ANTHROPOLOGY AND RACE

ANTHROPOLOGY AND RACE

Although it is never possible to explain to our ultimate satisfaction why a particular idea comes to the fore, there are many reasons why late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinking, especially in Europe and the USA, became steadily fixed on the idea of race. The development of science generally, especially natural science; the secularisation of Europe that went hand in hand with the discovery that man could be classified with the animals; and the subsequent development of the theory of evolution are all major turning points. Nevertheless, it is also important to note that for centuries notions such as the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘wild man’ had fed the European imagination, fuelled the desire for travel (and embellished the tales of travellers) and driven the colonial adventure. Now science was not only providing rational explanations for the natural world, including human beings, but also giving credence to long-standing fantasies about different, non- European peoples. Sometimes—as in Thomas More or Michel de Montaigne—these early-modern theories of difference had been quite open to ‘otherness’; one of the striking things about the race-thinking that developed in the nineteenth century is its hardening of lines of difference, its drawing of racial distinctions that was no less inquisitive about ‘the other’, but that sought to establish clear demarcation lines. One of the things that needs explaining, in other words, is how a theory that necessitated the coming into contact of different peoples (necessary for ethnological research) aimed at classifying types and drawing rigidly maintained boundaries, and went hand in hand with

a fear of pollution and miscegenation, finally developing into a theory of racial hierarchy that—like the closely allied fields of primitivism and orientalism—was more a reflection of the ‘self’ than it was an attempt to understand the ‘other’.

The attempt to draw up a natural history of mankind, classifying human groups in the same way as plants and animals were now being classified—according to kinship rather than external similarity—began in the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries with the pioneering work of John Ray (1627–1705), regarded as the father of natural history, Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707–88), Conte de Buffon (1707–

88) and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), among others (for example François Bernier, Francis Willughby, Georges Dagobert, Baron Cuvier). Though both still creationists, Buffon, in his Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, and Linnaeus, with his Systema Naturae, sought to understand human beings as simply part of the world of natural occurrences. Linnaeus distinguished different races on their ability to use reason, with Homo Europaeus at the top; Buffon believed that God had created man in his image, and that the different races were marked by their deviation from the norm, which he considered to be the white European. Both theories are significant in that, although they see reason as the faculty that distinguishes human beings from animals, they nevertheless feel comfortable classifying man with the animals. These ideas were taken further by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), IMMANUEL KANT (1724– 1804), Barthold G.Niebuhr (1776–1831), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), to the point at which the idea of fully created species had been replaced with natural history, and pre- Darwinian theories of evolution.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 20 Despite the theoretical sophistication of Kant and Goethe (who did not reduce human

beings to their physicality, unlike many modern race-scientists), it is Blumenbach who is accredited as the father of modern anthropology. His De Generis Humani Varitate Natura (The Natural Variety of Mankind, first edition 1775) was the first study that argued for the importance of skull shape in determining racial classification, a claim that endured for more than a century and a half (and is currently becoming fashionable again in certain quarters).

Blumenbach’s inquiries inspired the work of many followers, among them James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), considered the founder of English anthropology, with his Eastern Origins of the Celtic Nations (1831) and Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1836–47), and Jean Baptiste, Chevalier Lamarck (1744–1829), author of the Philosophie zoologique (1809). The development of this type of anthropology—aimed primarily at measuring physical characteristics—was furthered by the studies of men such as the Swede Anders Retzius (1796–1860), who introduced the cephalic index to anthropology; Paul Broca (1824–80), the French craniologist and brain surgeon; Robert Knox (1791–1862), Edinburgh anatomist and author of The Races of Man (1850); JOSEPH COMTE DE GOBINEAU (1816–82), foremost proponent of the fixity of racial differences whose Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–5) made him the hero of a later generation of racists; T.H.HUXLEY (1825–95), leading British evolutionist; and Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), the anti-Darwinian craniologist who carried out extensive surveys of the physical characteristics of German schoolchildren.

