Seaborne ethnography and the natural history of man

Journal of Pacific History

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 3-27

  Douglas, Bronwen ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 14844286276     PISSN: 00223344     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00223340306072     Document Type: Article

References (104)

1. For a classic consideration of this theme, see Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific (2nd edn New Haven and London 1985 [1960]), passim
2. [Charles de Brosses], Histoire des navigations aux terres australes ... , 2 vols (Paris 1856), I, 77 , 80. Except where otherwise indicated, all translations are my own
3. Edme Mentelle and Conrad Malte-Brun, Géographie mathématique, physique et politique de toutes les parties du monde ... , 16 vols (Paris 1803-5), XII, 359-63
4. Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville, 'Sur les îles du Grand Océan', Bulletin de la Société de Géographie, 17 (1832), 2-3
5. The problematic concept of human 'agency', particularly that of indigenous, female and other historically suppressed categories of persons, here neither necessarily infers intent nor presumes a modernist notion of the individual as a bounded, autonomous subject. Rather, it takes as given that there is a general human potential to desire, choose and act strategically which must be historicised within the limits and possibilities of unstable assemblages of culture, structure, personality and circumstance. Bronwen Douglas, 'Provocative readings in intransigent archives: finding Melanesian women', Oceania, 70 (1999), 111-12
6. François Péron and Louis-Claude de Saulses de Freycinet, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes ... pendant les années 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 et 1804. Historique, 2 vols (Paris 1807-16), I, 446-84
7. Jean-Baptiste-Geneviève-Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent, L'homme (homo): essai zoologique sur le genre humain, 2 vols (2nd edn Paris 1827 [1825]), I, 82, 318-28
8. Dumont d'Urville, 'Sur les îles du Grand Océan', 6, 11-14
9. idem, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde: resumé général des voyages de découvertes, 2 vols (Paris 1834), II, 316
10. Idem, Voyage de ta corvette l'Astrolabe exécuté ... pendant les années 1826-1827-1828-1829 ... Histoire du voyage, 5 vols (Paris 1830-33), V, 96
11. See Smith, European Vision, 37-44, 133-7, 147-51
12. Georges Cuvier, 'Discours prononcé par M. le baron Cuvier, à l'assemblée générale annuelle du 5 décembre 1828 de la Société de géographie', Annales maritimes et coloniales, pt 2, 1 (1829), 343
13. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960 (London 1982), xi-xii
14. The inception of the 19th-century scientific conception of 'race' and its formal differentiation from earlier synonymy with the terms Variety' or 'species' is commonly sourced to a series of papers published between 1775 and 1788 by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). E.g., Robert Bemasconi, 'Introduction', in Robert Bernasconi (ed.), Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols (Bristol 2001), I, v-xi
15. Thomas Strack, 'Philosophical anthropology on the eve of biological determinism: Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster on the moral qualities and biological characteristics of the human race', Central European History, 29 (1996), 285-308
16. The idea of a broad late-18th-century shift in the emergent science of anthropology from holistic conceptions of essential human similitude across different stages of civilisation to biologically ratified insistence on essential racial difference is commonplace. E.g., Claude Blanckaert, 'On the origins of French ethnology', in George W. Stocking Jr (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior: essays on biological anthropology (Madison, WI 1988), 24-30
17. Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: in the wake of the Cook voyages (Carlton, Vic. 1992), 184-8
18. Stepan, The Idea of Race, ix-xiv
19. George W. Stocking Jr, Race, Culture and Evolution: essays in the history of athropology (New York 1968), 13-41
20. Nonetheless, some scholars unreflectively and inaccurately project a modernist conception of 'race' back to the 18th century. E.g., Tom Ryan, '"Le président des Terres Australes": Charles de Brosses and the French Enlightenment beginnings of Oceanic anthropology', Journal of Pacific History, 37 (2002), 166-76
21. Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: gender in the making of modern science (Boston 1993), 115-25
22. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière ..., vol. 6, Histoire naturelle de l'homme (5th edn Paris 1752 [1749-89]), 212, 334
23. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte, 2 vols (2nd edn Göttingen 1806 [1790]), I, 61, 67
24. Georges Cuvier, Le règne animal distribué d'après son organisation ... , 5 vols (2nd edn Paris 1829-30 [1817]), 1, 80
25. Carolus Linnaeus, Systema Naturœ ... , vol. 1, Regnum Animale (10th edn Holmiæ 1758 [1735-66]), 20-4
