'Le President des terres australes': Charles de Brosses and the French enlightenment beginnings of oceanic anthropology

Journal of Pacific History

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 157-186

  Ryan, Tom ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ABORIGINE; ANTHROPOLOGY; ARTICLE; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; ETHNOLOGY; FRANCE; HISTORY; HUMAN; PACIFIC ISLANDS; RESEARCH; TEACHING;

ANTHROPOLOGY; ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; FRANCE; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HUMANS; OCEANIA; OCEANIC ANCESTRY GROUP; RESEARCH; TEACHING;

EID: 14844328354     PISSN: 00223344     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0022334022000006583     Document Type: Review

References (121)

1. Charles de Brosses, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes: contenant ce que l'on sçait des mœurs & des productions des contrées découvertes jusqu'à ce jour: & où il est traité de l'utilité' dy faire de plus amples découvertes, & des moyens d'y former un établissement (Paris 1756; also Amsterdam 1967). Hereinafter referred to as Histoire des navigations or Histoire.
2. Edward Said, Onentalism (New York 1979), 116-17.
3. In particular, J.C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (Stanford 1974), 119-20;
4. John Dunmore, Visions & Realities: France in the Pacific 1695-1995 (Waikanae 1997), 36-43;
5. O.H.K. Spate, Paradise Found and Lost (Canberra 1988), 70-6.
6. A notable exception is a currently unpublished paper by Serge Tcherkézoff (Sept. 1999), 'L'invention de la "Polynésie" et de la "Melanésie" du présent au passé: le racisme derrière la géographie', in which de Brosses's writings on 'race' in the South Seas are discussed in some detail.
7. This tendency is well reflected in Bernard Smith, European Vision and, the South Pacific 1768-1850 (Oxford 1960)
8. and Nicholas Thomas, 'The force of ethnology: origins and significance of the Melanesia/Polynesia division', Current Anthropology, 30 (1989), 27-41.
9. See also 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), 167-201.
10. In particular, Maurice Blackman (ed.), Australian Aborigines and the French (Kensington NSW 1990);
11. also Jean Copans and Jean Jamin (eds), Aux origines de l'anthropologie française: les mémoires de la Société des observateurs de l'homme en l'an VIII (Paris 1994).
12. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris 1966).
13. For an important critique, see George Canguilhem, 'The death of Man, or the exhaustion of the cogito?', in G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge 1994), 71-91.
14. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, A History of Anthropological Thought (London 1981), 3-12.
15. Michèle Duchet, Anthropologie et histoire aux siècle des Lumières (Paris 1971).
16. See also Claude Blanckaert, 'Button and the natural history of Man: writing history and the "foundational myth" of Anthropology', History of the Human Sciences, 6:1 (1993), 13-50.
17. Marvin Hams, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York 1968), 13-14
18. Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge 1976), 68-76
19. and Frank E. Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (New York 1962), 13-51.
20. Claude Lévi-Strauss, 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau, founder of the sciences of Man', Structural Anthropology, 2 (Harmondsworth 1973), 33-43.
21. Hans F. Vermeulen, 'Enlightenment anthropology', in A. Barnard and J. Spencer (eds), Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (London 1996), 183.
22. In particular, Epeli Hau'ofa, 'Our sea of islands', in Eric Waddell et al. (eds), A New Oceania: rediscovering our sea of islands (Suva 1993), 2-19.
23. For general overivews of de Brosses's life and work, see H. Mamet, Le Président de Brosses, sa vie et ses ouvrages (Paris 1874);
24. A.C. Taylor, Le Président de Brosses et Australie (Paris 1937);
25. and Yves Florence, Le, Président de Brosses (Paris 1964).
26. Herman Harder, Le Président de Brosses et le voyage en Italie au dix huitième siècle (Genève 1981), 237-48.
27. See also Filip Regner, Aux origines de la bibliothèque Bouhier (Troyes 1980).
