Seite 48 [48]
OCR
Domesticating Nature, Appropriating Hierarchy 1735 on (Koerner 1999) and that of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German surgeon 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 “countries” of nature: animals, plants, minerals (Feuerstein-Herz 2007) The place of Man seemed, however, either completely distinct or rather elusive in this division. Sixteenth- 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 distinct 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 categories 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. 45
