Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

Race and Natural History, 1750–1850

Nicolaas Rupke, Gerhard Lauer, Nicolaas Rupke, Gerhard Lauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351732147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The major significance of the German naturalist-physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) as a topic of historical study is the fact that he was one of the first anthropologists to investigate humankind as part of natural history. Moreover, Blumenbach was, and continues to be, a central figure in debates about race and racism.

How exactly did Blumenbach define race and races? What were his scientific criteria? And which cultural values did he bring to bear on his scheme? Little historical work has been done on Blumenbach's fundamental, influential race work. From his own time till today, several different pronouncements have been made by either followers or opponents, some accusing Blumenbach of being the fountainhead of scientific racism. By contrast, across early nineteenth-century Europe, not least in France, Blumenbach was lionized as an anti-racist whose work supported the unity of humankind and the abolition of slavery.

This collection of essays considers how, with Blumenbach and those around him, the study of natural history and, by extension, that of science came to dominate the Western discourse of race.

Part I

Blumenbach studies

1 Introduction

A brief history of Blumenbach representation

Nicolaas Rupke and Gerhard Lauer

Introduction

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was one of the most celebrated practitioners of natural history of his generation, who from 1776 till the year of his death taught in the medical faculty of the University of Göttingen. His fame has been shaped on the several occasions of commemorative celebrations at the university. During his life time, Blumenbach enjoyed two such events, which happened to fall on dates of consecutive years: 1825 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Blumenbach’s doctorate and the appearance of the first edition of his highly acclaimed doctoral dissertation, De generis humani varietate nativa (On the natural variety of mankind), whereas 1826 represented the fiftieth anniversary of his career as an internationally eulogized university professor. Additionally, Blumenbach was honored during the university’s centennial celebrations of 1837, and commemorated in the context of the 1887, 1937, and 1987 events, as well as during the 150th anniversary of the Göttingen Academy in 1901.

Exactly why has Blumenbach been commemorated? And how has he been remembered? What biographical portrait has been depicted of him? Intriguingly, no single answer has been or can be given to these questions, but several different ones exist, each reflecting the place and time of the particular publications about him. Even just at his own university, Blumenbach’s representation has undergone noticeable changes; and if we add to the Göttingen location the ones of London, Paris, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and others – all places of authorship about him – the collective body of literature on Blumenbach shows an even broader range of interpretations of his scientific identity. Taking a bird’s eye view of the entire body of Blumenbach scholarship, from his own time until today, we discern some four surprisingly different portraits. Let us take a brief look at each, and compare and contrast them with what we are doing in this volume, which, perhaps, is adding up to a fifth portrait.

The revered teacher of natural history who upheld the unity of humankind

Today, internationally, Blumenbach’s significance is commonly narrowed down to his work on human skulls. The Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia offers no more than the following single and incorrect (Böker, this volume) sentence: “By his study of comparative skull measurements, he established a quantitative basis for racial classification” (Crystal 1994, 119). Yet in 1825/1826, at Göttingen, Blumenbach was honored for a much wider range of contributions. He was seen as a founder of what today we call the biomedical and paleontological sciences, and highly regarded for his research, teaching, writing of textbooks, and indefatigable collecting of natural history objects. His Handbuch der Naturgeschichte – to cite just one title – went through twelve editions (from 1779 till 1830) and was translated into Danish, Dutch, English, French, Italian, and Russian (Kroke 2010, 25–31).

Colleagues at the Georgia Augusta and other universities, some of them former students, celebrated him as much for his physiological insights as for his comparative anatomical work. Karl Friedrich Burdach, founder of a major school of physiology at Königsberg, in his published tribute to Blumenbach focused on the latter’s ideas about a Bildungstrieb (1825) (nisus formativus). Jan Evangelista Purkinje, famous for his physiological work at the University of Breslau, offered a gratulatory essay that dealt with the development of a bird’s egg before incubation (1825); the Swedish-born Karl Asmund Rudolphi at the University of Berlin contributed a booklet on numismatics (1825); and the following year, broadening the scope of relevant topics yet further, Karl Ernst Adolf von Hoff, gentleman-geologist in the civil service of the duchy of Gotha, emphasized the importance of his former teacher for the geological sciences (1826). At Göttingen, upon Blumenbach’s death, a similarly broad appreciation was shown, among others by Karl Friedrich Heinrich Marx, a medical colleague and protégé of Blumenbach, in an obituary address to the Göttingen Academy (1840). This inclusive portrayal of him as the consummate professor of natural history persisted into the early part of the twentieth century (Ehlers 1901).