28. Charles de Brosses, Mémoire sur les antiquités d'Ercolan o et sur l'état du mont Vesuve (Paris 1750).
29. Charles de Brosses, Histoire de la République romaine dans le cours du VIIe siècle par Salluste ... (Paris 1777);
30. idem, Lettres familières sur Italie (Paris 1799).
31. See also Frédéric d'Agay (ed.), Lettres d'Italie du Président de Blosses (Paris 1986).
32. Agay, Lettres, 32-6;
33. also Florence, Le Président, 24-6
34. and Harder, Le Président, 246.
35. Taylor, Australie, 3.
36. Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English voyages and encounters 1570-1750 (New Haven 1997), 264-70, notes that France was the centre of European cartography at this time, and that when Vaugondy's world atlas was published in 1757 it was enthusiastically received in London.
37. Spate, Paradise, 71-2.
38. Antoine-François Prévost, Histoire générale des voyages ou nouvelle collection de toutes les relations de voyages par mer et par terre ... (Paris 1746-56, 7 vols).
39. Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas 1680-1840 (Chicago 2001), 99-100.
40. Duchet, Anthropologie, 65-7.
41. The words 'ethnography' and 'ethnology' were in use in Germany by 1767 and 1783 respectively; 'anthropology' gained its modern meaning in 1788 with Chavannes's Anthropologie ou science générale de l'homme. See Vermeulen, 'Enlightenment anthropology', 185-6;
42. Lester G. Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the quest, vol. 1 (New York 1968), 271.
43. Lévi-Strauss, 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau', 34, 35.
44. J. Lafitau, Mœurs des sauvages Amériquains, comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (Paris 1724).
45. Ulrich Im Hoff, The Enlightenment (Oxford 1994), 232-3.
46. The main works from this period which Hoff sees as meeting this definition are: Antoine-Yves Goguet, De l'origine des lois, des arts et de leur progrès chez les anciens peuples, 1759;
47. Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme oriental, 1760;
48. Charles de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches, 1760 ;
49. Jens Kraft, Brief Histmy of the Various Institutions, Manners and, Opinions of Savage Peoples, 1760 ;
50. Isaak Iselin, Philosophical Conjectures on the History of Mankind, 1764;
51. Johann Gottlieb Steeb, General Account of the Condition of the Civilized and Uncivilized Nations with Reference to their Moral and Physical Constitution, 1766;
52. Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1766.
53. De Brosses, Histoire, II, 377 (my trans.).
54. The 'cult of Baetyles' he mentions refers to ancient Egyptian statues, which he discussed previously in his Lettres Italiques - see M.V. David, 'Le president de Brosses, historien des religions et philosophe', in Jean-Claude Garetta (ed.), Charles de Brosses 1777-1977 (Genève 1981), 138-9.
55. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (Yale 1993), 155.
56. Margaret Hogden, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Pittsburg 1964), 491 ;
57. Fred Vogt, History of Ethnology (New York 1975), 71.
58. William Pietz, 'The problem of the fetish, I', Res, 9 (1985), 5-17;
59. 'The problem of the fetish, IIIa: Bosnian's Guinea and the enlightenment theory of fetishism', Res, 16 (1988), 105-24.
60. Annemarie de Waalmalefijt, Images of Man: a history of anthropological thought (New York 1974), 90-2;
61. V.Y. Mudimbe, Tales of Faith: religious and political performance in Central Africa (London 1997), 6.
62. Charles de Brosses, Traité de la formation méchanique des langues et des principes physiques de l'étymologie (Paris 1765).
63. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Loudon 1970), 108-10;
64. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (London 1995), 92-3.
65. Lytton Strachey, 'The Président de Brosses', in Portraits in Miniature (London 1931), 72-3.
66. Lucien Brunei, Les Philosophes et l'Académie française aux dix-huitième siècle (Genève 1967), 210-14;
67. Jacques Roger, Buffon: a life in Natural History (Ithaca 1997), 215-17.
68. A.C. Taylor, Le Président, 133-4.
69. Phillip R. Sloan, 'The idea of racial degeneracy' in Button's Histoire naturelle', in Harold Pagliaro (ed.), Racism in the Eighteenth Century (Cleveland 1973), 293-321;
