De generis humani varietate nativa

Race et médecine

“…Pour être complet, il aurait fallu décrire un troisième modèle, où la race est moins perçue comme une dévia-tion d'une identité d'origine que comme un arrêt de développement dans la réalisation d'un type. Là encore, en effet, le langage médical va jouer à plein 23 . Mais nous espérons avoir suffisamment démontré deux choses : (1) l'intime relation entre le concept de « race » et la 21 [24], pp.…”

Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940

“…Experience was grounded in encounters, where racial ideas and representations were enacted, reworked, or forged, but the level of generality at which the collection is necessarily pitched means that particular embodied encounters figure only fleetingly as examples. 39 Our core themes are variety, flux, ambiguity, contestation, and recursion in the concept of race as well as in the exemplary representations and appropriations of indigenous Oceanian people and their bodies made by savants and scientists, field naturalists and collectors, colonial officials and humanitarians, settlers and missionaries. Our wide thematic net thus traces the threads of scientific conceptions of race into political, philanthropic, and public domains.…”

“…For instance, the word persistently infiltrated the 1865 English translation by Thomas Bendyshe (1827-1886 of the third edition of Blumenbach's De Generis Humani (1795): varietas and gens are sometimes 'race'; adjectival inflections of gens are usually 'racial'; and even stemma and stirps are frequently 'race'. 39 The biological notion of race emerged and gained potency in a complex historical conjuncture. Intellectually, the information about non-white people pouring into Europe from around the globe both enabled and seemed to require the demarcation of new scientific disciplines -notably biology and anthropology -which classed human beings as natural objects.…”

“…23 Blumenbach 1795:121, 303, 320;1798:94-5, 213, 223;Forster 1786:159-60. As early as 1793, Blumenbach had privately applied the English term race in this indefinite sense to the Pacific Islanders (Blumenbach to Banks, 1 November 1793, in Banks [1770-1820: 8098/116-17); see Chapter Two (Douglas), this volume. 24 Kant first explicitly addressed in print the question of den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen, 'the diverse races of men', in 1775, in a prospectus for a summer course on physical geography (2001).…”

Moving Objects: Reflections on Oceanic Collections

“…It was offered to the British Museum but Banks campaigned successfully to have them refuse it. It went to auction in 1806 and was dispersed in several Johann Friedrich Blumenbach used the collection for both research and teaching, famously arguing that all peoples are 'true humans', mere varieties (Spierlarten) of the same species (Blumenbach 1775) and using artefacts in his lectures on comparative Völkerkunde (ethnology; a habit extended by Heren into the nineteenth century). Both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt drew inspiration from the collection.…”