A recognisably modern, scientific race theory first emerged in the 1850s and 1860s. None of its proponents can be considered anthropologists in the sense we mean that word today; first and foremost they were zoologists, botanists, philologists, anatomists, archaeologists, physicians and lawyers. What they were interested in was explaining the physical origins of mankind, in particular how mankind diverged into different ‘stocks’ or ‘races’. Many were polygenists, that is, in contrast to the biblical tale of creation, they believed in the existence of several distinct human species. And they took for granted the idea that these races were of unequal worth.

Polygenism was challenged by the view that the races were not separate species, but that they had evolved and interbred. CHARLES DARWIN’S Origin of the Species (1859), along with the work of HERBERT SPENCER, was the cause of much debate, and eventually a reorientation of the discipline. Yet the eventual eclipse of polygenist thinking (which took longer than one might suspect, especially in the USA where it was a useful justification for white supremacism) did not mean a rejection of the hierarchical race-thinking that accompanied it. Quite the contrary; the rise to prominence of monogenism actually strengthened the racist case. Furthermore, Darwinism—contrary to the implications of Darwin’s thinking on the meaning of species—did not mean an overturning of conventional methods of human classification; the broad outlines of racial evolution had already been suggested by Kant and many others, and the a priori assumption that races could be distinguished and then placed in a hierarchy of value remained in place. What Darwin and Spencer accomplished was to suggest that the laws of social life were subject to the same trends of evolutionary change that characterised natural history.

Hence towards the end of the nineteenth century, the emphasis of thinkers such as Kant and Hegel (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM) on race as only one part of the

Entries A-Z 21

human animal—the other part being reason or spirit—was overturned so that the emphasis was squarely placed on physical characteristics alone. ‘Race is everything,’ said Houston Stewart Chamberlain, echoing Disraeli, ‘there is no other truth. And every race must fall which carelessly suffers its blood to become mixed.’ This final statement reveals that understanding race theory solely through the writings of ‘great men’ does not suffice; actually, for all the clashes between supporters and opponents of Darwin, or between polygenists and monogenists, the idea of ‘race’ held connotations that were extremely widely shared in the nineteenth century, meshing as it did with notions of European superiority that accompanied industrialization, technologization and imperialism. The hardening of attitudes to race that occurred at the century’s end was connected to the challenges to that instinctive sense of superiority being brought about by the rise of mass politics, feminism, immigration, fears of racial degeneration, ‘restless natives’ and economic decline.

In all of these developments in race-thinking the early anthropological societies played

a key part. They promoted the new science, gradually turning it from an amateur pursuit into a discipline in its own right. The history of anthropology’s institutionalization in Britain is perhaps the best illustration of the development of the discipline during the nineteenth century. The earliest such society was the Ethnological Society of London (ESL), formed at the end of 1843 by Richard King (1811–76) and Thomas Hodgkin (1798–1866) out of the remains of the earlier Aborigines Protection Society (APS). The latter, a group led by evangelicals and Quakers, was a humanitarian body that campaigned against slavery in the colonies, and much of this sentiment accompanied the interest of the ESL in studying ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’ societies. The ESL sought to explain the origins of human beings through culture, language and archaeology, as well as through physical traits. It believed, in other words, in evolution, and in the unity of mankind.

Only a few years after its foundation, the ESL’s premises were being challenged by the new emphasis on the analysis of physical characteristics. In opposition to the ESL, the Anthropological Society of London (ASL) was set up in 1863. Its founder, James Hunt (1833–69), a student of human speech, was much influenced by the racial theories of Knox; after three unsatisfying years of membership of the ESL (he joined in 1856) Hunt left and set up the ASL. Hunt’s polygenist assumptions, which he derived from Knox, are revealed most clearly in his famous essay ‘On the Negro’s Place in Nature’ (1863), a classic statement of mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon supremacism.

