9. Anténor Firmin, Nineteenth-Century Pioneeering Anthropologist: His Influence on Anthropology in North America and the Caribbean

Anténor Firmin was a pioneering anthropologist in the nineteenth century whose major work, De l'égalité des races humaines (Anthropologie positive) was published in Paris in 1885 and was largely ignored or dismissed as a foundational text in anthropology (Fluehr-Lobban 2000). The text only recently has been recovered, translated, and introduced into English as The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology) (2000), 115 years after its original publication. Thus, it is being evaluated as an anthropology text for the first time after 2000.

Firmin was one of two Haitian members of the Paris Anthropology Society from 1884–88, during his years in France as a Haitian emissary, although apparently his name remained on the roster until years after his death in 1911 (personal communication Ghislaine Geloin).¹ Although a member of the Société who attended many of its meetings his voice was effectively silenced by the racialist physical anthropology dominant at the time, and by his race. In the Memoires that provide a transcript of the Société's deliberations, apparently Firmin rose to speak only twice, and on both occasions he was silenced by racialist or racist comments. At one point he rose to challenge the biological determination of race that pervaded the prevailing physical anthropology of Broca and others when he was confronted by Clemence Royer (a pioneering woman of science who translated Darwin's Origin of Species into French), who asked Firmin if his intellectual ability and presence in the Société were not the result of some white ancestry he might possess. Firmin tells us in his own words in the preface to The Equality of the Human Races that he wanted to debate those who "divide the human species into superior and inferior races" but he feared his request would be rejected. "Common sense told me that I was right to hesitate. It was then that I conceived the idea of writing this book" (2000:liv). We now know that a signed copy conveying "Hommage respective à La Société d'anthropologie de Paris, A Firmin" was presented to the Paris Anthropological Society in 1885, and that no review or further mention of the book, beyond it having been received, was made in the Memoires d'anthropologie, the periodical of the Society.²

The publication date of 1885 of De l'égalité des races humaines (Anthropologie positive) marks it as a pioneering text in anthropology well within the time framework of the other foundational texts in the field such as L. H. Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) and E. B. Tylor's Anthropology (1881). Although Franz Boas began his "geographical" writings about Cumberland Sound and Baffin-land in 1884–85, he did not produce a synthetic work of anthropology until his 1911 The Mind of Primitive Man, that being the year of Firmin's death. P. Topinard, one of the French racialist physical anthropologists to whom Firmin devotes a great deal of his criticism, published in 1885 his Éléments d'anthropologie générale, the same year as De l'égalité des races humaines. In this work Topinard outlines the general principles of French physical anthropology—racialist, polygenist, grounded in biologically fixed notions of race proved by the science of anthropometry, brought to technical perfection by the French physicians-anthropologists. The difference between Firmin's perspective on anthropology as a new discipline and race as a scientific category and these other pioneers of anthropology are dramatic and significant.

Firmin, Anthropologist and Scientific Positivist

The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology) in twenty chapters and 451 pages (662 in the original French), embraces topics in what became the four-field study of humanity including physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and ethnology. It is clear from chapter 1, devoted to "Anthropology as a Discipline," that Firmin's vision of anthropology is one of a comprehensive study of humanity with such potential breadth that all other sciences become as "tributaries to it" (2000:3). Firmin reviewed and assessed the philosophical and scien-tific tradition that had shaped the nascent...