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COMMENT

Notes on ‘Race’ and the Biologisationof Human Difference

It has come belatedly to my attention that the Journal of Pacific History has printed arejoinder by Tom Ryan to a footnote in my paper ‘Seaborne Ethnography and theNatural History of Man’.1 While it is gratifying that one’s footnotes are read, this onehardly does what it is accused of — namely, question Ryan’s ‘professional competence inthe history of anthropology’. Indeed, in a forthcoming publication I praise his ‘importantrecent study of Brosses [which] convincingly demonstrates his seminal contribution to themid-eighteenth-century emergence in France of the anthropology of Oceania’.2 Contraryto a footnote of his own (which misrepresents my argument in the work cited) and somerather heavy-handed insinuations in his rejoinder, I do not believe and have neversuggested that ‘ ‘‘scientific’’ thinking with respect to Oceania did not emerge until thelate 1760s and early 1770s’;3 or that ‘French anthropological thinking about the peoplesof the South Pacific began to coalesce only after 1800’; or that anthropology and ‘theintellectual field it belongs to came into being only during the last decades of the 18thcentury and, especially, the early decades of the 19th century’.4 What I have repeatedlyargued is the now ‘commonplace’ position that, towards the end of the 18th century,‘biological ideas of ‘‘race’’ as innate, hereditary, and fundamentally differentiatingsteadily displaced the environmental and cultural criteria with their connotation ofessential human similitude on which earlier descriptions and classifications mainlydrew’.5

I am pleased to read that Ryan shares this viewpoint.6 Unfortunately, this is notalways evident in his 2002 paper. Inverted commas do not adequately signal that his ‘useof the word ‘‘race’’ reflected its use by French Enlightenment writers’ since modern usersconventionally put ‘race’ in inverted commas in order to acknowledge and distancethemselves from its infamous history.7 My reading of the ten-page section of his paper

1 Bronwen Douglas, ‘Seaborne ethnography and the natural history of man’, Journal of Pacific History,38 (2003), 6, fn. 14. Tom Ryan, ‘On ‘‘reflectivity’’, ‘‘accuracy’’ and ‘‘race’’: a note on an underarm footnote’,

Journal of Pacific History, 39 (2004), 251–3. I saw an early draft of Ryan’s rejoinder but was given no opportunity

prepublication to respond to the final version. Non-Antipodean readers of the Journal (and, indeed, many

Australians) might well be perplexed by Ryan’s subtitle. They will be relieved to know that it refers not tomy personal hygiene but to an incident in a cricket match in 1981 which signifies ‘foul play’ in terms of some

New Zealanders’ sensitivities about Australians.2 Bronwen Douglas, ‘Inventing race: the science of man and the Pacific connection, 1750–1850’, in Bronwen

Douglas and Chris Ballard (ed.), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the science of race 1750–1940 (forthcoming).3 Indeed, I locate the emergence of what Ryan calls ‘more deliberately rational and scientific’ thinking

about Oceania earlier than he does, with Dampier rather than Brosses. See Douglas, ‘Seaborne ethnography’,

7, cf. Tom Ryan, ‘ ‘‘Le president des Terres Australes’’: Charles de Brosses and the French Enlightenment

beginnings of Oceanic anthropology’, Journal of Pacific History, 37 (2002), 158.4 Ibid., 158 and fn. 5; idem, ‘On ‘‘reflectivity’’ ’, 252.5Douglas, ‘Seaborne ethnography’, 6; see also idem, ‘Science and the art of representing ‘‘savages’’: reading

‘‘race’’ in text and image in South Seas voyage literature’, History and Anthropology, 11 (1999), 162.6Ryan, ‘On ‘‘reflectivity’’ ’, 251–2.7 Ibid., 251.

ISSN 0022-3344 print; 1469-9605 online/05/030331–8; Taylor and Francis� 2005 The Journal of Pacific History Inc.

DOI: 10.1080/00223340500312054

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headed ‘ ‘‘Race’’ and the Antipodes, c. 1750’ is that Ryan at times uses ‘race’unproblematically, thereby connoting its naturalised modern sense rather than a specific18th-century or earlier meaning.8 This is no great sin (even less a ‘heresy’9), and myinclusion of the adjectives ‘unreflectively and inaccurately’ in the offending footnote wasgratuitous. I regret the hurt they caused and rescind them unreservedly. However, sinceRyan has made my own integrity an issue, I take the opportunity to probe certain keyaspects of the history of the French term race.

