Zur Narrativisierung der Natur

Abstract

Abstract This essay investigates the narrative structures employed to describe nature in Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (1790). Blumenbach’s text can be read as the product of two fundamentally different (and opposed) narrative models which both have roots in the eighteenth-century discipline of natural history. On the one hand, the text shows traces of a static, predominantly spatially oriented model of representing nature, associated during the eighteenth century in particular with Carl Linné’s influential Systema naturae (first published 1735). The text, however, also demonstrates the advantages of a temporal, dynamic model of nature, introduced into Enlightenment natural history by Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749–1788). In addition, Blumenbach’s text also articulates the transition from natural history to anthropology, a new discipline emerging in the final decades of the eighteenth century that provides Blumenbach, who will be instrumental for its introduction, with a new set of narrative strategies.