Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment

Abstract

The historiography of anthropology is notoriously fragmentary and fractious. In the American context, there is some confidence that a discipline came into place after Franz Boas. But before Boas, things remain far from clear. Scholars have hunted down first uses of key terms, only to be confuted by other scholars who found them earlier and elsewhere. Moreover, terms mean little without their concrete implementation, and historical inquiries have revealed not only how equivocal these terms have been, but also how disparate the implementations that evoked them. Various national traditions have taken different tacks in both rubrics and practices, adding to the blur in the overall history of the discipline. One of the most complicated historical problems has been the struggle in the nineteenth century over the very name for the whole discipline—the choice of anthropology over ethnography or ethnology.Into this very treacherous terrain Han Vermeulen has intrepidly ventured, with the aim of overthrowing much of the received wisdom (equivocal as it has been). With compelling historical-archival reconstructions and with equally persuasive theoretical clarifications, Vermeulen takes us into the intellectual world before Boas and into the most specific traditions out of which Boas in fact derived. His reconstruction offers the best history of the emergence of a research field involving what he terms the “ethnos terms,” ethnography and ethnology, indisputably at the core of the contemporary discipline of anthropology.Along the way, Vermeulen offers us a striking illustration of the manner in which contemporary politics continually color and often obscure historical reconstructions. This proved true in an aggravated manner in the twentieth century. Vermeulen is arguing that the origin of ethnography and ethnology should be traced to the exploration of Siberia by preponderantly German scholars in the eighteenth century. But, in the course of the twentieth century, Germany and Russia lost historical respectability in the West in a number of fields, not the least of which was anthropology. After the gruesome twist into racism of German Völkerkunde under the Nazis, that whole tradition came to be discredited. And from the Bolshevik Revolution through the Cold War, mutual hostility forestalled Western awareness of, and access to, the relevant Russian archival resources (457). Ironically, within the Soviet bloc, as East German scholars sought to find points of intellectual collaboration with their Russian overlords, their research uncovered crucial archival material, opening the way for Vermeulen's remarkable post–Cold War harvest (126). He is very scrupulous to note his reliance on their earlier research throughout his monograph.To restate Vermeulen's thesis: ethnography, as the description of peoples, and ethnology, as a comparative theory about them, developed out of the participation of preponderantly German scholars in the explorations undertaken by the Russian empire, over the course of the eighteenth century, of its vast territorial holdings in Siberia. The research program was then systematized in German universities, most importantly Göttingen, in the later eighteenth century. German-language terms—Völker-Beschreibung and then Völkerkunde—were articulated to formulate the new research program, and these terms were then rendered into (neo)Greek out of the conviction that “names of sciences had to be denoted in Greek” (447). Vermeulen establishes that German scholars coined the “ethnos-terms,” ethnography (for the description of a particular people) and ethnology (as the general theory of peoples) by the close of the eighteenth century, something hitherto unrecognized in the history of anthropology. As these Germans envisioned and practiced it, “Völkerkunde would be the general name for a study consisting of a theoretical part (Ethnologie) and a descriptive part (Ethnographie)” (347; see also 278). Crucially, German scholars worked up the agenda of research both for individual investigations and for their theoretical integration. That was part of a fundamental shift, during the “second Age of Discovery” in the eighteenth century, from the genre of travelogues, based on casual observations by individuals, to the genre of expert reports of scientific expeditions, based on preestablished research agendas (453).Vermeulen argues that the context of this breakthrough is highly pertinent. Scholars raised and educated in multiethnic societies in the Holy Roman empire and in the Russian empire possessed the indispensable sensibility to conceive and execute this new inquiry. “The diversity of peoples and nations had become a serious object of study for historians in both Russia and Germany long before 1789” (331). Thus, “the Holy Roman Empire's cultural, linguistic, political, and religious diversity played a key role in ethnography's emergence” (329). “German political disunity brought to the fore the notion that language was a characteristic of people's identity, that language was a marker of ethnicity, and that a people (Volk) was especially, although not exclusively, defined by its language” (331). The Russian empire became the proving ground for such a view. “German and Russian views of peoples or nations reinforced one another” (332).More