Race in the 18th Century?

I ought to have given a more precise page reference to the assertions in Ryan’s paperwhich provoked my critical remark. They begin: ‘While it is a commonly held viewamongst historians of ideas that Buffon in 1749 first systematically introduced the word‘‘race’’ into the 18th-century scientific literature, that distinction surely belongs toMaupertuis. His Venus physique, originally published in 1745, makes frequent use of thewords ‘‘varieties’’ and ‘‘races’’ ’. A footnote adds that Maupertuis probably ‘adapted thissense of ‘‘race’’ from Francois Bernier . . . (1684)’ and makes the gratuitous accusationthat ‘‘ ‘experts’ ’’ who argued that ‘the word ‘‘race’’ was rarely used’ in the 17th and 18thcenturies ‘appear to have ignored the writings of Bernier, Maupertuis and Buffon’.10

To clear up the minor issues of incidence and precedence before addressing the moreimportant one of semantics, I make two points: first, that race was rarely used in ‘thissense’ — that is, as a synonym for the concrete noun variete, ‘variety’ — before the mid-18th century and not much then in comparison with the term’s prevalence in the 19thcentury, when it had acquired a novel extended meaning; second, that Bernier andMaupertuis used race only fleetingly in their major pieces on human difference. Bernierdid so three times, as an explicit synonym for espece, ‘kind, species’; Maupertuis ten timesin all — always concretely, three times with older signifieds, the remainder loosely as asynonym for espece, variete, nation or peuple, and only twice in his chapter on ‘the differentraces of men’, including the title.11 With respect to animals and plants, Maupertuisadopted the standard Linnaean differentiation of stable especes from accidental varietes,but he only applied it patchily to man, whom he represented as a single, variegated genrehumain, ‘human genus’, or race des hommes, ‘human race’, divided into numerous especes,

8 Idem, ‘‘ ‘Le president’ ’’, 166–76. It is by no means unusual for historians of ideas to imply an

unproblematic naturalisation of the modern idea of race with respect to the 18th century; see, e.g., the excellentpaper by J.H. Eddy, Jr, ‘Buffon, organic alterations, and man’, in William Coleman and Camille Limoges (ed.),

Studies in History of Biology (Baltimore 1984), VII, 22–39. In this context, I reiterate my 2003 reference to Londa

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: gender in the making of modern science (Boston 1993), 115–25, where the word ‘race’

appears repeatedly as a gloss for contemporary terminology in her discussion of 18th-century ideas of humandifference.

9Ryan, ‘On ‘‘reflectivity’’ ’, 252.10 Idem, ‘‘ ‘Le president’ ’’, 167 and fn. 48.11 [Francois Bernier], ‘Nouvelle division de la terre, par les differentes especes ou races d’hommes qui

l’habitent, envoyee par un fameux voyageur a Monsieur ***** a peu pres en ces termes’, Journal des Scavans, 12

(1684),148, 153; Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Venus physique (n.p. 1745), 119, 122, 123, 136, 140, 142,

148, 158, 167. In the key second part of Venus physique, Maupertuis twice used race with its original connotation

of common ancestry or descent (‘races of dogs, pigeons, canaries’; ‘races of squinters, cripples, gout sufferers,consumptives’) and once with the long-established generic meaning of ‘human race’ (‘la race des hommes’).

In contrast to his sparing use of race, espece appears eighteen times, variete fourteen, nation seven, and peuple ten.

In the fifth edition, to which Ryan refers, the heading of the second part changes from ‘On the origin ofthe blacks’ to ‘Varieties in the human species’. Idem, ‘Venus physique’ (5th edn, 1748), in Oeuvres, ed. Giorgio

Tonelli, 4 vols (Hildesheim 1965–74), II, 97. All translations are my own.

