The transfer of modes of thought, concepts, models, and metaphors from Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary biology played a signi cant role in the mergence, constitution, and legitimizatio n of sociology as an autonomous discipline in France at the end of the nineteenth century. More speci cally, the Durkheimian group then came to be recognized as "French sociology." In the present paper, I analyze a facet of the struggle among various groups for this coveted status and demonstrate that the initial adherence to and subsequent abandonment of "the biological" played an important, but complex, role in the outcome of that struggle. Furthermore, the choice of biological model, whether Darwinian or Lamarckian, had repercussions on one's position in that cultural eld. The outcome of the "battle" between René Worms' group that supported and contributed to the Revue Internationale de Sociologie (RIS) on the one hand, and Emile Durkheim's group and those committed to the L'Année Sociologique (AS) on the other-from which the Durkheimians emerged victorious-was due not only to internal scienti c factors, but also to a particular juxtapositio n of developments within sociology and anthropology and their relation to and interaction with French culture and politics at large.
This paper looks at the conditions of the emergence of "race" as a new scientific category during the eighteenth century, arguing that two modes of discourse and visualization played a significant role: that on society, civility, and civilization -- as found principally in the travel literature -- and that on nature, as found in natural history writings, especially in botanical classifications. The European colonizing enterprise had resulted in an extensive flow of new objects at every level. Visual representations of these new objects circulated in the European cultural world and were transferred and transformed within travelogue and natural history writings. The nature, boundaries, and potentialities of humankind were discussed in this exchange within the conceptual grid of classifications and their visual representations. Over the course of the century the discourse on society, civility, and civilization collapsed into the discourse on nature. Humans became classified and visually represented along the same lines as flora, according to similar assumptions about visible features. Concurrently, these visible features were related necessarily to bundles of social, civilized, and cognitive characteristics taken from the discourse on society, civility, civilization, as found in the contemporaneous travelogue.
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