Page 43 [43]
OCR
40 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 early 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 development 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 Hungary 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, translations and adaptations of foreign (mostly western European) books. Among the latter, 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,