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races, varietes, nations or peuples.12 The following composite passage shows clearly histransposable and ambiguous terminology with respect to the fraught subject of humandifferences:

[Africans] seem to comprise a new species of men . . . [T]owards the East, we shallsee peoples whose features are softened . . . [In America] we find . . .many newvarieties . . . [and in the far south] a race of men whose height is almost doubleours . . . [In the extreme north of Europe we find] another species of men very differentfrom these . . . [T]he Lapps in the North, the Patagonians in the South appear [to be]the extreme limits of the race of men . . . . [In the islands of the Indian and PacificOceans] each people, each nation there has its own form.13

In contrast, race recurs often in Buffon’s long essay on ‘Varieties in the human species’,published in 1749 in the third volume of his Histoire naturelle.14 But, like Maupertuis, hisusage of the term at this point was hardly systematic or precise. For Buffon, race was moreor less interchangeable with espece (in the sense of ‘kind’) or variete and overlappedconfusingly with nation or peuple. Thus, in a notorious passage he wrote:

we find in Lapland and on the northern coasts of Tartary, a race of men ofsmall stature and bizarre figures, with faces as savage as their mores . . .who seem tohave degenerated from the human species [espece humaine] . . . in a climate uninhabitableby all other nations. All these peoples have large, flat faces . . .This race . . . seems to be aparticular kind of stunted individuals.

With respect to Africans, he opined:

there is as much variety in the black race as in the white . . . It is therefore necessary todivide the blacks into different races, & it seems to me that we can reduce themto . . . two kinds of black men . . .Then by examining more particularly the differentpeoples who compose each of these black races, we shall see there as many varieties asin the white races.15

Maupertuis and Buffon invariably used race as a concrete noun and not in the abstractsense attributed to them by Ryan.16 Maupertuis, indeed, used no abstract noun indiscussing human differences in Venus physique, while Buffon’s was usually variete orvariation. Moreover, Ryan’s named list of ‘different varieties or ‘‘races’’ of humani-ty . . . historically associated with specific regions’ by Buffon is overly categorical —though less so than the conventional assertion, started by Blumenbach and repeated

12Maupertuis, Venus physique, 123, 125, 134, 137, 151, 153–4. The phrase espece humaine, ‘human species’,

does not appear until the fifth edition. See fn. 11.13 Ibid., 121–3, my emphasis. Cf. Ryan’s contention that Maupertuis ‘recognised basic physical differences

between the races of Europe and Africa, and between these and the races of Asia and America’. ‘‘ ‘Le president’ ’’,

168, my emphasis.14 [Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon], ‘Varietes dans l’espece humaine’, in Histoire naturelle, generale et

particuliere, 15 vols (Paris 1749–67), III (1749), 371–530.15 Ibid., 371–2, 453–4, my emphasis.16 ‘Maupertuis insisted that ‘‘race’’ is a descriptive rather than a fixed category . . .Nor is there any necessary

correlation between race and degree of civilisation’; ‘It was Buffon’s view that climate is the primary cause

of ‘‘race’’ or human variety’. Ryan, ‘‘ ‘Le president’ ’’, 168. Ryan similarly misattributes a ‘concept of ‘‘race’’’ toBrosses with reference to his indeterminate use of the concrete collective noun race to label ‘frizzy-haired blacks’

whom, he conjectured, were ‘the first inhabitants of the torrid zone: . . . a more brutish and ferocious kind [espece]

of men than the others . . . [which] long ago drove it from its possessions in Asia, . . .& have little by littledestroyed the race’. [Charles de Brosses], Histoire des navigations aux terres australes . . . , 2 vols (Paris 1756), II,

378–9, my emphasis; Ryan, ‘‘ ‘Le president’ ’’, 175.

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by Darwin, amongst numerous others, that Buffon classified man into six varieties orraces.17 Rather, Buffon successively described the myriad nuances of the multiple especes,varietes, races, nations or peuples known to him within the single espece humaine but avoidedsystematic labelling or formal classification.18 Slotted into this exhaustive cataloguebetween ‘the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Pegu and Aracan’ (in what is nowMyanmar) and the ‘peoples of the Indian peninsula’ were the inhabitants of the MalayArchipelago, some western Pacific Islands, New Guinea, and New Holland — whomRyan thinks were ‘noticeably missing’ from the ‘schema’ he attributes to Buffon.19

