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5. Experimenting in the Metropole: The Theory and Practice of African Studies, 1908–19
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view are prematurely approached in linguistic investigations.”47 As a possible corrective to Müller, Meinhof suggested that purely linguistic phenomena —such as the existence of grammatical gender in noun classi‹cation, in›ection, or the appearance of clicks—be compared to determine whether or not two languages were related, and that physical traits be discounted in the early stages of philological research. Yet undergirding Meinhof’s work—not to mention Luschan’s—was still the belief that Hamites were in some way originally white. Through intense racial mixing over hundreds of years some, like the Hottentots or Nama, might have taken on the physical characteristics of the neighboring Bushmen or San. This did not, however, detract from their original position as racial “Hamites.” In the essay “On the Racial Af‹nities of the Hottentots ” Luschan explained that whenever two groups met and intermingled , their languages and “somatic” types were never equally in›uenced. He held, “As a matter of fact, we see the somatic type depending on the numeric relation between the old native population and the newcomers.”48 This effectively meant that members of an “attacking” tribe would lose most of their distinguishing physical characteristics, since the attackers were usually outnumbered by those they had conquered. Further, the invaders would likely have brought few women on their travels. Therefore, they would have had no choice but to marry the subjugated women and produce offspring with them. After several generations, a bastardized race would then be born. Even so, Luschan argued that a people’s original status as Hamites could never be completely obscured. We see the mental culture develop independent of all numeric relation , and the superior language, the superior religion, and (if there is any) the superior writing, survive. In a few cases we might see the old language persist with women and children; but generally the language, or at least the grammar, of the superior invaders survives, and very often is actually adopted by the native race.49 The best way to ascertain whether a group had been Hamitic was to study its language and to look for Hamitic traits in its structure. The “tribes” whose languages possessed a speci‹c morphology and usually exhibited grammatical gender were thus likely descended from “racially pure” Hamites. Despite Luschan’s belief that the Hamites’ “white” biological characteristics had faded when they came into contact with their numerically su106 Africa in Translation perior black victims, his arguments did not agree with those of Gobineau or Kossinna. Elsewhere, Luschan contended that “we all know that a certain mixture of blood has always been of great advantage to a nation. England, France, and Germany are equally distinguished for the great variety of their racial elements.” Nonetheless, while he did not reject the bene‹ts of intermarriage outright, Luschan also thought that the jury was still out with regard to the question of its positive or negative impact on future generations. Anthropologists were “especially ignorant as to the moral and intellectual qualities of half-castes.”50 Luschan’s ideas were certainly more in line with those of Meinhof, Büttner, and the missionaries than the hard-line antimiscegenationsts . Still, the problem was not that Luschan renounced race mixing but that he valued some biological and intellectual characteristics over others, and those tended to be ones possessed by whites. Luschan began his paper on the Hottentots with the assumption that all sub-Saharan African languages could be parceled out into the Hamitic, Sudanic, or Bantu categories, except for those of “the Arabs, the Portuguese , the Boers, and other people immigrated recently . . . [and] the Bushmen, the Hottentots, and the various pigmy [sic] tribes of tropical Africa.”51 However, he quickly moved toward “proving” Hottentot af‹liation with Hamites, using Meinhof’s linguistic ‹ndings to bolster his arguments . In his essay “The Language of the Hottentots,” Meinhof rounded out Luschan’s anthropological argument with technical linguistic details. He asserted that because Hottentot languages exhibited grammatical gender —the division of nouns into separate classes according to whether they were male or female—they had to be grouped among the in›ecting languages , the only ones that Meinhof believed showed this trait. At the time, the sole African languages that scholars believed displayed grammatical gender were Semitic and Hamitic. Meinhof did not question whether the Hottentots were Semites but concluded that, on the basis of the type of language they spoke, they had to be Hamites. This furthermore indicated that their languages were related to those of...