notion) did not even ai$[. On me orner hand, even the most cautious his­ roriography-that which has sought to understand the polirical and social implications of racial classifications-has been to some exten, enthealled with the concept of race. both in i<s wholesale reduction of physical anthropology [0 racial classi6cuion alone and in its historical assessment of it as nothing more than colonial ideology. thereby relegating impo<tant issues to the statuS of a pseudoscience and. indeed. IiIvoring their deceitful concealment. The insistence with which both the apparently neuteal historiography• • nd that critical of the concept of race: have looked at early racial classifi­ cations. is not without its intrinsic interest. It is my ~lief. however, that both historiographies do not yield understanding of the various scientific. religiOUS. political. and cultural reasons for the complex genesis of physical anthropology as a discipline. as well as the meaning i, has assumed in the various contexts of European society and culture in the course of me last 131 I 132 RENATO G. MAZZOUNI SKIN COLOR AND THE ORIGIN OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 133 five centuries. On the basis of wide-ranging =h conducted over many man as human. Since the sixteenth century this image has grown increasingly years. it is my intention in this chapter to suggest some dements fOr a general resrric((~~d in its range. rethinking of the origin of physical anthropology during Its gestation between h was perhaps because the travelers of the late fifteenth and sixteenth approximately the mid-sixteenth cenrury and the mid-nineteenth cenrury. century did not come across men with dog heads and tails during their However. rethinking this historical phase requires w. first ofall. to consider it long, dangerous. and exhausting journeys that their accounts of these travels not as a "phase" that inevitably produced the racial theories of the nineteenth say Iitde about the physical fearures of the peoples that they met along the century but rather to examine it in relative autonomy and detached from its way and. instead. abound with descriptions of Customs and beliefs. These presumed future_ In other words. when we read the texts of the seventeenth accounts had a forceful impact on the imaginations of those who read them and eighteenth cenruries. which a well-established historiographical tradition in Europe. depicting as they did forms of behavior and belielS at odds with regards as constiruting the foundation of physical anthropology. we mwt set those permined in closely structUred and disciplined European society. They this interpretation aside and instead ask what problems these texts addressed also prompted the first collection of observations that became the stock and sought to explain. We mwt also ask what categories Europeans employed in trade of a new discipline: ethnology. But at that time. they were rathet to classifY non-Europeans befOre the advent in the nineteenth cenrury ofsuch the object of theological and moral reRection. which gave rise to specula­ notions as TiUt~ racism, civilirAtion. primitivt, monogtnais. polygtnesu, and so tive models of another son of humankind: "man in me state of nature" in on. We mwt enquire. fOr example. as to whether physical otherness was effec­ the sevemeenth century and the "noble savage" in the eighteenth. The acti­ tively a cognitive problem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ques­ vation of an imaginative capacity now able to conceive a different kind of tions of this kind undermine our relative certainties on the perceptive modes human existence was not a matter of minor importance. It is comparable in of Europeans in that period. and they require a systematic reinterpretation of irs implications and effects on European culture to the great sixtcenth- and the documentation available to w. sc:venteemh.-.century debates on me struclUre of the cosmos. This imagina­ If we take physical anthropology to be that area ofscientific research that tion, however. closely imerwove with another dimension: the past. Histori­ concerns itself with human biological diversity. then we mwt concur with cally erudite inquiries conducted by wing the method of historical derivation those who locate the Routishing of the discipline in the second half of the sought to legitimate vested power on genealogical grounds. propounding eighteenth cenrury. when scholars like Buffon (1749) called it the "narural the unlikely descendents of coeval noble houses from Roman or even Tro­ history of man."' Ifinstead we ask when. in Westetn Europe. human biologi­ jan families. This gave rise to renewed interest in Greco-Roman civilization, cal diversity became a problem to explain and why it became a problem. we which was proposed as the model ofenduring civil and artistic virtues against find ourselves in great difficulties. because die question has not been sub­ which the present-the sixteenth and seventeenth cenruri ........hould mea­ jected to systematic historical inquiry. Moreover, the belief in the existence sure itself in an ideal endeavor to emulate and surpass it. and of which the of men with the heads of dogs and taiIs. which from Herodorus through qUm!1k tks anamna " tks modema was only one of the many symptoms. Pliny and Pomponiw Mela was still widespread in the Middle Ages and the However. seeking to emulate a beloved and mythiciu:d past also meant emu­ early modern age. can hardly be taken to be the maner of an alleged physi­ lating its decadence. Europeans were thus foreseen a fate similar to the one cal anthropology. becawe the difference was not ascertained. It was not the that befell the Greco-Romans. which the millenerianist Christian tradition object of research. nor was it thematized. This is not to imply that the belief viewed as even more likely. and indeed inevitable. Amuety about the future is not of historical significance; only that it cannot be taken to be part of and a desire. almost always unexpressed. fOr endless conservation prompted an explicit anthropology or "narural history of man." The historical impor­ ror some a comparative concern with the relative features and merits of the tance of the belief resides in the fact that scholars of antiquity and of the various European populations. This generated. on the one hand, a peculiar Middle Ages were ready to recognize beings with the heads of dogs and tails genre of essays on "national characters," which enjoyed great success in the as human beings. Consequendy. although these scholars located these beings eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and.