German-speaking scientists and universities debated the scientific notion of race as a sub- category of a single human species in the mid- to late eighteenth centuries.48 The
monogenetic position was dominant, but some opposed this view and maintained a polygenetic position, asserting that not all humans shared the same common origin. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that people belonged to ‘one and the same natural kind’ based on their ability to produce fertile offspring. Kant identified four racial types from one common species, specifying skin colour as the distinguishing feature.49
Theories regarding the nature of ‘race’, a ‘slippery’ term that carried multiple meanings and varied substantially across both time and space, varied widely50; its pre-modern usage could
45 Patrick Minder, “Swiss Völkerschauen: The Fascination with Things Colonial,” in Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep (Paris: Musée du Quai
Branly, 2011), 140. Human exhibitions occurred at the Jardin Zoologique de Bâle from 1879 and a new space in the zoo was opened to facilitate these displays in 1892. ‘La Caravane Schili’ features Sundaese Egyptians consisting of 12 men, 15 women and three children in 1982 at the zoo. Nicholas Bancel, “The Place of Switzerland in the European System of Ethnic Exhibitions (1919–1939),” 3rd Swiss Congress of Historical Sciences, Freiburg: University of Freiburg, 2013. <https://2013.geschichtstage.ch/referat/356/the-place-of- switzerland-in-the-european-system-of-ethnic-exhibitions-1919-1939> Accessed, 29 June 2017; Zimmerman,
Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany, 23; Poignant, Professional Savages, 116.
46 Hilke Thode-Arora, “Johan Adrian Jacobsen: Impresario and Collector,” in Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage, edited by Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep (Paris: Musée du Quai Branly,
2011), 90; Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany, 90; Poignant, Professional Savages, 116–117. Johann Adrian Jacobsen (1853–1947), who collected artefacts for the Berlin Ethnological Committee, was one such collaborator, bringing two Inuit families from Labrador, Canada, to Germany in 1880, while employed by Carl Hagenbeck, a Berlin-based zoo keeper and animal importer. The entire group died of smallpox.
47 Roslyn Poignant, Professional Savages, 12. Poignant mentions Saartjie Baartmann’s body after her death in
Paris in 1815. Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany, 23. Zimmerman refers to the skull of an Inuit ‘performer’ being kept in Berlin for study following his death.
48 Hilary Susan Howes, The Race Question in Oceania: AB Meyer and Otto Finsch between Metropolitan Theory and Field Experience, 1865–1914 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Edition, 2013), 31–41; Sara Eigen and Mark J Larrimore, The German Invention of Race (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
49 Howes, The Race Question in Oceania, 35.
50 Bronwen Douglas, “Climate to Crania: Science and the Racialization of Human Difference,” in Foreign Bodies and the Science of Race, 1750–1940, edited by Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (Canberra: ANU Press,
106
refer to a tribe, nation or common stock or physical characteristics of family ties, geography or culture.51 However, a loose racial hierarchy of Europeans on top and Negroes on the
bottom prevailed.
Blumenbach adopted Kant’s theories and laid the foundation of the notion of races by studying humankind as part of natural history. In 1775 Blumenbach’s dissertation, completed at the University of Göttingen, analysed the varieties of humankind (Menschenvarietäten, G), ‘all of which he traced back in equal measure to one and the same species’.52 His third
comparative anatomy study, ‘On the Natural Varieties of Mankind’, 1795 (De Generis Humani
Varietate Nativa, G), proposed that because all humans experienced the same physical stages
of development, they could only be classified under racial typologies.
Blumenbach used Latin terms such as varietas to indicate ‘variety and diversity’ in human physical appearance, and gens to denote a natural division of collective human change, indexed in relation to regional differences in skin colour.53 By 1860 this terminology became
interchangeable with ‘race’ and ‘racial’ in an English translation of Blumenbach’s work.54
Blumenbach established a classification system of five Abarten, hereditary varieties – Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay55 – leading him to claim ‘that these
races were but varieties of one human species’.56 His large collection of ‘skulls of foreign
nations’, grouped according to the norma verticalis (the shape of the skull viewed from above), was part of a larger project to document biological notions of race.57 Human beings,
including Europeans58, were increasingly classified as natural objects, with emphasis
National Socialism Racisits? A Comment on the December 2007 Issue of The Journal of Pacific History,” The
Journal of Pacific History, vol. 52, no. 1 (2017): 123.