concretely, Peter the Great's concern to inventory the resources of his Siberian holdings dovetailed with his creation of a new Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in 1725, attracting numerous scholars from Central Europe who would staff that very effort to canvas the Siberian lands for their peoples and their resources. Thus the inauguration of ethnography was directly connected with a colonialist project, something that has preoccupied recent, self-critical thought within and about the discipline of anthropology. Vermeulen takes up this question throughout his study in an intelligent and discriminating manner, to which we will return. But what is foremost, here, is his careful historical reconstruction of German engagement with Russian exploration.Vermeulen's narrative begins with a German figure who actively sought to influence the institutionalization of sciences in the newly reconfigured Russian empire: Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz actively communicated with Peter the Great and his entourage. He was, of course, one of the key proponents of Academies of Science in Europe, and his ideas contributed to what emerged in St. Petersburg. But there was an even more important aspect about Leibniz: he had the crucial theoretical insight upon which to found the new inquiry. As he wrote to a colleague, “languages are the most ancient monuments of the human species … that serve best for determining the origins of peoples” (39). It was Leibniz's historical linguistics that gave the German scholars the purchase they needed to create a new research program (440). For the key figure in Vermeulen's narrative, Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–1783), “the basis for ethnic classification was ‘not mores and customs, not food and economic pursuits, and not religion, for all these may be the same in peoples of different tribes and different in peoples of the same tribe. The only foolproof standard is language’” (209). Thus, “for Leibniz and German-speaking historians, nations were groups of people connected by means of a common history … predominantly defined by their languages” (29).Inspired particularly by Lafitau, Müller “intended to do for Siberia what French and Spanish authors had done for the Americas … compile ‘a most general description of peoples.’” Thus, he built on work that had already been done on the peoples of Siberia by earlier figures, particularly Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt (1685–1735), “the first scientifically trained explorer of Siberia,” trained in the medical faculty of the University of Halle, and motivated by the missionary zeal of the Pietism that pervaded that institution (115). But, in crucial contrast to Messerschmidt, Müller hoped that “from this, ‘a certain new science would be founded (eine gewisse neue Wissenschaft begründet werden möge)’” (201). Disciplinary background influenced this. Messerschmidt understood himself in terms of the already established practices of descriptive natural history, for which the cultural practices and linguistic identity of peoples were peripheral. “Whereas Messerschmidt was a naturalist trained by Hoffman and Wolff in Halle, Müller was trained as a historian … in Leipzig … Müller apparently strove to surpass Messerschmidt's tentative efforts in this field” (147). In his original research design, which he entitled historia gentium (1732), Müller already articulated a remarkably comprehensive set of topics for investigation regarding the peoples to be encountered in the Siberian expeditions. But he advanced beyond this original research scheme over the course of his own field work, arriving at an even more sophisticated model of the research program by 1740, for which he now employed the term Völker-Beschreibung (208). “Müller invented a systematic, comprehensive approach to the study that had not yet been named,” Vermeulen contends. “By using the term Völker-Beschreibung for such a study, Müller suggested that ethnography should deal with the world's national diversity (what Germans today call Völkervielfalt) and that it should be descriptive (i.e., empirical) and comparative” (171). Theory should build from a fund of empirical data. In this he was clearly inspired by the Baconian tradition of natural history, especially as it was articulated in Robert Boyle's important program, “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country, Great or Small” (1665) (170). Müller amassed a formidable set of data, with which he returned from Siberia to the St. Petersburg Academy. “His research program envisaged a series of ethnographic studies of all Siberian peoples, followed by their comparison with those of ‘other Asian, African, and American peoples’” (439). For all these reasons, Vermeulen asserts, “Müller deserves credit as a founder of ethnography” (132), yet “his name does not appear in any major work on the history of anthropology, with only two exceptions” (131).Müller's extensive materials got confined in the archives of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, together with materials from other German scholars, like Messerschmidt, in part because they ran afoul of Russian interests in their critiques of the treatment of indigenous peoples and in part because of their “Westernizing” disposition in the context of emergent “Slavophilia” (156). Only in the twenty-first century have many of these texts come to publication. “Müller's manuscripts from the 1730s and 1740s … partly written in Siberia, confirm that there had been a stage, before the introduction of Völkerkunde and ethnologia in the academic centers of Göttingen and Vienna, during which a new research program for describing all peoples of Siberia had been conceived and developed: Völker-Beschreibung” (23). But those materials were studied by his successors among the German scholars in the Petersburg Academy and his program was implemented in the Siberian expeditions that followed. Concurrently, they were transmitted to the German academic community, especially at the University of Göttingen. The key figure in this was August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809), who actually worked with Müller in the 1760s at the St. Petersburg Academy. Vermeulen writes: “My theory is that Müller's ethnological program influenced Schlözer, who brought the idea of ethnography to Germany” (217). But other transmitters included the famous father-son team of Reinhold and Georg Forster, noted for their participation in Cook's second voyage to the South Pacific, and for their own contributions to the development of ethnography on that basis (334–35).It was via Schlözer and others, primarily at the University of Göttingen in the 1770s, that ethnography got elaborated into ethnology. “Schlözer labored to integrate Müller's ethnographic perspective with [Johann David] Michaelis's historical-critical program into a view on general historiography including both Ethnographie and Völkerkunde” (274). The succession from Müller to Schlözer systematized the research program. “While Schlözer largely adopted Müller's views, he transformed the latter's (descriptive) Völker-Beschreibung into a (general) study of peoples he preferred to call Völkerkunde” (217). Trained as a historian, Schlözer worked up a theory of universal history that included a prominent place for ethnography. As he saw it, his project would integrate Leibniz's historical linguistics with philological analysis of historical documents (“diplomatics,” as it was called) to work up a “‘system of peoples (Systema populorum), grouped in classes and orders, genera and species, constructed following Linnaeus's method’” (283). Schlözer saw himself carrying out “‘Leibniz's method in ethnography’” (293) in the service of a universal history: “Only by combining historical and linguistic evidence would it be possible to solve the historical problems of how peoples were related, what their affinities were, where they had come from, and how they had reached their eventual habitats during and after the Great Migration” (301).Thanks to figures like Schlözer, “Göttingen was the leading center of geography, ethnology, and anthropology in the Late Enlightenment” (338). But ethnography/ethnology and anthropology were not the same things in the German Enlightenment. To be sure, “during the eighteenth century the study of anthropology boomed in an unprecedented way” (362), but “Enlightenment anthropology was not a ‘unified science of man,’ such as the Boasians developed in the early twentieth century. Instead, the word ‘anthropology’ was polyvalent and was used for diverse approaches” (393). As Vermeulen sees it, “anthropology was a medical, biological, or philosophical study of humankind. Social and cultural anthropology did not yet exist” (8). Anthropology considered the wholeness of man. Trends in medical anthropology took up the relation between physiology and psychology, while philosophical anthropology concerned itself with the moral “destination of mankind” (Bestimmung des Menschen). Neither of these concerns, however, took interest in the specific cultures of peoples. Thus, “when ethnology emerged during the Enlightenment, it was not part of anthropology but part of history”—the universal “history of humankind” (365). The impulses in medical and philosophical anthropology converged into a natural history of mankind, occasioning the rise of physical anthropology. That began with Linnaeus, who first situated humans within a larger class of “primates” in 1758. The program got taken up by Buffon, Camper, Blumenbach, and others over the century (368–69). “Thanks to Linnaeus and Buffon, the study of human beings occupied a central place in eighteenth-century life science” (359). That discourse of the “natural history” of mankind became swiftly infused with a discourse of “race.” Importantly, Vermeulen shows that this term had no place in the Siberian genesis of the “ethnos terms.” It “developed on separate tracks” (379). Above all, Vermeulen insists, correcting me among others (324), “Ethnography was not born from philosophy (Kant, Herder, the Scottish moral philosophers), nor from natural history (Linnaeus, Buffon, Blumenbach), but from history, assisted by linguistics” (456).Nonetheless, these discourses did overlap by the end of the century, as they became critically entangled with the concept of “race.” That began first in physical anthropology (from Linnaeus and Buffon to Blumenbach and Kant), and then, even more ominously, it got taken up into ethnology. Here, Vermeulen's story has much to contribute to “critical race theory.” In the first vein, “thanks especially to Buffon, the ‘varieties’ of the human species