70. J.M. Brumfitt, Voltaire: historian (Oxford 1958), 76-94;
71. Michèle Duchet, Buffon: de l'homme (Paris 1971), 7-36.
72. Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: travel writing and transculturation (London 1992), 15-16.
73. The other branch of this experiment was the ill-fated expedition led by the astronomer Godin and the philosopher La Condamine to the Andes.
74. Colin Kiernan, Science and. The Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Fiance (Geneva 1968), 23, 33;
75. Jacques Roger, Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIII siècle (Paris 1971), 468-87;
76. Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment: Esprit Philosophie, vol. 1 (Princeton 1977), 521-48.
77. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, cited in Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton 1996), 156-8.
78. Ashley Montague, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: the fallacy of race (Alta Mira 2000), 69
79. and Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: race, history and culture in Western society (London 1996), 54.
80. It is probable, in turn, that Maupertuis adapted this sense of 'race' from François Bernier, 'Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l'habitent', Journal des Scavans (1684).
81. Malik, The Meaning of Race, 54, also notes that 'Michael Banton, Robert Miles and Anthony Barker, in their various surveys of racial thinking, have all argued that, in Banton's words, "though there was a substantial literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about Africans and other non-Europeans, the word "race" was rarely used either to describe peoples or in accounts of differences between them"'. I can only conclude that these 'experts' appear to have ignored the waitings of Bernier, Maupertuis and Buffon.
82. P.L.M. de Maupertuis, Venus physique, in Oeuvres (Hildesheim 1965), 99-100, my trans.
83. G.L. Buffon, Histoire naturelle de l'homme (Paris 1749).
84. G.L. Buffon, 'Of the varieties in the human species', in J. Barr, Buffon's Natural History (London 1797), 221-2.
85. P.L.M. de Maupertuis, Lettre sur le progrès des sciences, in Oeuvres (Hildesheim 1965), 375-81, 384-6, my trans.
86. Voltaire, Histoire du Docteur Akakia et du natif de Saint-Malo (Paris 1753), 25, my trans.
87. Also see A.J. Ayer, Voltaire (London 1988), 81-5;
88. John Hearsey, Voltaire (London 1976), 193-209.
89. Marcel Bouchard, De l'Humanisme à l'Encychpédie: l'esprit public en Bourgogne sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris 1930), 636, 648.
90. De Brosses, Histoire, I, 13.
91. Magellanie, Magellanica and Magellanique are names that have been applied variously to this same part of the world, and sometimes to Terra Australis Incognita as a whole, since the late 16th century, while Australasie and its alternate Australie echo respectively the early 17th century explorer Quiros's Austrialia del Espiritu Santo and the late 17th century French novelist Gabriel de Foigny's Australie. According to the missionary scholar William Ellis (Polynesian Researches, 2nd edn, London 1831, 3) the designation 'Polynesia' was in the 16th century 'given by Portugese authors to the Moluccas, the Philippines, and other islands to the eastward of Java', and then in 1756 was 'appropriated to those clusters and islands' of the wider Pacific by Charles de Brosses.
92. See Jean-Etienne Martin-Allanic, Bougainville: navigateur et les découvertes de son temps (Paris 1964), vol. I, 23, 33.
93. Étienne Taillemite (dir.), Bougainville et ses compagnons autour du monde 1766-1769 (Paris 1977), vol. I, 4.
94. A. Taylor, 'Charles de Brosses, the man behind Cook', in [National Maritime Museum], The Opening of the Pacific: image and reality (London 1971), 4.
95. He had met Admiral Anson while on diplomatic service in London in 1754-55. See Taillemite, Bougainville, vol. I, 11.
96. Taylor, 'Charles de Brosses', 6-7.
97. Jonathan Lamb, 'Re-imagining Juan Fernandez: probability, possibility and pretence in the South Seas', in Nicholas Thomas and Diane Loche (eds), Double Visions: art histories and colonial histories in the Pacific (Cambridge 1999), 22.