A Semantic History of Race

Etymologically obscure, the French term race dated from about the 15th century when itsignified ‘origin [extraction]’, ‘ancestry [lignee]’, ‘lineage’, or ‘breeding’, of both people andanimals — early definitions include ‘house’, ‘family’, ‘kindred’, ‘progeny’, ‘stock’ and italso became a synecdoche for humanity as a whole, ‘the human race’.20 In a short,anonymous article published in 1684, Bernier gave the term a radically expandedreferent as well as an eerily modern look which would not recur for nearly a century. Heposited the existence of ‘four or five species [especes] or races of men whose difference is sonoteworthy, that it can justly serve as the basis for a new division of the earth’, displacinggeography. He speculated that African ‘blackness’ must be ‘essential’ rather than an‘accidental’ product of exposure to the sun and sought its cause ‘in the particularconstitution [la contexture] of their body’, or ‘in the blood’, or in ‘the seed [la semence]which is particular to certain races or species’.21 But the article had little conceptualimpact, though Blumenbach acknowledged its author as the first to divide ‘mankind intovarieties’.22 Buffon’s erratic use of race in 1749 to label extensive human populations —such as his ‘Lapp race & Tartar race’23 — thus marked a significant widening of theterm’s original genealogical referents but it was not the standard modernist usage.

Buffon’s contribution to the racialisation of European concepts of human differencehas been vigorously debated, ranging from Tzvetan Todorov’s hyperbole that‘the racialist theory in its entirety is to be found in Buffon’s writings’ to KenanMalik’s protest in response that his ideas ‘were a long way from nineteenth-century

17 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, De generis humani varietate nativa (3rd edn, Gottingae 1795), 297; CharlesDarwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (2nd edn, London 1882 [1871]), 175. Michele Duchet

discerned in Buffon’s work a ‘spectral analysis of the human species’ into ‘four principal races’. Anthropologie et

histoire au siecle des lumieres (2nd edn, Paris 1995 [1971]), 271, orig. emphasis.18 Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: the fallacy of race (6th edn, Walnut Creek CA, 1997 [1942]),

69; see also Robert Bernasconi, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Bernasconi (ed.), Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth

Century, 8 vols (Bristol 2001), I, v–xi. Online <http://www.thoemmes.com/18cphil/race_intro.htm>. Accessed

14 Aug. 2005.19 [Buffon], ‘Varietes’, 395–411; Ryan,‘‘ ‘Le president’ ’’, 168. Buffon devoted separate sections of his 1777

Supplement to information provided by recent voyagers — notably Cook — on the ‘Islanders of the South Sea’

and the ‘Inhabitants of the southern lands’. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, generale

et particuliere: supplement, IV, Servant de suite a l’histoire naturelle de l’homme (Paris 1777), 539–55.20Le dictionnaire de l’Academie francoise, dedie au roy, 2 vols (Paris 1694), II, 364; Robert Estienne, Dictionaire

Francoislatin, contenant les motz & manieres de parler Francois, tournez en Latin (Paris 1539), 411; Jean Nicot, Thresor de

la langue francoyse, tant ancienne que moderne (Paris 1606), 533–4.21 [Bernier], ‘Nouvelle division’, 148–50, 153; see also Pierre H. Boulle, ‘Francois Bernier and the origins of

the modern concept of race’, in Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (eds), The Color of Liberty: histories of race in France

(Durham, NC 2003), 13–16; Siep Stuurman, ‘Francois Bernier and the invention of racial classification’,

History Workshop Journal, 50 (2000), 1–21.22 Blumenbach, De generis humani, 296.23 [Buffon], ‘Varietes’, 379.

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racism’.24 The ‘commonly held view’ referred to by Ryan is Ashley Montagu’ssuggestion that in 1749 ‘Buffon introduced the word ‘‘race’’, in its zoologicalconnotations, into the scientific literature’.25 It is this ‘distinction’ that Ryan shifts toMaupertuis, who clearly does not warrant it. Nicholas Hudson argued further that, in1749, Buffon ‘first made systematic use of the term ‘‘race’’ ’ to denominate subgroupsof the human species, thereby ‘elevating this old word to a new, eminent status inscientific nomenclature’. Buffon, said Hudson, deliberately chose race in preferenceto Linnaeus’s static, schematic term variete because race connoted a labile ‘familylineage’ and enabled him ‘to stress the changing nature of human difference’.26