became a subject of interest to intellectuals in the second half of the eighteenth century, eventually resulting in the modern discourse of race” (363). In the second vein, “Herder and Meiners were concerned with a ‘history of humankind’ on both natural and cultural bases, although Meiners saw race as a dominant characteristic, while Herder did not” (365). The crossover from biological characterizations of racial difference, preponderantly skin color, to cultural “value judgments, intertwined with gender, beauty, and worth” (367) appeared already in the earliest European race classifications, e.g. those of François Bernier and Linnaeus. Still, in Buffon, Camper, and Blumenbach, this “natural history” did not imply racial inferiority. Moreover, all three believed that physical features associated with race were contingent and reversible. The figure who hardened all this into “immutable and inheritable” features, with decisive cultural concomitants, was Immanuel Kant, who Vermeulen claims, following Bernasconi, “invented ‘the modern concept of race’” (374; also 30). For Kant, racial difference was a natural phenomenon, discussed not in his anthropology but in his physical geography (379). At the same time, however, Kant drew grievous cultural inferences from his physical discrimination of races. A still more drastic cultural twist in race theory came with Christoph Meiners. “What was new with Meiners was that he used ethnological data to prove his anthropological theories. He was convinced that racial traits, both physical and moral, were inherited, and therefore, the racial hierarchy was of consequence for basic human rights” (386). Against this line of thought in Kant and Meiners, strong criticism was voiced by Herder, by Blumenbach, and above all, in Vermeulen's view, by Georg Forster (386).Vermeulen believes that the approach of Leibniz, Müller, and Schlözer, who “compared peoples on the basis of their languages instead of their customs or institutions,” was “less speculative and less judgmental” than approaches in the vein of the “conjectural history” of social evolution, especially as “race” began to intrude upon it in the work of the Göttingen theorists Christoph Meiners and Michael Hissmann, “who used the conjectural tradition contrasting ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ peoples” for a hierarchical racist agenda (321). This turn was not unique to Germany. “Concomitantly, a watershed occurred in the European academic mind-set after the French occupation of Egypt (1798–1801)…. The dominant outlook became Eurocentric rather than universalist and comparative” (351). Race became a rationale for nineteenth-century colonialism, not just a rationalization of the eighteenth-century slave trade, and ethnography/ethnology came to be thoroughly embroiled in that redeployment. Vermeulen locates this “discontinuity” in the 1830s and 1840s, in a “shift from a ‘science of nations’ toward a ‘science of races’” (453). It would be the thrust of “the Boasian revolution in American anthropology,” in response, to assert “a clear distinction between the cultural and biological approaches to the study of humankind” (453).Vermeulen takes up Talal Asad's well-known observation that while ethnography actually provided few resources to facilitate colonialism, inversely colonialism did facilitate – perhaps indispensably—the practices of ethnography (23–28, esp. 27). Vermeulen holds that this fits the case of the Siberian ethnographer aptly. “Müller and other academic members of the expedition were not complicit in Russia's colonization of Siberia. They had no position in the colonial administration…. The researchers had to be careful in criticizing colonial practice…. It is unlikely that their work influenced colonial policies during the eighteenth century” (441). For Vermeulen, clearly, “the colonial relation goes only so far in explaining the emergence of ethnography in early eighteenth-century Russia” (217). “If Müller collected ethnographic information for the Russians, he primarily intended to provide data for larger scholarly debates about peoples worldwide” (216).Finally, we must turn to a theoretical question in the history of sciences, namely what we mean by the very concept of a “discipline,” and when we are entitled to discern the historical actuality of a domain of inquiry. Between origins that must perforce be obscure, since they cannot know where they will lead, and a firmly established discipline by current conventions, there are enormous conceptual, not simply empirical hurdles to leap. Vermeulen faces this question head-on, insisting that the “inception process must be distinguished from the institutionalization of ethnography and ethnology during the nineteenth century.” While the full-fledged notion of a scientific discipline conventionally involves “museums, societies, journals, chairs, and departments,” the pioneering work of conceiving and constructing the research program gets lost in the background, “leaving out sciences in the making” (438). Vermeulen is correct to insist that many such research programs were launched in the eighteenth century, even if they achieved “disciplinary” status by current lights only considerably later. Science in the making needs to be taken more seriously by historians of science, and not just in the case of ethnography/ethnology.