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Reviewed by:
  • The German Invention of Race
  • Carl Niekerk
The German Invention of Race. Edited by Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. vii + 221 pages. $60.00.

This is a fascinating, truly pathbreaking collection that seeks to bring some order into the early history of German anthropology and to clarify how that discipline understood biological difference. While the collection is particularly useful in mapping out the positions of Kant and Blumenbach, it also pays attention to a number of minor, but nevertheless interesting figures. One of the volume's main objectives is to reconstruct the 'biological' roots of German Idealism—'biology' being a discipline highly dependent on the religious, ethical, and aesthetic norms of the day. At least as interesting as the theories of race and ethnicity discussed in this collection is a secondary issue the volume raises: how Germans started to understand 'culture,' their own and that of others, as a historical phenomenon around 1800.

For me, the key essay in this book is Han Vermeulen's "The German Invention of Völkerkunde," which offers a very precise reconstruction of the conceptual history of a number of terms relevant for the volume: Völker-Beschreibung, Völkerkunde, Ethnographie, Ethnologie, and Anthropologie, to name a few. Through a detailed reading of [End Page 563] sometimes completely forgotten sources, Vermeulen is indeed able to show that these concepts—and consequently, one is led to conclude, an interest in the topics associated with them—first emerged in German-speaking countries between 1740 and 1798. Vermeulen ends his essay by pointing to the origins of these new concepts in ethnological practice (rather than in philosophy), the history of which has remained under-examined. That is a conclusion to which I subscribe wholeheartedly. Vermeulen's text makes clear that there exists quite a body of travel literature and other ethnographic documents that still await discovery and might substantially change how we look at the late Enlightenment in European cultural history.

Two other fine essays also present a developmental overview of thinking about 'race.' George S. Williamson reconstructs a fascinating debate in the early nineteenth century about the origins of ancient Greek civilization, and in particular about the question put forward by Friedrich Creuzer as to whether the culture of ancient Greece had roots in older religious systems in India and Egypt. The answers to this question had consequences for the (still-present) inclination in Germany to locate the origins of modern humanism in ancient Greece. This debate also had a racial component: it appeared as if 'white,' 'European' Greece had been dependent on other, non-European (and non-white) cultures (148). Earlier scholarship, in contrast, had sought to distinguish Greek freedom and autonomy from 'Oriental' despotism. Tuska Benes's contribution "From Indo-European to Aryans" sketches the history of Friedrich Schlegel's idea that, building on a rather free interpretation of certain biblical notions, Germans' roots were located in India. This was a vision with great normative potential that led Schlegel to distinguish 'honorable' and 'cultured' nations, which had preserved the Indian heritage, from other degenerated ones that had not been able to profit from the Indian influence (170). It was also Schlegel who introduced the term 'Aryan' into philological debates in 1819 (175), making possible a gradual racialization of what essentially had been a philological discourse on the relationship of languages. While most of the 'science' behind this was debunked by the mid-nineteenth century, a concept like 'Aryan' took on a life of its own in racial discourse. These two essays by Williamson and Benes should be required reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century German cultural history.

The core of this collection consists of four papers that focus on Kant's adoption of the concept of 'race.' John Zammito interprets Kant's interest in human diversity in the context of an intellectual debate with Herder, Platner, and Meiners, and, more indirectly, Voltaire, Hume, and Kames (37). Zammito identifies Kant's opposition to the idea that humankind must have different roots (polygeneticism) as one of the factors that determined his interest in presenting his theory of race in 1775 (he attributes the same motive to...

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