Defining the terrain

The rise of the modern empires threw Europeans into contact with exotic peoples and environments on an unprecedented scale. The bewildering diversity presented interpretive challenges without parallel.

Anthropology was part of an ensemble of new fields of knowledge that emerged during the Enlightenment. As a systematised approach to the study of human society, activity and behaviour, it sits alongside economics, linguistics, sociology, psychology and other branches of the social sciences. Anthropology bears a particularly close relationship to empire since much of the primary data on which it depended was the product of interaction between native peoples and their colonisers. Of course, the notion of anthropological research did not arrive pre-formed. The recorded observation of manners, customs and traditions extends far back into European history, to the Renaissance and beyond.¹ The astrologer and polemicist Richard Harvey made the first recorded use of the word ‘anthropology’ in Philadelphus, or a defence of Brutes and the Brutans history (1593).

The rise of anthropology was indelibly associated with the opening of the world to the imperial eye. As reports from afar arrived in the metropole, the vastness and complexity of the human panorama became ever more apparent. Scientists and others had cause to wonder at what might connect these disparate parts of the human family at the moment when, according to Foucault, human beings ‘became an object of science’. It was, he argued, a monumental ‘event in the order of knowledge’. Humanity could be seen not as God-given, but as one among many of the productions of nature. This epistemic shift had profound effects, since it provided a new and purportedly rational foundation for the objectification of those whom Europeans deemed culturally inferior. Foucault said of anthropology that it is ‘the knowledge we have of peoples without histories’.³ Giving vali­dation to the condescension of the ‘civilised’ towards the ‘uncivilised’ is certainly a key aspect of anthropology in the nineteenth century. Yet this aspect of the ‘science of man’ does not encapsulate the full complexity, let alone the contradictoriness, of the anthro­pological project, which could champion the value of all cultures, even when looking down at some of them from a great height. As an early manual, published for the guidance of would-be researchers, emphasised: ‘The anthropologist regards all races as equally worthy of a place in the records of human development.

Fields of knowledge are shaped by disputation, as much as organised around zones of consensus. That is certainly true of the emerging science of humanity, which attracted diverse European thinkers from linguistic, national and ethnic traditions. From the vantage point of Britain or continental Europe, ‘savages’ were necessarily seen from afar, whereas in the United States, where there existed also a thriving anthropological discipline, many key practitioners were personally associated with Native Americans. While cross-pollination between the German-, French- and English-language traditions certainly occurred, anthropological enquiry remained somewhat inchoate for much of the nineteenth century. Even something so basic as agreement on a name for the new science proved elusive. The term ‘ethnology’ was at times championed as the most apposite descriptor, some writers intending it to displace the word ‘anthropology’, while others treated it as a synonym. ‘Ethnology’, too, drew from the Greek—ethnos refers to a ‘race’ or a ‘people’—and when first printed in English in 1842, it was defined as the ‘science which treats of races and peoples, and of their relations to one another, their distinctive physical and other characteristics, etc.’⁵ The Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843, became the first organisation in Britain specifically dedicated to the science of humanity, although it eventually merged with a rival group, the Anthropological Society, to form the Anthro­pological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (later the Royal Anthropological Institute). These days, the word ‘ethnology’ has lost much of its currency, although a cognate term, ‘ethnography’, is used frequently within and outside the discipline, most often to describe the fieldwork component of the anthropologist’s research process. ‘Anthropology’ now serves as a broad descriptor for often dissimilar fields. For ‘social anthropologists’, the patterns of culture and society provide the objects of investigation, while the ‘physical anthropologists’ study human physiology and its transformation over time.

Nineteenth-century anthropology comprised a field of knowledge, supposedly a science, that involved analysis and/or comparison of ‘races’, ‘civilisations’ or ‘peoples’, variously defined. There remained disagreement about whether cultural-cum-social attributes pro­vided the key indicators of a people’s distinctiveness, or whether the essential differences between these groups manifested in their physiological form. Anthropology from that period has left a legacy of elephantine proportion. As well as creating written texts in copious quantities, researchers of the imperial epoch used non-literary methods to docu­ment the peoples of the world. Some collected artefacts or physiological specimens, espe­cially (and now controversially) human bones and other body parts. Other branches of anthropology depended on archaeological investigation. There were also schools that championed the research potential of what, to the Victorians, were ‘new media’: sound recordings, films and photographs. A selective pruning through this material illuminates anthropology at a formative moment in its history; it also offers a compelling insight into modern imperialism.