Also Blumenbach’s highly original dissertation and his contributions to physical anthropology were repeatedly addressed.¹ Influential was his classification of humankind into five (initially four) varieties: the Caucasian, or white; the Asiatic, or yellow; the African, or black; the American, or red; and the Malay, or brown (for the original names used by Blumenbach, see Böker, this volume). Yet more important than this fivefold division was the fact that Blumenbach stressed their essential sameness – the unity of the human species. Such unity served the humanitarian politics of anti-slavery, the emancipation of black slaves in the New World, and in particular the acknowledgment of the equality of “the Negro.” At the time that Blumenbach produced the four editions of his dissertation (1775; 1776; 1781; 1795 – the first two of 1775/1776 were essentially the same) ideas of polygenism were gaining scientific ground (Livingstone 2011, passim). Blumenbach’s monogenist stance, the view of unity amid variety, was highlighted by Marx:

At the time when Negroes and savages were still thought of as half animals and the idea of the emancipation of slaves had not even been raised, Blumenbach spoke out to make known, how their mental aptitude was not inferior to that of Europeans, how even between those tribes major differences exist, and how their higher faculties merely lack the opportunity for development.²

(Marx 1840, 10; author’s translation)

Others later echoed a similar view: “It was not just the study of humans as part of natural history that drew attention, rather more his advocacy of the unity of mankind”³ (Ehlers 1901, 400; author’s translation). Not only in Göttingen, however, but throughout the Western world, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Blumenbach’s name became synonymous with the liberal notions of “unity of mankind” and “Negro emancipation.” Among the great names of biomedical science who saw him that way and cited him accordingly were – to select merely two examples – the English physician, anthropologist, and ethnologist James Cowles Prichard, and one of Georges Cuvier’s protégés, the French physiologist Marie Jean Pierre Flourens.⁴ This portrait of Blumenbach was given its definitive brushstroke by his most famous student, Alexander von Humboldt, who since the publication of the Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba (1826) was publicly known for his abolitionist stance; later, in the first volume of Kosmos (1845), having referred to his Göttingen teacher as “my master,” Humboldt canonically stated, “While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races” (Humboldt 1997, 356, 358).

When Blumenbach’s dissertation was translated into French, it was given a new, interpretative title, De l’unité du genre humain et de ses variétés (1804; 1806; 1808). In his Éloge historique of Blumenbach (1847), Flourens opined that Blumenbach’s fivefold division was not perfect; yet, referencing the French translation, he continued:

But the idea, the grand idea, which reigns and rules and predominates throughout in the admirable studies of Blumenbach is the idea of the unity of the human species, or, as it has also been expressed, of the human genus. Blumenbach was the first who wrote a book under the express title of the Unity of the Human Genus. The Unity of Mankind is the great result of the science of Blumenbach, and the great result of all natural history. […] The human race had forgotten its original unity, and Blumenbach restored it. […] According indeed to his doctrine, all men are born, or might have been born, from the same man. He calls the negroes our black brothers. It is an admirable thing that science seems to add to Christian charity, or, at all events, to extend it, and invent what may be called human charity. The word Humanity has its whole effect in Blumenbach alone.

(Flourens 1865, 56, 58, 60)

The “odious traffic” in black slaves would come to an end “in our age,” Flourens predicted (1865, 57), and humanitarian science would join politics in a crusade for abolition, led by Blumenbach,

a man of high intellect, an almost universal scholar, philosopher and sage; a naturalist, who had the glory, or rather the good fortune, of making natural history the means of proclaiming the noblest and, without doubt, the highest truth that natural history ever had proclaimed, The Physical Unity, and through the physical unity the moral unity, of the human race.

(Flourens 1865, 63)