98. H. Carrrrigton (ed.), The Discovery of Tahiti: a journal of the second voyage of HMS Dolphin around the world under the command of Captain Wallis RN, in the years 1766, 1767, and 1768. Written by her Master, George Robertson (London 1948), 179, 228-9, 227, 228, 241.
99. Louis de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768, and 1769, J.R. Forster, trans. (London 1772), 249, 253.
100. Bougainville, Voyage, 290-387.
101. P. Commerson, 'Post-scriptum sur l'isle de la Nouvelle-Cythère ou Tayti', in Taillemite, Bougainville, vol. II, 507-8.
102. J.C. Beaglehole, The Exploration of the Pacific (London 1947), 223-9.
103. John Callander, Terra Australis Cognita: or, voyages to the Terra Australis, or southern hemisphere, during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, 3 vols (Edinburgh 1766-68).
104. Bernard Smith, 'The intellectual and artistic framework of Pacific exploration in the eighteenth century', in William Eisler and Bernard Smith (eds), Terra Australis: the furthest shore (Sydney 1988), 124;
105. also Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: in the wake of Cook's voyages (Melbourne 1992), 44, 81.
106. J.C. Beaglehole, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768-1771 (Sydney 1962), 142-3, 230, 327, 370, 469.
107. Thomas, 'The force of ethnology', 30, 26;
108. Nicholas Thomas, 'On the varieties of the human species: Forsters comparative ethnology', in N. Thomas, H. Guest, and M. Dettelbach, Observations Made Dining a Voyage Round the World: Johann Reinhold Forster (Honolulu 1996).
109. Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made on a Voyage Round the World (London 1778), 228.
110. Although Thomas (in 'On the varieties', xxxix) acknowledges 'the diverse arguments of Observations', and refers in passing to Forster's 'notion that the Tahitian chiefs were descended from a race that had conquered the ancestors of tlie commoners', he otherwise fails to pursue these dimensions of Forster's work.
111. His son and associate on Cook's second voyage, Georg Forster, in debates with Kant and others during the 1780s, became a leading advocate for scientific polygenism. See Wolf Lepenies, 'Germany: the search for a new ancestor', 395-430, in Stanley Diamond (ed.), Anthropology: ancestors and heirs (The Hague 1980).
112. Ducket, Anthropologie, 65.
113. John Pinkerton, Modern Geography: a description of the empires, states, and colonies; with the oceans, seas, and isles; in all parts of the world (London 1811). Pinkerton began developing these ideas in a hook, of the same title, published in 1802.
114. Conrad Malte-Brun, Universal Geography, or Description of all the Parts of the World, vol. 3, 'India and Oceanica' (Edinburgh 1822). Malte-Brun appeals to have coined the French parent term 'Océanique' in 1813.
115. In 1804, Matthew Flinders employed the three terms 'New Holland', 'Terra Australis' and 'Australia' on the draft chart of the continent he had recently circumnavigated and mapped. After his chart was finally published in 1814, the last name became standardised.
116. William Ellis, Polynesian Researches ... Including Descriptions of the Natural History and Scenery of the Islands - with Remarks on the History, Mythology, Traditions, Government, Arts, Manners, and Customs of the Inhabitants (London 1829).
117. G.-L. Domeny de Rienzi, Océanic ou cinquième partie du monde: revue géographique et ethnographique de la Malaisie, de la Micronésie, de la Polynésie et de la Melanésie (Paris 1836-37). Serge Tcherkézoff (pers.comm.) says the derivative 'Oceanic' was probably adapted by geographers around 1820 from Malte-Brun's 'Océanique'.
118. J.-S.-C. Dumont d'Urville, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde: résumé général des voyages de découvertes de Magellan, Tasman, Dampier ... , vol. I (Paris 1834-35), vi-vii.
119. See Thomas, 'Force of ethnology'.
120. Claude Blanckaert, 'On the origins of French anthropology: William Edwards and the doctrine of race', in George W. Stocking jr (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behaviour: essays on biological anthropology (Madison 1988), 29;
121. Jacqueline Duvernay-Bolens, 'L'Homme zoologique: races et racisme chez les naturalistes de la première moitié du XIX siècle', L'Homme, 133 (1995), 9-32.