Oldal 46 [46]
Domesticating Nature, Appropriating Hierarchy
be done to explore the true dimensions of the geographical distribution of Raff's
texts and images.‘
(Morphological/structural) invariability
The third concept that I would like to emphasize is (morphological) invariability.
Visual stereotypes, as products of the printing press, seem to have a very long life
and, accordingly, a long-lasting impact on their readers’/viewers’ minds. One can
think of certain feedback effects, too, functioning in the background. In order to be
recognizable for the readers/viewers, visual stereotypes need to stay constant, fixed,
for a certain period of time.
The editions of Raff’s schoolbook contained—preserved—indeed the same im¬
ages from Göttingen to Glasgow and Paris, or to Vienna and Kassa (Kosice, today
in Slovakia), and so on. The engravings show a basic similarity in structure and
matter for more than half of a century, that is, until the last editions of the school¬
book around the middle of the nineteenth century, and that independently of the
place of edition.’ Smaller changes, modifications, did occur during the process of
the reproduction of the images (re-drawings, re-cuts after pre-existing models),
but I dare to claim that the different editions of Raff's schoolbook have conveyed
the same elementary ideas of the order of nature and human society from the western
corners of Europe (London and Edinburgh 1796; Amsterdam 1793; Paris and
Strasbourg 1786; and so on) to its central and easternmost parts (Sz. Kristóf 2011:
325-327). It seems to have been one of the most important schoolbooks of natural
history in that enormous region of Europe until about the middle of the nineteenth
century, so the system of the classification of the world that it communicated in a
fixed and constant order for decades had indeed the opportunity to impose itself
upon the minds of masses of students (and teachers/professors) all over that area.
The importance of Raff’s Naturgeschichte, specifically for us east-central Euro¬
pean researchers lies in the fact that the representations that it provided of Us, that
is, east-central European peoples, are inscribed, as I will discuss later, in a much
broader context. It is a characteristic symbolic geography as well as historical-political
philosophy of the late eighteenth century that shaped the representation of all the
peoples—and plants and animals, and so on—occurring in it. And this geography
4 The schoolbook has become so popular in western Europe that the surname of its author started
representing the genre itself in the German territories, and so it entered the international catalogues of
natural history, too. Philipp Jacob Beumer’s Der Kleine Raff, oder, Vater Gotthold’s Unterhaltungen mit
Seinen Kindern über die Reiche der Natur (Wesel 1841) is included, for example, in the Bibliographia of
Louis Agassiz (Agassiz 1848: 278). See also Kunze 1976: 131-135 and Doderer 1979: 120.
> As to my knowledge, Raff’s schoolbook was published in the German territories until 1861. As for
the Kingdom of Hungary, it was popular during almost fifty years, the period between 1799 and 1846
(Sz. Kristóf 2011: 312, note 9, and 323). Images published here are Courtesy of National Széchenyi
Library, Budapest.
43