Europe’s leading physical anthropologist who validated racist politics

Yet precisely this conclusion of “moral unity” was contentious and objected to by many. At about the time that the English translation of Flourens’s Éloge historique of Blumenbach appeared, his identity was radically changed by being made part of a racist discourse. The new interpretation originated in London, spread to the United States and, finally, in our own day, also found an audience in Germany. Blumenbach’s image was reconstructed and turned from the great scientific advocate of human equality into the leading authority of anthropology – in fact the founding father of physical anthropology – whose work on human varieties legitimized racism and, according to some, the politics of segregation and slavery. This reframing of Blumenbach took place within the Anthropological Society of London. The group was founded in 1863 in a breakaway move from the older Ethnological Society of London (Rainger 1978). The differences between the two societies were of a profound political-scientific kind. The fellows of the Ethnological Society, influenced by Prichard, were by and large monogenists and tended to be politically liberal in matters related to race. The Anthropological Society, by contrast, advocated polygenism and supported the Confederacy in the American Civil War (Desmond and Moore 2009, 332–333, 413). The issue that most sharply divided the two societies was the so-called Negro question. The president of the new society was James Hunt, author of On the Negro’s Place in Nature (1863b), a book written in opposition to “that gigantic imposture known by the name of ‘Negro Emancipation’” (Hunt 1863b, viii). He believed that Africans belong to a different species from Caucasians, that they are irredeemably inferior, and that slavery is the role for which they are best suited. In his programmatic “On the Study of Anthropology,” Hunt bracketed Blumenbach’s foundational work with the mission of the Anthropological Society:

Whatever may be the conclusion to which our scientific inquiries may lead us, we should always remember, that by whatever means the Negro, for instance, acquired his present physical, mental, and moral character, whether he has risen from an ape or descended from a perfect man, we still know that the Races of Europe have now much in their mental and moral nature which the races of Africa have not got. We have hitherto devoted our attention almost exclusively to physical Anthropology, which Blumenbach first founded. We now require to investigate the mental and moral characteristics of mankind generally. The difference between the European and the African is not so great physically as it is mentally and morally.

(Hunt 1863a, 3)

In Hunt’s opinion, “Blumenbach saw, in his five varieties of man, nothing but degeneracy from some ideal perfect type” (Hunt 1863b, 4). When in 1865 the Anthropological Society had grown to no fewer than 500 fellows/members, the vice president, Thomas Bendyshe, continued the appropriation of Blumenbach’s legacy by producing an English translation entitled The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, which included the obituary essays by Flourens and Marx. In the preface, Bendyshe criticized Flourens for having interpreted/translated Blumenbach’s doctoral thesis in the sense of “The unity of the human genus,” which he characterized as a “singular mistake” (Bendyshe 1865, xiii). The volume made some of Blumenbach’s work available to an English readership, but the selection was limited and the translation, in crucial respects, tendentious (Michael 2017). This partial source of information about Blumenbach, produced in the context of the racist polygenism of the Anthropological Society of London, has continued to be the primary source of information about Blumenbach in the English language. Till the present day, the portrayal of him as a founder of scientific racism has remained in vogue in different circles and for different purposes.

The German skull collector bearing historical blame for twentieth-century eugenicist atrocities

One of these circles took shape in the wake of World War II, in the context of which Blumenbach was included in a third, wholly different discourse. Two points of contrast stand out. First, the issue of race was now discussed less in relation to black slavery and more in relation to eugenics and the Holocaust. Second, although the main source of information about Blumenbach continued to be the inadequate Bendyshe volume, the purpose of painting a racist image of Blumenbach was no longer to adulate and appropriate him but to use his picture as a dart board. In a search for the historical causes of the eugenicist atrocities as promoted by National Socialist anthropology, the finger was pointed, in the international arena, at Blumenbach’s dissertation and his collection of human skulls – his “Golgotha.”

An early accusatory finger was that of the British-Polish mathematician and science popularizer Jacob Bronowski. In the book that accompanied his highly acclaimed BBC documentary The Ascent of Man (1973), he took special notice of Göttingen and paid tribute to the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß and the mathematical physicists Max Born and Werner Heisenberg, even telling his audience/readership about the “Gänseliesel” (a fountain statue in the town square) and the “Rathausspruch” (a saying painted on the wall of an entrance to the town hall): “Extra Gottingam non est vita” (outside Göttingen there’s no life); but then he went on to hint at a link between Blumenbach and Nazi racism:

The sky was darkening all over Europe. But there was one particular cloud which had been hanging over Göttingen for a hundred years. Early in the 1800s Johann Friedrich Blumenbach had put together a collection of skulls that he got from distinguished gentlemen with whom he corresponded throughout Europe. There was no suggestion in Blumenbach’s work that the skulls were to support a racist division of humanity, although he did use anatomical measurements to classify the families of man. All the same, from the time of Blumenbach’s death in 1840 the collection was added to and added to and became a core of racist, pan-Germanic theory, which was officially sanctioned by the National Socialist Party when it came into power.

(Bronowski 1973, 367)

In the course of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, as part of a wider discourse of postcolonialism i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Blumenbach studies
• Part II Defining human races
• Part III Racism, anti-racism, and Eurocentricity
• Appendix: Biographical sketch
• Index