John White and the Invention of Anthropology: Landscape, Ethnography, and Situating the Other in Roanoke

John White's 1585 watercolors of the coastal Algonquian people of what is now northeastern North Carolina were among the primary texts of the first attempt at English colonization of North America, what is known as "the Lost Colony."¹ In 1590 copperplate engravings based on these paintings by Theodor de Bry were paired with Thomas Hariot's "A briefe and true report of the new founde land of Virginia," published simultaneously with Latin, English, German, and French text: a seminal event in the history of publication, part of de Bry's multivolume America (de Bry 1590; Mancall 2007:195). These pictures have long been acknowledged as the most significant early representations of what would become English North America (Hulton 1984:12). Beyond providing an important early source of ethnographic knowledge, as William Sturtevant (1965) has argued, they constitute an originary use of the "tools of legibility," as James C. Scott (1998) has called the technology of representation that allows for the cataloging, with an eye to possession, of the resources and population of lands brought under central control. This is achieved, visually, largely through the use of synopsis.

However, underlying this visual appropriation of lands and people of "Virginia" seen in these pictures is their placement within a metonymic order, which would include metropolitan England and its countryside, in stark contrast to an earlier style of metaphoric representations of peoples and places of the New World, as examples of "Plinian races" or other antipodal alternatives to the metropole (see Leerssen 1995). Rather than circumscribing civilization within a realm of logical permutations of a rational human social order—a trope with roots in the Classical age, but reaching well into the early modern era—a symbolic elaboration of both Algonquian and British social orders is required, in order to construct a "middle ground" between them.

Figure 1.

Theodor de Bry, detail of map of Brasil, in America. Courtesy of Toppan Rare Book Library, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie.

The White Paintings as an Epistemic Break

When John White arrived on the Outer Banks to paint watercolors that would come to constitute the most important ethnographic record of early American aboriginal culture, there existed no model of scientific ethnography for him to draw upon. Most prior visual depictions of New World people were influenced and even determined by medieval taxonomies, which were based on the idea of unlimited morphological variation of humanoid species. "Plinian races" and creatures depicted in the writings of Sir John Mandeville were the expectation. Earlier pictorial representations engraved and published by de Bry, including in the same publication in which White's pictures appear, showed creatures such as the Blemmiae (Figure 1), headless monsters of classical lineage (see Dathorne 2001:30).

White's depictions are striking, by contrast, for their evident empiricism (Figure 2). The coastal Algonquian culture depicted is consistent with what is known from later sources about material culture, and further validated by their general agreement with Thomas Hariot's contemporary text (cf. Solomon 1991). The de Bry copperplates, departing in systemic ways from the originals, nevertheless retain their ethnographic information, which was conveyed to a broad European audience (see Gaudio 2008:127). White's watercolors, although lost for centuries and republished in 1984, thus constitute one of the most detailed and sympathetic ethnographic records that exist of any North American group prior to the advent of professional anthropology in the late nineteenth century (Hulton 1984). This fact has been duly noted by scholars, including those contributing to a celebratory companion volume to the recent White exhibit in the British Museum (Sloan 2007). Surely White deserves such celebration. Although not technically an original or superior artist, he has nevertheless left behind a visual record that is both attractive and rich with information.

My purpose here is neither to praise nor to bury White as an artist, but to examine his extraordinary accomplishment, which I believe is primarily epistemological rather than artistic or visual, against the context of his times. My argument...