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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 images 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 schoolbook 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 European 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
