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Domesticating Nature, Appropriating Hierarchy
1735 on (Koerner 1999) and that of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German sur¬
geon and professor in the University of Géttingen, on the other, whose De generis
humani varietate nativa (1775) and Allgemeine Naturgeschichte (1779) became highly
influential at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Blumenbach
2005).
Raff’s own classification— just like that of Linnaeus or Blumenbach—has been
founded, however, on a much older, tripartite division of the world according to
which every being could be ordered into one of the three “kingdoms” or “coun¬
tries” of nature: animals, plants, minerals (Feuerstein-Herz 2007) The place of Man
seemed, however, either completely distinct or rather elusive in this division. Six¬
teenth- and seventeenth-century authors did not necessarily include a discussion of
human beings—a topic held to belong rather to theology and/or the competency
of theologians for a long time—in their Historia naturalis (Feuerstein-Herz 2007).
Raff, and especially the two (secular) authors that he relied on, did, and this was
an important moment in late-eighteenth-century scientific thinking. Though not
making a distinct “kingdom” or “country” in themselves, human beings came to
belong with Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and Raff—to nature, and more or less to the
“kingdom” of animals. Humans were said to dominate the latter as well as the other
“kingdoms” of nature. They have formed, as Raff says—with Blumenbach—as dis¬
tinct an “order” (Ordnung, rend, classe, class, etc.) as all the other natural beings.
Raff’s description of the various peoples belonging to the human order, and
their further division was not, however, systematic. It was based rather randomly
on such categories as skin color, height, and climatic and territorial distribution that
have been in use in European scientific thinking for centuries. Altogether, Raff's
description of Man seems to have been based upon Linnaeus to a greater extent than
upon the more meticulous classification of the peoples of the world provided in the
works of Blumenbach.’ In about the middle of the chapter on “the history of Man,”
for example, Raff devoted long paragraphs to the “wild men” and “wild women,”
that is, human children having been apparently lost or kidnapped and later raised,
as it was thought, by animals. According to the schoolbook, plenty of such “feral
7 Raff does not seem to have taken over Blumenbach’s division of humankind in its details, although
the latter’s De generis humani varietate nativa came out in 1775 in Gottingen, that is, three years before
the first publication of Raff's schoolbook in 1778. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the basic cat¬
egories of peoples discussed in the chapter on Man and shown in the pictures do seem to correlate with
those of Blumenbach. The latter distinguished altogether five races (Caucasian, Asian, Malay, African,
and American), while Raff spoke of, as well as represented in the images, altogether five “peoples.” These
“men,” (or “Menschen,” “Leute,” “Völker,” “hommes,” “peuples,” “emberek,” “n&pek” [in Hungarian])
are described as being attached to certain geographical regions with populations showing different
external characteristics (hair as well as skin color). Raff distinguished European, north or continental
Asian, east or island Asian, African, and American peoples, and in this sense his schoolbook conveyed
and popularized a division of humankind that was similar to, although not entirely identical with, that
of Blumenbach.
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