26. Robert Kerr (tr. and ed.), The Animal Kingdom, or Zoological System of the Celebrated Sir Charles Linnœus; Class 1. Mammalia ... (London 1792 [1788]), 40-53
27. Frank Spencer (comp.), Ecce Homo: an annotated bibliographie history of physical anthropology (New York 1986), 76-9
28. Buffon, Histoire naturelle, VI, 148-56
29. James Burney, A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Seas or Pacific Ocean, 5 vols (London 1803-17), IV, 388
30. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (6th edn 1717 [1697]), in John Masefield (ed.), Dampier's Voyages, 2 vols (London 1906), I, 453.
31. Dampier damned Aboriginal appearance even more trenchantly in the narrative of his second Australian sojourn in 1699: 'they all of them have the most unpleasant Looks and the worst Features of any People that ever I saw'. William Dampier, A Voyage to New-Holland, &c. in the Year 1699 [1703], in Masefield (ed.), Dampier's Voyages, II, 440
32. Joseph Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768-1771, ed. J.C. Beaglehole, 2 vols (Sydney 1962), I, 50, 55, 92, 111-12, 124
33. James Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, ed. J.C. Beaglehole, 3 vols (Cambridge 1955-67), I, 312, 358, 395
34. John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere ... , 3 vols (London 1773), III, 228
35. Banks, The Endeavour Journal, II, 112, my emphasis
36. Hawkesworth, An Account, III, 227
37. [Henry Home, Lord Karnes], Sketches of the History of Man, 2 vols (Edinburgh and London 1774), I, 23, my emphasis
38. Bory de Saint-Vincent, L'homme, I, 61-101
39. Cook, The Journals, I, 399
40. Banks, The Endeavour Journal, II, 130. Hawkesworth transposed these sentiments to Tierra del Fuegans rather than Aborigines. Account, II, 59
41. A similar passage in the published journal of the artist Sydney Parkinson is located in Tahiti. Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas in his Majesty's Ship, the Endeavour, ed. Stanfield Parkinson (London 1773), 23
42. Banks, The Endeavour Journal, II, 54-5, 134
43. Parkinson, Journal, 134
44. Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook's Voyages, 3 vols (Melbourne 1985-7), I, 48
45. [Kames], Sketches, I, 15-20, 36
46. Bronwen Douglas, 'Art as ethno-historical text: science, representation and indigenous presence in 18th and 19th century Oceanic voyage literature', in Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche (eds), Double Vision: art histories and colonial histories in the Pacific (Cambridge 1999), 65-99
47. Bronwen Douglas, 'Science and the art of representing "savages": reading "race" in text and image in South Seas voyage literature', History and Anthropology, 11 (1999), 157-201
48. James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, ed. George W. Stocking Jr (Chicago 1973 [1813]), 248-317
49. Smith, European Vision, 122-3, 137-43
50. Georges Cuvier et al., 'Report of the National Institute (Class of Physical and Mathematical Sciences) on the work by Mr. André entitled Theory of the Present Surface of the Earth' [1807]
51. tr. Martin J.S. Rudwick, in Martin J.S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: new translatons & interpretations of the primary texts (Chicago 1997), 106
52. Blumenbach, De generis humani (1775), 40
53. Prichard, Researches, 3
54. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: a particular history of the senses (New York 1993), 143
55. Bronwen Douglas, 'Inventing "race": the science of "man" and the Pacific connection, 1750-1840', unpub. paper presented to the 'Foreign Bodies: Oceania and Racial Science 1750-1940' workshop, Australian National University, 18 Oct. 2001
56. idem, 'Indigenous Presence', ch. 1
57. Blumenbach, De generis humani (3rd edn 1795), 284-322
58. Blumenbach's major anthropological works are available in English translation. Thomas Bendyshe (tr. and ed.), The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (London 1865)
59. translation from Bendyshe, The Anthropological Treatises, 209-10, 225
60. Blumenbach, Beyträge, I, 48-72, my emphasis
61. Blumenbach, De generis humani (1775), 42ff; (3rd edn 1795), viii, 114-283
62. Cuvier, Le règne animal, I, 84
63. Georges Cuvier, 'Extrait d'observations faites sur le cadavre d'une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentotte', Mémoires du Muséum d'Histoire naturelle, 3 (1817), 273
64. Jean-René Constant Quoy and Paul Gaimard, Voyage de découvertes de l'Astrolabe ... pendant les années 1826-1827-1828-1829 ... Zoologie, 4 vols (Paris 1830), I, 40-6, 49
65. Prichard, Researches, 13, 174-242, 261-72