After several years of wrangling, however, the two groups compromised and merged (though not without continued strife) to form the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1871. With a membership rarely exceeding 500, its members crossed the spectrum from the amateurs interested in prehistoric archaeology and folklore to the military men who had encountered ‘primitives’ during their service in the colonies, to a minority of medics and natural scientists who made up the scholarly end of the society. What is striking is that, in the context of post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the Institute (which became the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1907) moved steadily away from the humanitarian premises that accompanied the dominant ‘ethnological’ approach of the 1870s and moved ever closer to a biological determinism after the mid- 1880s. Scientists had always assumed the existence of a connection between physical and mental attributes, and the developments in anthropological methods of the 1880s onwards After several years of wrangling, however, the two groups compromised and merged (though not without continued strife) to form the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1871. With a membership rarely exceeding 500, its members crossed the spectrum from the amateurs interested in prehistoric archaeology and folklore to the military men who had encountered ‘primitives’ during their service in the colonies, to a minority of medics and natural scientists who made up the scholarly end of the society. What is striking is that, in the context of post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the Institute (which became the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1907) moved steadily away from the humanitarian premises that accompanied the dominant ‘ethnological’ approach of the 1870s and moved ever closer to a biological determinism after the mid- 1880s. Scientists had always assumed the existence of a connection between physical and mental attributes, and the developments in anthropological methods of the 1880s onwards

George Stocking, the pre-eminent historian of anthropology, sums up the three phases of the discipline’s history in Britain during the nineteenth century: first, an older, ‘ethnological’ tradition that derived from the APS a humanitarian instinct, and that sought to investigate ‘primitive’ culture, language and archaeology—as well as bodies— as a way of understanding the common origin of human beings; second, the growth of an ‘anthropological’ tradition with an emphasis on more narrowly physical characteristics, which sought to provide a polygenist account of the emergence of ‘human races in the context of a pre-Darwinian tradition of comparative anatomy’; third, an emerging ‘evolutionary’ tradition at the end of the century, which sought to account for ‘the problem of the discovery of human remains in the context of Darwinian biological evolutionism’. The third group were, by contrast to the second, still ‘ethnologicals’, that is to say, they were not radical, racist polygenists. Rather, they were scientifically more sophisticated, and had close links to the scientific establishment. Nevertheless, their emphasis was, unlike the first group, firmly on the physical; hence men such as Augustus Lane Fox (1827–1900), John Lubbock (1834–1913), William H. Flower (1831–99), John Evans (1823–1908), John Beddoe (1826–1911) and even E.B.Tylor (1832–1917) contributed to the hardening of race theory that took place at the end of the century by stressing the dominance of nature over nurture and by failing to call into question the racial typologies (as opposed to their evolution) that had been in place for more than a century. The logic of evolution lost out to a rhetoric of heredity, that is, a return of the belief in the immutability of racial types.

By the end of the nineteenth century, then, anthropology had become synonymous with physical anthropology. The mere description of living peoples was considered ethnology, which was interesting as a first step, but basically a highbrow form of travel writing usually accompanied by an unscientific and effete humanitarianism. What anthropologists were interested in was the origin of human beings. They believed that societies could be classified on a trajectory of evolutionary development that ran: savage- barbaric-primitive-civilized. Hence the idea of race was so attractive to anthropologists, who saw ‘primitive’ peoples as ‘stuck’ at a stage of development that reminded them of European children, and thus legitimized their ‘disappearance’ at the hands of white

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 22

Entries A-Z 23

colonial settlers as a ‘natural’ consequence of racial progress. Many colonial genocides were justified and swiftly forgotten on that basis, with the total eradication by the British of the Tasmanians, the archetypal ‘Naturvolk’, being an excellent example. The European tradition of the ‘noble savage’, once biologized and refracted through the lenses of race theory, became less a romantic tale of repulsive but sympathetic Calibans and more an obstacle to the spread of white civilization. ‘Primitives’ simply had to be eradicated, as the laws of Nature had revealed. Penetrating the ‘heart of darkness’ and expediting Nature’s work for her was considered to be humane for all concerned, as Daniel Brinton,

a leading US anthropologist put it:

The Bechuana kraal which refuses to have a grand opera house and electric lights, if the European sees fit to put them there, will be wiped out of existence. So will every tribe, every nation, every race, which sets forth to oppose the resistless flow of civilised progress.

Hence, the hardening of race theory at the end of the century was not solely a result of developments in science and methodology, but also owed much to the rapidly changing social and political context of the 1880s and 1890s.

