Poissons /

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

“…83 The authors' confident summary of the 'moral and intellectual faculties' of the Papous shows how readily phrenological terminology could slide into conventional racial essentialism (1824c:9-11): they had innate 'dispositions to theft'; a 'destructive instinct' so strong as to produce a 'penchant for murder' and the presumption of cannibalism; and a 'tendency to superstition'. Yet the paper's optimistic conclusion -entirely missing from the first published version -is a paradoxical reminder that phrenology could offer a radical technology for personal and racial improvement: 84 the Papous were 'wrongly considered by clever naturalists to be close to the Apes'; 85 they were 'capable of education'; and they only needed 'to exercise and develop their intellectual faculties in order to hold a distinguished rank among the numerous varieties of the human species'. The racial taxonomy of Oceania gained new momentum from the early 1820s when the recently formed Société de Géographie in Paris offered one of its annual prizes for a memoir on the 'differences and similarities' between the 'various peoples' of the region.…”

“…On the other hand, since nature abhorred specific mixing and inspired universal 'repugnance' against it, species were 'essentially unalterable' in type. 101 Virey's ambivalence is patent in his discussion of 'mulattos'. He denigrated them as an 'ambiguous', perhaps unstable 'caste', a 'multitude of bastards' produced 'in the colonies' from the abuse of grossly unequal power relations between white men and female slaves.…”

“…Notable amongst them were three men with close links to Dumont d'Urville's final voyage: the ships' surgeon-naturalists Hombron andHonoré Jacquinot (1814-1887) who invoked their wide global experience to authorize the individual volumes on 'man' and on 'anthropology' and 'human races' that they contributed to the co-authored Zoologie section of the official voyage publication; and Blanchard, a naturalist at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, who wrote the Anthropologie volume based on Dumoutier's collections. 104 Hombron insisted that all species, including the 'several species of men', had been created for particular locales and were 'unchangeable'; that only parents of proximate species could produce fertile offspring; and that the lower a species was in the 'human series', the less its hybrid 'fruits' would share the physical and moral qualities of the 'more beautiful' parent. On these grounds, he damned the progeny of Chinese-Malay and Malay-Papuan unions as 'very disagreeable', 'very ugly', 'monstrous', and probably of limited fertility.…”

“…100 Accordingly, Quoy devoted the bulk of his chapter 'On Man' to differentiating each race into the varieties known personally to him and Gaimard. 101 This empirical section incorporates long extracts from Quoy's shipboard journal, producing marked tension in the text between his deductive system and circumstantial anecdotes: between a reductive, purportedly objective, but fundamentally racialized theoretical schema and contingent details about the haphazard, idiosyncratic behaviour and appearance of actual human beings.…”

The New Zealand Cucumariidae (Echinodermata, Holothuroidea)

“…(Ludwig) Comparative material. Plesiocolochirus spinosus (Quoy and Gaimard, 1833), NMV F45021 (3); Leptopentacta grisea H.L. Clark, 1938, NMV F82972 (1).…”