66. James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean ... in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780 [ed. John Douglas], 3 vols with Atlas (London 1784), I, 111-17, see below. In his original journal, Anderson sharply dissociated Tasmanians from physical proximity to 'Negroes': 'Their features are not at all disagreeable, and their noses though broad or full are not flat and their lips of an ordinary thickness'. William Anderson, 'A journal of a voyage made in His Majestys Sloop Resolution', in Cook, The Journals, III, 785. However, the distantiation became equivocal when Anderson's words were reworked post mortem for the published narrative of Cook's voyage: 'Their noses, though not flat, are broad and full'. I surmise that this subtle shift in tone was the work of Cook's editor, Canon John case for 'a striking resemblance' between Dampier's and Cook's New Hollanders and between the inhabitants of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land. Cook and King, A Voyage, I, 99, 100, 101, 113. Dampier, it will be recalled, had likened Aborigines to 'the Negroes of Guinea'. New Voyage, 453
67. James Cowlcs Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, 5 vols (3rd edn London 1836-47), I, 257, V, 4-5, 212
68. Beyträge, I, 67-97
69. Cook and King, A Voyage, I, 5
70. Anderson, 'A journal of a voyage', 784-6
71. Joppien and Smith, The Art, III, 13-15, 271-5
72. Smith, Imagining, 184-8
73. Georges Cuvier, 'Note instructive sur les recherches à faire relativement aux différences anatomiques des diverses races d'hommes' [1800, 1857], in Jean Copans and Jean Jamin (eds), Aux origines de l'anthropologie française: les mémoires de la Socié té des Observateurs de l'Homme en l'an VIII (Paris 1978), 171-6
74. Douglas, 'Art as ethno-historical text', 76-9
75. La Billardière, Relation, II, 68-9
76. cf. [Alexandre d'Hesmivy d'Auribeau], 'Rapport de d'Auribeau: seconde relache à la Terre de Van Diem Richard, Une grande expédition scientifique au temps de la Révolution française: le voyage de d'Entrecasteaux à la recherche de La Pérouse (Paris 1986), 312
77. Jacques-Julien Houton de La Billardière, Atlas pour servir à la relation du voyage à la recherche de la Pérouse ... (Paris 1800), plates 4-8
78. [d'Auribeau], 'Rapport', 313
79. [D'Auribeau], 'Rapport', 321-2
80. Nicolas Baudin, 'Des naturels que nous trouvions et de leur conduite envers nous' [Baudin to Jussieu, 18 Nov. 1802], in Copans and Jamin (eds), Aux origines, 207-14
81. See Douglas, 'Art as ethno-historical text'; 'Science and the art of representing "savages'". Stephanie Anderson considered similar generic tensions in Péron's writings on the Tasmanians: 'French anthropology in Australia, the first fieldwork report: François Péron's "Maria Island - anthropological observations'", Aboriginal History, 25 (2001), 228-42
82. [D'Auribeau], 'Rapport', 312
83. Baudin, 'Des naturels', 213-14
84. Cook and King, A Voyage, I, 113
85. [Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse], Voyage de la Pérouse autour du monde ... , ed. Louis-Antoine Milet-Mureau, 4 vols (Paris 1798 [1797]), III, 239-63
86. Jacqueline Bonnemains, 'A descriptive catalogue of the drawings and paintings of Australian subjects by C.-A. Lesueur and N.-M. Petit from the Lesueur Collection at the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle, Le Havre', in Jacqueline Bonnemains, Elliott Forsyth and Bernard Smith (eds), Boudin in Australian Waters: the artwork of the French voyage of discovery to the southern lands 1800-1804 (Melbourne 1988), 135-59
87. Rhys Jones, 'Images of natural man', in Bonnemains, Forsyth and Smith (eds), Baudin in Australian Waters, 52-6
88. Howard Morphy, 'Encountering Aborigines', in Sarah Thomas (ed.), The Encounter, 1802: art of the Flinders and Baudin voyages (Adelaide 2002), 148-54
89. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicholas-Martin Petit, Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes. Partie historique. Atlas ([Paris 1807]), plates 8-12
90. François Péron, 'Maria Island: anthropological observations: interview with the natives of this island and description of a tomb found on the northern shore of East Bay, Ventose an. 10 [February 1802]', tr. N.J.B. Plomley, in NJ.B. Plomley, The Baudin Expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines 1802 (Hobart 1983), 85-6
91. Péron and Freycinet, Voyage, I, 280
92. Péron, 'Maria Island', 85-6
93. Johann Caspar Lavater, Essai sur la physiognomonie, destiné à faire connaître l'homme & à le faire aimer, 4 vols (La Haye [1781]-1803)
94. Péron, 'Maria Island', 86, 88
95. François Péron, 'Observations sur l'anthropologie, ou l'histoire naturelle de l'homme, la nécessité de s'occuper de l'avancement de cette science, et l'importance de l'admission sur la flotte du capitaine Baudin d'un ou de plusieurs naturalistes, spécialement chargés des recherches à faire sur ce sujet' [1800, 1913], in Copans and Jamin (eds), Aux origines, 183-4, orig. emphasis
96. Péron and Freycinet, Voyage, I, 285, 287, my emphasis
97. Baudin, 'Des naturels', 211, 213
98. see also Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Claude-Théodore Leschenault de la Tour, 'Journal' [1802], tr. N.J.B. Plomley, in Plomley, The Baudin Expedition, 133
99. [La Pérouse], Voyage, III, 238
100. Péron, 'Maria Island', 89, 93
101. Péron and Freycinet, Voyage, I, 283, 285, 287, 446-84
102. Jean Copans and Jean Jamin, 'Présentation: de la filiation déviée à l'oubli des origines', in Copans and Jamin (eds), Aux origines, 37-9, 47-8, 66-7
103. Joncs, 'Images of natural man', 36-46
104. Stocking, Race, 32-4, 39-41