The histories of other anthropological associations also tell a story of a biologization of anthropology towards the end of the century. The French split between the Société Ethnologique de Paris and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris remained in place far longer than that of their London equivalents, however. Nevertheless, the work of such thinkers as Gobineau, Broca and Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936, author of Les Selections sociales in 1896 and L’Aryen in 1900) did much to encourage an intuitive link between anthropology and a belief in rigid racial schemas. The French obsession with pro-natalism was encouraged by anthropological race-thinking, which fed by the end of the century into the science of puericulture, the French equivalent of eugenics.

Yet the work of Gobineau and Lapouge was more influential in Germany than in France. Although it took much longer for anthropology to become institutionalized in Germany, once it did so the country soon became one of the leading centres of research into primitive societies and race. The discovery of the Neanderthal skull in 1856, suggesting that Germany was the birthplace of mankind, was an enormous boost to the nascent science. When the Berlin Anthropological Society was founded in 1869 at its head was Rudolf Virchow, a critic of Gobineau’s and Lapouge’s Aryanism. Yet the popularization of anthropology through museums such as Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde (1886), along with the rise of Social Darwinist thinking epitomized by men such as Otto Ammon (1842–1916), who measured the skulls of nearly 28,000 military recruits in Baden and uncovered racial differences between Germanic long-heads and Asiatic round-heads within the population, did much to overturn this initially relatively liberal consensus in a fairly short space of time. Indeed, despite generally being regarded by historians as an enemy of anti-Semitism, Virchow’s own massive study of the racial characteristics of German schoolchildren, which explicitly separated Jews from non-Jews on the basis of hair, eye and skin colour, paved the way for thinking in terms of Jews and Germans as separate races.

The rise of Nordicism and race-hygiene in Germany—especially epitomized by the work of Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940), Fritz Lenz (1887–1976), Erwin Baur (1875–1933),

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 24

Ernst Rudin (1874–1952), and Eugen Fischer (1874–1967)—continued apace in the early twentieth century even while anthropology elsewhere (especially in Britain) was beginning to question the racist assumptions it had developed throughout the nineteenth. Perhaps the relatively small size of the German empire (which it lost altogether in 1918) meant that, whilst British anthropologists could discover in the field that their theories bore no relation to the people they were studying, German anthropologists turned inwards to focus on ‘degenerates’ at home. Certainly the theories of Gobineau, Ammon and Chamberlain were important in helping Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946, Nazi philosopher and Minister for the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union after 1941) and Hans F.K.Günther (1891–1968, known as ‘der Rassen-Günther’ because of his obsession) formulate their explicitly Nazi race theories. And the continuity of personnel from Felix von Luschan (1854–1924, the first Professor of Anthropology in Berlin in 1900) to Fischer (who began his career studying the so-called Rehoboth Bastards in German Southwest Africa and eventually became head of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin during the Third Reich), to Otmar von Verschuer (1896–1969, who worked with Fischer on the issue of Jewish Mischlinge, or ‘mixed-race’ individuals) and Josef Mengele (1911–84, a student of Fischer’s and the ‘angel of death’ of Auschwitz) is well-documented.

The standard textbooks of anthropology that became fashionable in the years before 1900 illustrate this drift towards biological determinism. E.B.Tylor’s Anthropology (1881), unlike his more famous Primitive Culture (1871), gave considerable space to racial determinism. And Augustus Keane (1833–1912) wrote two popular textbooks, Ethnology (1895) and Man, Past and Present (1899), which, like many other books of the period, provided descriptions of the characteristics—both physical and mental—of the world’s racial groups. A similar approach was taken by John Beddoe, in his The Races of Britain (1885), which sought to distinguish racial types according to his ‘index of nigrescence’; Paul Topinard (1830–1911), in his Anthropology (French edn 1874; English edn 1894), which distinguished ethnography (‘the general science of nations’) from anthropology (‘the branch of natural history which treats of Man and of the races of Man’); Daniel Brinton, whose Races and Peoples (1890) argued that the ‘leading race in all history has been the white race’; Joseph Deniker, librarian of the natural history museum in Paris and author of The Races of Man (1897); and William Z.Ripley, author of The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study (1899), which argued that ‘Race denotes what man is; all these other details of social life represent what man does.’ The examples could be multiplied many times over. Yet however these writers chose to divide up the races (most followed the pattern: Caucasian, Mongoloid, Ethiopian, American and Malayan), the most benign conclusion was that such pure races did once exist, even if they were now interbred, and the most radical that the racial types are immutable and easily ranked in terms of quality and achievement. An increasing hereditarian obsession with skin colour tended to favour the latter conclusion, despite the difficulties in establishing clear lines between one pigment and another.

