Anthropology, Race, and Englishness: Changing Notions of Complexion and Character

Abstract

The term "anthropology" occurs in the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1768-71), but it gets only a one-line entry: "ANTHROPOLOGY, a discourse upon human nature"; and Johnson's Dictionary (1755) defines it as "The doctrine of anatomy." Clearly, there was no anthropology as we know it in the eighteenth century, but both anthropological ideas and the terminology that would later define the discipline were emerging. To simplify somewhat, what we now call "social anthropology" or "cultural anthropology" was then known variously as "ethnography" (in the eighteenth century, usually but not always at the level of description), "ethnology" or Völkerkunde (in contrast to folklore [Volkskunde], at the level of comparison), or part of "moral philosophy" (especially in Scotland, at the level of theory). 1 Yet anthropology, ethnography, ethnology, and moral philosophy were really quite separate enterprises, and relations between moral philosophy and natural history were frequently ambiguous. Even more problematic were the ideas of "race" and "racism," so taken for granted in nineteenth-and twentieth-century political discourse.Petrus Camper was the leading Dutch anatomist and anatomical illustrator of the mid-eighteenth century. He was among the first to mark out an "anthropology," or more precisely Menschkunde, which he distinguished from Natuurkunde (natural history). He believed that facial angle coincided with distinctions of "race" and sought to use this criterion to study and classify humankind. However, like many anthropological ideas of the eighteenth century, his were misunderstood and misused, both by his contemporaries and by his successors. Miriam Claude Meijer's book is, to a large measure, an attempt to correct such misunderstandings.