Europaischer Volkerspiegel: Imagologisch-ethnographische Studien zu den Volkertafeln des fruhen 18. Jahrhunderts, and: Europaer: Ein imagologischer Essay (review)

Around 1730, an anonymous artist in Styria, Austria, produced a "Table of Peoples" (Völkertafel)—a picture showing 10 male, costumed, ethnic types, each of whom is characterized by a tabulation of his traits in 17 categories. The picture was entitled "Short description of the Peoples in Europe and their Characteristics." Today, it belongs to the Austrian Museum of Folklife and Folk Art—bought at an auction in 1913 by the museum's founder. One would think that this document, with its combined roster of visual and verbal stereotypes, would long have attracted scholarly attention. Yet, while folklorists, ethnologists, and anthropologists have worked extensively on documenting groups, ethnic and otherwise, as they present themselves from within, there has been far less attention paid to how groups characterize each other. Proverb scholars have pointed to the printed compendia of blaison populaire or ethnic and national stereotypes that have been in circulation for centuries, yet efforts to explain why such stereotypes time and again solidify from seemingly harmless caricatures into bases for virulent aggression remain few and far between.

Franz K. Stanzel is perhaps best known in German-speaking Europe for his work on narrative theory. Yet he has devoted time to questions of enemy construction in literature, as well as cross-national literature evaluation. It is thus not just pure chance that this eminent scholar, now in his seventies, opted to devote considerable energy to the task of unpacking this frequently reprinted but never before seriously analyzed painting. In preparation for the edited volume Europäischer Völkerspiegel, he wrote the essay "Ein imagologischer Essay," in which he analyses the painting itself and places it within the representational as well as literary context of production. He covers representational schemes in older ethnographies (from encyclopedias to lexica) as well as in ethnographies penned during the age of Humanism. Stanzel's major finding or argument is that ethnic and national stereotypification as evidenced in this painting, as well as parallel representations conveniently reproduced in these two books, is less based on vernacular discourses than on literary ones, especially ethnographic treatises. Armchair ethnographers happily copied from each other, and literary authors in turn mined ethnographies for such images.

The outline of the essay as well as Stanzel's overarching finding serve as an organizing principle for the fuller, edited volume in which 14 further authors from Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Poland offer carefully researched chapters. Six of them cover general themes, such as the relationship between climate theory and national character as found on the painting, or on the role of dress in relation to this pictorial national stereotyping. Here, Austrian folklorist Franz Grieshofer notes that the clothing depicted is actually borrowed from upper-class clothing trends and not the more recently essentialized ethnic costumery. The final 10 chapters are devoted to the 10 types on the picture, with Wolfgang Brückner writing on the French (Brückner, perhaps because of his interest in folk art in general, is to my knowledge the only German folklorist who has made earlier efforts to analyze these types of painted typologies). Many of these essays uncover the same pattern: old clichés are but lightly updated on the Völkertafel.

Among the most important issues discussed in these works is the role of writing and publishing in the dispersal of ethnic stereotypes. The editor goes as far as arguing that the trail for written, literary precursors for the "Table of Peoples" is so thick, reaching back to classical antiquity, that one ought to reconsider the assumption that these ethnic and national stereotypes were originally of vernacular, oral provenence. Indeed, Jack Goody, in his The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1977), cites this Austrian tabulated depiction of peoples as an...