All of these trends—physical anthropology, race-hygiene, Social Darwinism, biometrics, anthropometry, the growing obsession with race defined by skin colour— coalesced at the end of the nineteenth century with the eugenics movement. In Britain, where the term eugenics was coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911), the movement had both a scholarly wing, led by Karl Pearson at University College London,

Entries A-Z 25

and a popularizing wing in the Eugenics Education Society, led for some years by Darwin’s son Leonard. Although its interests dovetailed with broad public concerns about racial degeneration, crime, immigration and ‘national efficiency’, it made little headway in terms of legislation, mainly thanks to the existence of a public welfare bureaucracy. In the USA, however, under the influence of Charles B.Davenport, Henry H.Goddard, Paul Popenoe, Roswell Johnson and other scientists, the eugenics movement was responsible for sponsoring legislation in more than half of the states of the union that ended in the sterilization of thousands of supposedly ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘congenitally ill’ people. The same is true for the Scandinavian countries, where the sterilization campaigns prove that eugenics was by no means simply a concern of the right; for these countries all had progressive, technocratically minded, social democratic governments. Eugenics movements were influential in Russia, Italy, France, Romania, Latin America and China. Especially in Germany, eugenics, particularly in its ‘hard’, racist form, grew in influence after the Great War, and informed policy during the Weimar and Nazi years. Research into race in these years ended not just by stigmatizing and sterilizing criminals, alcoholics and epileptics; it was also one of the strands of thought that fed the Holocaust.

It has been generally assumed that in the rest of the world at this time, this ‘hard’ form of ‘mainline’ eugenics declined in importance. But this decline in eugenics has been much exaggerated. After all, even up to the outbreak of the Second World War, British left-wing scientists such as J.B.S.Haldane (1860–1936) and Lancelot Hogben (1895– 1975), who protested about the abuse of science by the Nazis, nevertheless continued to accept that research into race per se was perfectly valid. They continud to use the basic textbook Human Heredity by Lenz, Baur and Fischer that took for granted the assumption that race was a meaningful term, and failed to see the implication of modern genetics that race, basically defined as groups of different colour, had no scientific validity, since genetic differences within any chosen population group are always greater than genetic differences between any chosen population groups. In the USA, revised editions of Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson’s standard textbook Applied Eugenics continued to appear into the 1940s. Furthermore, the aspirations of eugenics—the creation of ‘better babies’—continued to echo in popular culture, as they still do.

Nevertheless, the rise of cultural anthropology, especially in the USA, had a decisive impact on eugenics and on the practice of physical anthropology. This attack on physical anthropology was led by a man trained in the discipline, Franz Boas. Although later on other scholars such as Jacques Barzun, Ashley Montagu, A.C.Haddon and Julian Huxley also explicitly took on the notion of race, Boas’s wide-ranging studies on race, language and culture, and his devotion to political activity fighting racism, ensured that his school of cultural anthropology gradually came to dominate US academic anthropology. His demonstration that the children of immigrants to the USA had larger heads than their parents effectively exploded the myth that the physical characteristics that supposedly defined race were immutable. He took on Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, the most outspoken defenders of racist physical anthropology, and worked hard to ensure that his students, among them Alfred Kroeber, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, were all well- placed within academia. In Britain, physical anthropology gave way to the functionalism of Bronislaw Malinowski, A.R.Radcliffe-Brown and Edward Evans-Pritchard. Even though it was shaped by the colonial adventure, this school developed (almost unintentionally) from its own methods a critique of that adventure that has assured the

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 26

continued relevance of anthropology in the post-Second World War period. Indeed, it has left the self-reflexive and self-critical anthropological community better placed than many other disciplines to resist the ‘return of racial science’ that has, in the shape of socio-biology, evolutionary psychology and genetic counselling, according to many, marked the start of the twenty-first century.