In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C h a p t e r 8 Bodies In 1795 the third edition of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s De generis humani varietate nativa divided humanity into five categories: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. Skin color, hair texture and quantity, skull shape, and facial features were taken as the markers of race. In describing the “Mongolian” group (by which Blumenbach meant all the inhabitants of Asia excluding those counted as “Malays”) he adds a footnote quoting “a certain Yvo, a churchman of Narbonne, dated at Vienna in 1243.” Yvo’s letter is included in Matthew Paris’s mid-thirteenth-century Chronica majora: The Tartars have hard and strong breasts, thin and pale faces, stiff and upright cheekbones, short and twisted noses, chins prominent and sharp, the upper jaw low and deep, the teeth long and few, the eyebrows reaching from the hair of the head to the nose, the eyes black and unsettled, the countenance one-sided and fierce, the extremities bony and nervous, the legs also big, but the calf-bones short, the stature however the same as our own, for what is wanting in the legs, is made up for in the upper part of the body.1 Yvo, in effect, describes a natio, a “nation” in the sense of a people bound by geographical origin, common territory, customs, language, law, religion, and appearance. Blumenbach’s intention—to identify the physical features associated with one of five broad human groupings—is quite different, and indeed his portrait of the “Mongolian” type (which covers a far wider geographical area than Yvo’s “Tartars”) bears little in common with the medieval author’s. Notwithstanding his quotation from Matthew’s chronicle, Blumenbach’s own description of “Mongolians” identifies these key bodily markers: yellow skin; Bodies 173 black, stiff, straight, and scanty hair; squarish head; broad, flat face with small, flat “apish” nose; round cheeks; narrow, linear eyes; and prominent chins.2 The two descriptions have only “prominent chins” in common. I begin with these two descriptions, five and a half centuries apart, to draw attention to a conceptual gulf that Blumenbach’s own reference to Yvo might seem to elide. As has been much discussed by historians of modern racial theory, Blumenbach was a key figure in the development of the physical typologies by which modernity’s major racial divisions are marked. He had precursors in Francois Bernier (1684), Carolus Linnaeus (1735), George-Louis Leclerc (Comte de Buffon, 1749–88), and Immanuel Kant (1777), but it is Blumenbach who is acknowledged as the “father of modern ‘skin and bones’ anthropology.”3 At the end of the eighteenth century, the human body moved to the center of perceptions of difference between peoples. That legacy is still very much with us, despite UNESCO’s 1950 rejection of race as a scientifically valid concept and geneticists’ denial that it has any chromosomal foundation.4 Bodies are interesting to us, given three-hundred-odd years of scientific racial theory; we shall see they were also important in medieval learned and encyclopedic works. This chapter asks whether the travel writers of our present focus shared this fascination and considers the cultural resonances of Asian bodily descriptions for medieval readers before Orientalism. In brief, I argue that bodily features are important but not necessarily primary in precolonial travel writing on the far Orient and that in medieval travel writing oriental bodies signify in unsystematic and sometimes unpredictable ways. When travelers from Latin Christendom first ventured into lands far to the east they had to adapt their “gaze.” When they arrived in Asian countries and looked about at the inhabitants, they had not predetermined how to look or form narrative accounts of what they saw. With the desire to inform readers, most travel writers attempted to provide accurate descriptions of the human variety observed. The dominant existing cultural frameworks for conceiving bodies were theories of climate and environmental influence and discourses of monstrosity. These models had partial but by no means comprehensive utility for travelers describing distant Easts. As the last part of this chapter will show, the ancient imagery of monstrous bodies was part of the cultural furniture travelers took with them, but most were quick to discard it once they realized its lack of application to the peoples they met. Where monstrous peoples endured in late medieval travel writing was mainly in the works of fictional travelers or in application to peoples genuine travelers admitted they had not seen for themselves. This is not to...

Share