Hudson’s judgement rehearsed Buffon’s own retrospective claim that his latersystematisation of the term race was immanent in his earlier usage.27 Both are belied bythe indefinite terminology of the 1749 essay in which Buffon inconsistently conflated racewith espece, variete, or nation.28 By 1753, he was using races to designate subgroupings ofanimal especes formed by degeneration following ‘migration’ into different climates:‘There are different races among asses as among horses’.29 Indeed, his only clear — andvery late — definition of the term referred explicitly to animal breeding and recalled itsolder meaning: ‘The races in each species of animal are only constant varieties whichperpetuate themselves by generation.’30 He first systematically applied race to humanbeings in the Supplement of 1777, giving it the extended connotation of ‘resemblance’rather than direct filiation.31 He justified his having used the phrase ‘the Lapp race’ in1749 by now differentiating the word race ‘in the most extended sense’ from its ‘narrow’(genealogical) meaning, synonymous with nation. An extreme climate had produced such‘resemblance’ between all people living north of the Arctic Circle — from Lappland toSiberia, Canada and Greenland — that they were of the ‘same nature’ or the ‘same race’,though not the ‘same nation’. Whatever the ‘first origin’ of the ‘men of a region [pays]’, heargued, ‘the climate to which they become habituated will in the long run so stronglyaffect their first state of Nature that, after a certain number of generations, all these menwill resemble each other, even when they have come from different, widely separatedlands [contrees]’ and were originally so ‘very unalike’ that ‘we cannot even conjecture thatthey issue one from the other’.32 Juxtaposing two major signifieds of the French termespece and identifying race with the vaguer sense (sorte, ‘kind’, ‘type’33), he concluded that

24Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: race, history and culture in Western society (London 1996), 54; Tzvetan

Todorov, Nous et les autres: la reflexion francaise sur la diversite humaine (Paris 1989), 126.25Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, 68; see also Philip Sloan, ‘The gaze of natural history’, in

Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (ed.), Inventing Human Science: eighteenth-century domains

(Berkeley 1995), 135.26Nicholas Hudson, ‘From ‘‘nation’’ to ‘‘race’’: the origin of racial classification in eighteenth-century

thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1996), 253–5. Hudson noted that ‘race’ was a ‘conveniently ambivalent’

term for late 18th-century savants seeking a portmanteau category for both despised and approved human

groupings, because its original meaning of ‘breeding’ applied equally to animals and nobles.27 Buffon, Supplement, IV, 455–6, 462.28Duchet remarked the ‘lack’ of ‘precision’ in Buffon’s use of the term races in the ‘course’ of his 1749

inventory of human varieties but contended that he ‘really defined’ race at the end of the essay. However, Buffon

at this point made no mention of races and referred only to varietes de l’espece. Duchet extrapolated this usage as‘a clear-cut distinction’ between the concepts race and espece but her reasoning, like Hudson’s, was premature.

Duchet, Anthropologie, 253–4, 270–1.29 [Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon], ‘L’asne’, in Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere, 15 vols

(Paris 1749–67), IV (1753), 396–9.30Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, ‘Des epoques de la nature’, in Histoire naturelle, generale et

particuliere: supplement, V (Paris 1778), 252.31Duchet, Anthropologie, 271–3.32 Buffon, Supplement, IV, 462–3, 478–80.33 Jean-Francois Feraud, Dictionnaire critique, de la langue francaise, 3 vols (Marseille 1787–8), II (1787), 148.

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these polar people ‘form only a single, similar kind of men [espece d’hommes], that is, asingle race different from all the others in the human species [espece humaine]’.34

Buffon thus never ceased to maintain that the ‘great differences between men dependon the diversity of climate’ though he also acknowledged that climate operated incomplex ways, together with nutrition and customs or lifestyle, to produce the vast arrayof human differences.35 In his conception, the varietes, races or especes d’hommes of the singleespece humaine always remained flexible, in principle reversible products of externalinfluences and were neither innately organic nor immutable: ‘their flaws are not original;their differences being only external, these alterations of nature are only superficial’.Man’s return to his natal (temperate) environment would slowly reverse the degenerativeeffects of ‘extreme climates’ and eventually restore ‘his original features, his primitive size& his natural colour’.36 There is considerable irony in the charge (or implication) thatBuffon originated the modernist, biological idea of ‘race’ since — at least before Darwin— that concept’s defining attribute was fixity: thus, in the mid-1850s Isidore GeoffroySaint-Hilaire maintained that ‘what characterises a race, is not the importance of themodifications which distinguish a series of individuals, but the constancy of thesemodifications, or, more clearly, the constancy of their hereditary transmission’.37

