Page 53 [53]
50
Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
among the people depicted. In the case of those European inner Others (among
them, eastern Europeans), one such feature is an unusually close connection to the
woods and some of its animals (bears, in the case of the Poles, and reindeer, in the
case of the Lapps); while keeping camel (as well as smoking pipes) would character¬
ize the Africans;'* eating raw food (in the form of fruits to be gathered from trees),
the “East-Indians”; producing tea and building pagodas, the Chinese; producing
sugarcane and building very humble huts, the Central Americans (at least the black
slaves); and—what may be surprising to find—fishing and basketry, the North
American Indians.” Not unrelated to the second, the third strategy of representa¬
tion used in the images of Raff is an explicit “nature-isation” of the human beings
depicted. I borrow the expression—and appreciate the approach—of an excellent
French historian of science, Claude Blanckaert, who defines what emerged as a new
interpretation, a new epistemological field in the European sciences (especially in
French geography and anthropology during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries) as an intellectual process of the “naturalisation de l’homme” (Blanckaert
2004, 667). Parallel to this new épistémé, “nature-isation” as a visual strategy appears
as inserting those Others in characteristic scenes of nature, that is, showing them in
the woods, next to trees, bushes, plants, and/or various animals.
‘The fourth strategy of representation is kind of an ethnologization, that is, show¬
ing the people of the world surrounded with pieces of their material culture, tools,
instruments, clothes, livestock, buildings, carvings, and so on. This is what we see
in the case of the Lapps, the American Indians, the “Hottentots,” the Chinese, and
so on, announcing the scope and the fields of interest of the emerging new sciences
of ethnography and ethnology/anthropology all over Europe, which tend to seek
more and more empirical knowledge and data and, also, more and more what is
thought to be connected to it, authenticity and archaismlprimitiveness.’ The fifth
visual strategy used in Raff’s schoolbook is gendering which in this case means rep¬
#° Scenes showing smoking natives constitute a widely used stereotype in books of geography during
the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to represent Oriental—Arab, Turkish, and in general Afri¬
can—peoples, such as the “Hottentots” in Raff’s schoolbook.
5 A considerable historical distance separates Raff's rather ethnographic representation of American
Indians from either the diabolized image of the Central American Indians known from Christian
missionary discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Sz. Kristof 2012a and 2012b) or the
exoticized, artificial cultural mixture of Karl May’s Winneotu at the end of the nineteenth century.
Raff’s images resemble the naturalistic descriptions of American Indian life (especially that of north¬
eastern North America) provided by late eighteenth century European travelers and, for that matter,
the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. For stereotyping American Indians, see Sz. Kristéf 2011: 320,
note 17.
16 From the vast body of literature consisting of critical historiographies of Western anthropology,
let me mention only a more recent as well as a classical work focusing on the emergence and the insti¬
tutionalization of that science during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries: Fulford, Lee, and
Kitson 2004, and Stocking 1987. About the impact of the Enlightenment and especially Rousseau’s
ideas (primitivism and the idealization of indigenous peoples) on early anthropology, see During 1994.