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Race and Aesthetics in the anthropology of Petrus Camper (1722-1789)
After the discovery of the anthropoid ape in Asia and in Africa, eighteenth-century Holland became the crossroads of Enlightenment debates about the human species. Material evidence about human diversity reached Petrus Camper, comparative anatomist in the Netherlands, who engaged, among many other interests, in menschkunde. Could only religious doctrine support the belief of human demarcation from animals? Camper resolved the challenges raised by overseas discoveries with his thesis of the facial angle, a theory which succeeding generations distorted and misused in order to justify slavery, racism, antisemitism, and genocide. Thanks to his abundant papers in Dutch archives, Camper's ideas ar...
The Fate of Anatomical Collections
Almost every medical faculty possesses anatomical and/or pathological collections: human and animal preparations, wax- and other models, as well as drawings, photographs, documents and archives relating to them. In many institutions these collections are well-preserved, but in others they are poorly maintained and rendered inaccessible to medical and other audiences. This volume explores the changing status of anatomical collections from the early modern period to date. It is argued that anatomical and pathological collections are medically relevant not only for future generations of medical faculty and future research, but they are also important in the history of medicine, the history of t...
The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity
This volume offers one of the first systematic analyses of the rise of modern social science. Contrary to the standard accounts of various social science disciplines, the essays in this volume demonstrate that modern social science actually emerged during the critical period between 1750 and 1850. It is shown that the social sciences were a crucial element in the conceptual and epistemic revolution, which parallelled and partly underpinned the political and economic transformations of the modern world. From a consistently comparative perspective, a group of internationally leading scholars takes up fundamental issues such as the role of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the shaping of the social sciences, the changing relationships between political theory and moral discourse, the profound transformation of philosophy, and the constitution of political economy and statistics.
Petrus Camper in context
‘A meteor of spirit, science, talent and activity’ – thus Goethe described Petrus Camper (1722-1789). Goethe’s words contain all the elements that make Camper such a fascinating figure in the history of science and arts in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. This volume sheds new light on Camper’s versatility, engagement, and charisma in all fields and disciplines he ventured into and published on. It not only addresses his scientific activities, findings, and opinions, but also delves into his careers at the universities of Franeker, Amsterdam, and Groningen, his travels, relationships, friendships, and feuds, as well as the ways he communicated his wide-ranging research. Eleven case studies illustrate Camper’s views on eighteenth-century life and society, which motivated not just his scientific, but also his political, societal, literary, and artistic practice. Together they amount to a plea for an integration of all aspects of his scholarly life and persona.
The Invention of Race
This edited collection explores the genesis of scientific conceptions of race and their accompanying impact on the taxonomy of human collections internationally as evidenced in ethnographic museums, world fairs, zoological gardens, international colonial exhibitions and ethnic shows. A deep epistemological change took place in Europe in this domain toward the end of the eighteenth century, producing new scientific representations of race and thereby triggering a radical transformation in the visual economy relating to race and racial representation and its inscription in the body. These practices would play defining roles in shaping public consciousness and the representation of “otherness” in modern societies. The Invention of Race provides contextualization that is often lacking in contemporary discussions on diversity, multiculturalism and race.
Kant and the Naturalistic Turn of 18th Century Philosophy
"Struck by the absence of love affairs, adventures, travels, and political engagement in Immanuel Kant's life, a noted commentator describes him as unformed, to a degree surpassing all other philosophers, by challenging life events. Declaring that Kant 'can be understood only through his work in which he immerses himself with unwavering discipline,' the writer evokes the image of a body of writing demanding to be understood through text-internal analytical methods alone. The theme of the enclosed Kantian text is virtually irresistible. It dominates in teaching practice and in a large percentage of the expository literature, where Kant's ideas are paraphrased in more, or even less transparent...
Morphology and Evolution of Turtles
This volume celebrates the contributions of Dr. Eugene Gaffney to the study of turtles, through a diverse and complementary collection of papers that showcases the latest research on one of the most intriguing groups of reptiles. A mix of focused and review papers deals with numerous aspects of the evolutionary history of turtles, including embryonic development, origins, early diversification, phylogenetic relationships, and biogeography. Moreover it includes reports on important but poorly understood fossil turtle assemblages, provides historical perspectives on turtle research, and documents disease and variation in turtles. With its broad scope, which includes descriptions of material an...
Romantic Science
Although "romantic science" may sound like a paradox, much of the romance surrounding modern science—the mad scientist, the intuitive genius, the utopian transformation of nature—originated in the Romantic period. Romantic Science traces the literary and cultural politics surrounding the formation of the modern scientific disciplines emerging from eighteenth-century natural history. Revealing how scientific concerns were literary concerns in the Romantic period, the contributors uncover the vital role that new discoveries in earth, plant, and animal sciences played in the period's literary culture. As Thomas Pennant put it in 1772, "Natural History is, at present, the favourite science o...
Before Boas
The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology's academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnography and ethnology originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the "natural history of man." Han F. Vermeulen explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, and Great Britain in tracing how "ethnography" originated as field research by German-speakin...
Germany and the Black Diaspora
The rich history of encounters prior to World War I between people from German-speaking parts of Europe and people of African descent has gone largely unnoticed in the historical literature—not least because Germany became a nation and engaged in colonization much later than other European nations. This volume presents intersections of Black and German history over eight centuries while mapping continuities and ruptures in Germans' perceptions of Blacks. Juxtaposing these intersections demonstrates that negative German perceptions of Blackness proceeded from nineteenth-century racial theories, and that earlier constructions of “race” were far more differentiated. The contributors present a wide range of Black–German encounters, from representations of Black saints in religious medieval art to Black Hessians fighting in the American Revolutionary War, from Cameroonian children being educated in Germany to African American agriculturalists in Germany's protectorate, Togoland. Each chapter probes individual and collective responses to these intercultural points of contact.