51 Fenneke Sysling, Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press, National
University of Singapore, 2016), 5.
52 Hauser-Schäublin, “Changing Contexts, Shifting Meanings: The Cook/Forster Collection,” 29. 53 Douglas, “Climate to Crania,” 38.
54 Douglas, “Climate to Crania,” 43. 55 Douglas, “Climate to Crania,” 37–38.
56 Jeremy Vetter, “Wallace’s Other Line: Human Biogeography and Field Practice in the Eastern Colonial
Tropics,” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 39, no. 1 (2006): 95. Vetter cites Reginald Horsman, “Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 37 (1976): 387–410.
57 Vetter, “Wallace’s Other Line,” 40; Gustav Jahoda, “Intra-European Racism in Nineteenth Century
Anthropology,” in History and Anthropology, vol. 20, no. 1 (2009): 38.
58 Germann, “Race in the Making”, 57, 58, 60. In a Swiss context, ‘internationally influential anthropologist’
Rudolf Martin, who taught in Zurich, instigated a study between 1927 and 1932 of 35,511 Swiss Army conscripts. This study was led by Zurich anthropologist Otto Schlaginhaufen and included the participation of distinguished anthropologists such as Fritz Sarasin to ‘systematically study the racial-anthropological composition of the Swiss population’ (see Germann, “Race in the Making”, 50). Jahoda, “Intra-European Racism in Nineteenth Century Anthropology,” 37–56.
MKB and Alfred Bühler’s work
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increasingly placed on the shape of the skull, prompting the emergence of biology and physical anthropology disciplines.59
German physical anthropologist, physician, pathologist and biologist, Rudolf Virchow, drew links between cranial and social development.60 He rejected Darwin’s theories of evolution
and survival of the fittest61 as espoused in The Origin of Species (1859). He promulgated the
notion of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races; however, in the first instance it was necessary ‘to ascertain the entire breadth of individual fluctuations occurring within [each of] the separate tribes’ before conclusions regarding ‘the higher and lower character of the race or the stock’ could be made from ‘individual cases’.62 Virchow researched human skulls to create empirical
records to substantiate the unity of mankind, as he rejected a connection between physical characteristics and mental capacity.63
Virchow’s work was extended by Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who formulated a relationship between biological race and culture. The work of Oscar Peschel (1826–1875) favoured a compromise between environmental influences and biological determinism, arguing that societies develop as a result of their environment, not as a consequence of differing abilities. The practice of physical anthropology, in the late nineteenth century German context, was ‘quite “liberal” on matters of race’.64 A standardised horizontal method for measuring crania
was adopted in 1882 in Germany, developed by naturalist Hermann von Ihering (1850–1930). By adopting a common method for measuring skulls to avoid discrepancies that resulted from various measuring formulae, German anthropologists ‘worked out a collective identity as natural scientists of humanity’.65 Notwithstanding, contradictory theories, disagreement
59 Germann, “Race in the Making,” 43.
60 Rudolf Virchow, “Üeber einige Merkmale niederer Menschenrassen am Schädel und über die Anwendung der statistischen Methode in der ethnischen Craniologie” [On several cranial characteristics of lower human races and the application of the statistical method in ethnic craniology], Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Bd. 12 (1880): 1–26.
61 Penny, “Traditions in the German Language,” 85–86.
62 Rudolf Virchow cited by Howes, The Race Question in Oceania, 57. 63 Sysling, Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia, 6.
64 Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in
Wilhelmine Germany,” in Volkgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German
Anthropological Tradition, edited by George W Stocking, Jr (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996),
80. Massin examines the shift from this liberal stance to the reorientation of this discipline and its methodologies to the establishment of twentieth century ‘pseudosciences’ of ‘science of race” and ‘racial hygiene’.
65 Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany, 88. Also see Lucile E Hoyme, “Physical
Anthropology and Its Instruments: An Historical Study,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 4 (1953): 408–430.
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and ongoing debate continued to characterise German physical anthropology and the topic of racial differentiation in the late nineteenth century.66