Bones, Bodies amd Behavior: Essays in Behavioral Anthropology

On the Origins of French Ethnology: William Edwards and the Doctrine of Race

ON THE ORIGINS OF FRENCH ETHNOLOGY William Edwards and the Doctrine of Race CLAUDE BLANCKAERT What were my colleagues in Parisian ethnography doing while I was dreaming in Thebes? They were forming a society around M. Edwanls, author of the famous memoir less rich in logic than in accommodation for all. (Salles 1870:537) This rather sceptical recollection by Eusebe de Salles, a traveller-polymath of traditional monogenist inclinations, testifies both to the conflict of scholarly authority pervading the polymorphous field of French anthropological studies at the beginning of the nineteenth century and to the consensus that William Frederic Edwards, the "reformer" of the idea of race, was able to bring about. In the 1820s linguistic-geographers, travellers, naturalists, and historians by their very rivalries strengthened a beliefin the racial determination of the phenomena of material and symbolic civilization. In this context, the personality of William Edwards and the retrospectively multidisciplinary character ofhis proposed field ofstudy enabled his "systeme des races" to draw together dispersed and largely antagonistic theoretical tendencies. Thenceforth , their voices concurred in attributing a fundamentally determinative Claude Blanckaert is charge de recherche in the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-L.P. 21), Paris. His doctoral dissertation (1981) was on the history of French physical anthropology from Buffon to Paul Broca. More recently, he has edited a volume entitled Naissance de l'Ethnologie? Anthropologie et Missions en Amerique XVIeXVIII 'siecle (Paris, 1985), and published "Les vicissitudes de I'angle facial et les debuts de la craniometrie (1765-1875)", Revue de Synthese (1987). He is currently studying the institutionalization ofFrench anthropology in the nineteenth century, and preparing a thesis on the "natural history of man." 18 ON THE ORIGINS OF FRENCH ETHNOLOGY 19 role to "race," making its systematization "the all-absorbing question of the day," according to the Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox (1850:21). The apparent variety of racial opinion must be understood as reflecting an underlying consensus regarding the bases of racial classifications, the relationship ofphysiology to the stages of civilization, etc. Prior to 1850 few authors risked breaking out of this raciological circle, or breaking from an objectification that was acknowledged by everyone, materialists and spiritualists alike. Edwards' role in creating this consensus was variously evaluated by members of the succeeding generation. On the one hand, his disciple Paul Broca called him "the first author who clearly conceived and formulated the complete idea of race": "the notion that race is not only constituted by physical characteristics, but by a combination of intellectual and moral characteristics capable of exercising strong influence on the social and political destinies of peoples" (1876:221). In contrast, Armand de Quatrefages, professor of anthropology at the Museum d'Histoire naturelle in Paris after 1856, claimed priority in the conceptualization of race for his own professional corps, the naturalists, attributing to Edwards simply the demonstration of "the possibilities of applying these anthropological and physiological notions to history " (1876: 224-25). Despite their divergent emphases, however, both of these evaluations assumed that ethnology, "the science of races," had both a practical and a political aspect. And both authors were convinced of the meaning and the importance of the raciological synthesis: before Edwards, naturalists had striven to distinguish racial types, while historians and travellers were uncovering ethnic and organic factors underneath cultural practices and social revolutions. Each group presupposed the governing idea of the permanence of race. In 1829 this overdetermined idea found in Edwards its theoretician and its "proof." Attentive to all partial viewpoints, moderator of specialist scholars whom he would bring together in 1839 in a "society of ethnologists," Edwards' intellectual itinerary sums up a transformation of interests leading from a synchronic study of "nations" as the object of geographical and anatomical research, to a diachronic analysis of ethnic filiations , and then to the prospective politics of contemporary historians and sociologists. Yet no scholarly study has so far given appropriate intellectual historical weight to Edwards' work. Long relegated to an obscure realm peopled by the stereotypes of racist "pseudo-science," he has been characterized recently as a "magician who obviously finds in his hat what he just put into it" (Michel 1981:162). Focussing on the "crystallization" of racial thought precipitated by Edwards, the present essay attempts to cast further light on certain hidden aspects of a period that has been characterized as "the Dark Ages of the historiography of anthropological ideas" (Stocking 1974:413). 20 CLAUDE BLANCKAERT A...