‘Race’ and the Biologisation of Human Difference

Buffon’s ‘extended sense’ of the term race undoubtedly gained the credit of his immenseprestige, notwithstanding the ambiguities of his usage. However, the systematicbiologisation of the idea of ‘race’, its critical redefinition as a permanent inheritedcharacteristic signified externally by skin colour, and its formal differentiation from theterms ‘variety’ or ‘species’ were first given coherent expression in a series of paperspublished between 1775 and 1788 by Kant.38 ‘Race’ in this innatist sense waspopularised by Blumenbach — who had earlier attributed human physical differencesentirely to external causes — and was quickly adopted in France by Cuvier and otherleading naturalists. It underwrote the classification and ranking of bounded human typeson the basis of supposedly stable, congenital somatic differences. Such positions refuted,

34 Buffon, Supplement, IV, 484.35 Ibid., 462; [Buffon], ‘Varietes’, 446–8, 528–30; idem, ‘De la degeneration des animaux’, in Histoire

naturelle, generale et particuliere, 15 vols (Paris 1749–67), XIV (1766), 314–16; Duchet, Anthropologie, 256–8, 274–6;

Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 33–8.36 [Buffon], ‘Varietes’, 371–9, 523–4, 530; idem, ‘Degeneration’, 311, 313; Duchet, Anthropologie, 271; Eddy,

‘Buffon’, 31.37 Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, ‘Sur la classification anthropologique et particulierement sur les types

principaux du genre humain’, Memoires de la Societe d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1 (1860–3), 131–2, fn. 2, orig.

emphasis.38 See especially Immanuel Kant, Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen zur Ankundigung der Vorlesungen der

physischen Geographie im Sommerhalbenjahre 1775 (Konigsberg 1775); idem, ‘Bestimmung des Begriffs einer

Menschenrace’, Berlinische Monatsschrift, 6 (1785), 390–417; see also Bernasconi, ‘Introduction’; Timothy Lenoir,

‘Kant, Blumenbach, and vital materialism in German biology’, ISIS, 71 (1980), 87–96; Thomas Strack,‘Philosophical anthropology on the eve of biological determinism: Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster on the

moral qualities and biological characteristics of the human race’, Central European History, 29 (1996), 291–9;

cf. Sloan, ‘Gaze’, 148, fn. 79. Georg Forster published a diatribe against Kant’s use of Rasse, an indeterminate

term that Forster disliked and considered ‘synonymous’ with Varietat, ‘variety’. It was ‘borrowed’ from French,he said, where it had the ‘indefinite’ sense of ‘ancestry’ and was ‘tacitly’ subordinate to ‘species’. He thought it

should be applied sparingly and only to people — such as ‘the Papuans and the black islanders of the Southern

Seas’ — whose morphology was ‘idiosyncratic’ and origin ‘unknown’. Georg Forster, ‘Noch etwas uber dieMenschenrassen’, Teutsche Merkur, Nov. 1786, 159–60. I thank Christa Knellwolf for help in translating

Forster’s paper.

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or in Blumenbach’s case markedly qualified, the climatic argument for human differencesconsistently put by Buffon — but, significantly, not by Maupertuis.

Notwithstanding Maupertuis’s fleeting, indefinite usage of race (which saves him fromthe retrospective obloquy of having ‘systematically’ inserted the term into science), hewas — in important respects not mentioned by Ryan — a notably prescient precursor ofthe biologisation of human difference. Endorsing the Biblical history of common humandescent from ‘two first parents’, he set himself to solve the conundrum of how they couldhave engendered ‘so many so different species’ dispersed across the globe.39 Three relatedphenomena had to be clarified: ‘the production of accidental varieties; the succession ofthese varieties from one generation to the next; finally the establishment or destruction ofspecies’. He explained them in terms of a tentative epigenetic theory of reproductionwhich made human physical diversity the result of the hereditary transmission ofparticles carried in the ‘seminal fluids’ of both women and men.40 Maupertuis thus gaveprimacy to the internal operation of heredity though he did not ‘exclude’ the external‘influence’ of climate and diet. He further speculated that human agency might havebeen involved in the apparent correlation between ‘different races’ and ‘different parts’ ofthe globe: ‘when giants [‘‘Patagonians’’], dwarfs [‘‘Lapps’’], or blacks were bornamongst other men, pride or fear would have roused the majority of the human genusagainst them; & the most numerous species would have banished these deformed races tothe least habitable climates of the earth’.41

