Before Fieldwork: Textual and Visual Stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples and the Emergence of World Ethnography in Hungary in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

This chapter explores the emergence of a discourse on world ethnography in the Kingdom of Hungary between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth century. The author regards archives as a ″field″ for a historian of anthropology and elaborates on three main points: first, the principal agents of the so-called ″world ethnography″ in local, Jesuit, Lutheran, and Calvinist contexts; second, the respective historical sources that resulted from their work, i.e., missionary accounts, travelogues, (school)books of geography, and (school)books of natural history; and third, cultural stereotypes occuring in both texts and images, and relating to non-European indigenous peoples, for example, those of America, Asia, and Oceania. Examining the rise of global ethnography in Hungary as an entangled history, this chapter presents three detailed examples of the representation of indigenous peoples: demonization, hierarchization/barbarization, and exoticization. Demonstrating the Eurocentric background of Enlightenment ideas like that of savagery – barbarism – civilization, the chapter analyzes stereotypes relating to American Indians, Asian peoples (especially, the Chinese and the Samoyed), Polar peoples (the Greenland Inuit and the Sámi), and the Aborigins of Australia and Oceania.KeywordsHistory of anthropologyHistory of ethnographyRepresentation of indigenous peoplesCultural colonialismCultural history of HungaryVisual stereotypesDemonizationBarbarization