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Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
Domesticating Nature, Appropriating
Hierarchy: Ihe Representation of European
and Non-European Peoples in
an Early-Nineteenth-Century Schoolbook
of Natural History
Certain periods in the history of concepts and representations bore more relevance
than others to the discourse of the sciences par excellence of “The Other,” that is,
ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology. During the late eighteenth and ear¬
ly nineteenth centuries, a considerable reception of western European ideas took
place in the Kingdom of Hungary and, more broadly, in the east-central European
region. These ideas seem to have been connected closely to the emergence of the
above-mentioned sciences. The present study results from ongoing research of a
broader, but closely related, subject. My interests have long been in the develop¬
ment of knowledge about non-European indigenous peoples—especially those of
the western hemisphere, and the channels of communication (human as well as
instrumental media) by means of which this knowledge was transferred to Hun¬
gary during the early modern—modern period.
This knowledge has never existed independently of time and the sociocultural
microcontext in which it was born and/or was received, and which also shaped its
form and meaning. The Kingdom of Hungary and the Habsburg monarchy (Holy
Roman Empire until 1806) to which it was related in various political formations
from the late seventeenth century up until 1919 did not have any overseas colonies,
so notions about the indigenous inhabitants of faraway continents have arrived
here mostly by travelers’ accounts, peregrinating students’ knowledge gathered at
foreign (mostly western European) universities, and, no less importantly, transla¬
tions and adaptations of foreign (mostly western European) books. Among the lat¬
ter, schoolbooks on natural history constituted an important channel of ideas and
images conveying what may be called a (pre-)ethnographical knowledge, especially
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As I have emphasized in
an earlier article, scholars from different western European countries have pursued
exciting research relating to the overlapping fields of natural history and the history
of ethnography/anthropology, and they have also made important efforts to review
critically their own colonial past as well as the political-epistemological history of
their sciences. In the east-central European region, such initiatives have, however,