When in 1749 Buffon began to publish his own, more detailed epigenetic theory ofgeneration and reproduction, he warmly acknowledged the precedence and ‘truth’ ofMaupertuis’s work.42 At the heart of Buffon’s thinking was a radically reworked conceptof espece, ‘species’, which gave this heretofore abstract taxonomic category a ‘realexistence’ and material continuity as a ‘constant succession of similar individuals whoreproduce themselves’.43 From 1753, he gradually formulated a theory of the organicalteration of species through degeneration which reconciled his biological ideas ongeneration and reproduction with his conviction of the controlling influence of climateand other environmental conditions.44 However, it was not until the 1760s that heapplied these emerging ideas to the puzzle of variation within the human species. There isno hint of a biological explanation for diversity in Buffon’s 1749 essay on man but, in1766, he briefly sketched an outline of human organic change which qualified his earlierenvironmentalism. Climate was directly but ‘superficially’ responsible for the colour ofthe skin, hair and eyes. Changes in height, facial features and hair quality were the ‘moreprofound’ results of a more complex nexus of causes. The ‘most general & the most direct’was the quality of food which acted on man’s ‘internal form’. Food, Buffon proposed,served to channel ‘the influence of the land’ that man inhabits to produce ‘internalalterations, which having then perpetuated themselves by generation became the generaland constant characters in which we recognise the different races and even nations which

39Maupertuis, Venus physique, Preface, 134, 165.40 Ibid., 153–60. For an exposition of Maupertuis’s theory of the production of morphological diversity in

human beings through the operation of ‘internal hereditary mechanisms’, see Donald Grayson, The Establishment

of Human Antiquity (New York 1983), 145–6; see also Bentley Glass, ‘Maupertuis, pioneer of genetics and

evolution’, in Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus, Jr (eds), Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1859

(Baltimore 1959), 59–78.41Maupertuis, Venus physique, 119, 128, 158, 167. Ryan, in contrast, appears to claim that Maupertuis

attributed variations in human skin colour to adaptation to climatic extremes. Ryan, ‘‘ ‘Le president’ ’’, 167–8.42 [Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon], ‘Histoire generale des animaux’, in Histoire naturelle, generale et

particuliere, 15 vols (Paris 1749–67), II (1749), 164; Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 7, 29.43 Ibid., 18; idem, ‘L’asne’, 386; Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 4–12; Sloan, ‘Gaze’, 131–3.44 Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 12–22.

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compose the human genus’. He continued, however, to insist that such changes were atleast theoretically reversible in a restored favourable environment.45

Return to the Beginning

I end where I began: by reiterating my appreciation of Tom Ryan’s contribution to thehistory of anthropology in Oceania in the 18th century and his work on Brosses inparticular; and by defending myself against insinuation, in case I am meant to beamongst Ryan’s unnamed ‘Pacific-centred historians of ideas’ who have privileged‘discontinuity at the expense of continuity’.46 If so, I deny the charge. I find theindeterminate concepts of uneven discursive shifts, ambiguous reinscriptions, and partialrecursions more useful and plausible than the stark cleavages of rupture or revolution.47

It is the unexpected paradox of Bernier’s seeming modernity and the lack of consequenceof his ideas which interest me. I am exercised by the double irony that Buffon used theword race repeatedly but was not particularly modern about it; whereas Maupertuishardly used race at all while his theory of particulate inheritance foreshadowed modernistbiological theories of human diversity — that momentous reworking of older ideas ongeneration and reproduction which has underpinned racialist and antiracialist ideologiesalike since their consolidation at the end of the 18th century.

BRONWEN DOUGLAS

45 [Buffon], ‘Degeneration’, 313–16; Eddy, ‘Buffon’, 22–39; Sloan, ‘Gaze’, 133–9.46Ryan, ‘On ‘‘reflectivity’’ ’, 253.47 See Douglas, ‘Science’, 163, where I argued that ‘a case for disjuncture and change’ in the history of ideas

should not ‘elide continuities and genealogical links . . . [or] imply discursive homogeneity and consistency on

either side of the notional shift’; and advocated ‘precise attention to ambivalence, discrepancy, contestation,flux, and national and other variations within and between contemporary discourses, texts and genres of

representation’.

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