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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Public Interface | Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Ethnography and ethnicity : Introductory survey essay

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Traditions Racial ethnography, physical anthropology Europe (general) 1937 – Grainger, Percy: English and nordic art 1900 – Nordau, Max: (Muskeljudenthum) Racial map of Europe Cephalic Index map of the peoples of Eastern Europe Physiognomy and evolutionary biology Linguistic and biological family trees The beleaguered “Nordic race” in Europe Leerssen, Joep

Introduction

The development of physical anthropology and of scientific or vulgar racism falls outside the scope of this Encyclopedia, belonging as it does to an intellectual and ideological tradition which is distinct from, and not to be confused with, that of nationalism; even so, there are many points of overlap and interaction. The most important overlaps between the histories of racial and of national thought predate and postdate the Romantic 19th century. Even before 1800, the concepts of “race” and of “nation” were never rigidly systematized, let alone distinguished, in the different European languages, where in many cases there would be further lexical and semantic blurrings through near-synonyms like people/peuple, Volk or narod. After 1900, nationalism and pseudo-scientific racism converged. A moral-history-by-ethnicity that Ernst Moritz Arndt had practised under the name of Völkerkunde in the early 19th century became a cultural-history-by-race in the early 20th century; witness the work of the anthropologist Ludwig Woltmann, whose Rassentheorie und Culturgeschichte (1904) and Die Germanen in Frankreich: Eine Untersuchung über den Einfluß der germanischen Rasse auf die Geschichte und Kultur Frankreichs (1907) traced competing Teutonic and Celtic racial traits over the centuries.

In the early 20th century a racialist form of ethno-nationalism crystallized in doctrines like eugenics, and in the Rassenkunde and the “völkisch” thought of National Socialism, which conflated nation and race, saw the nation as a community of biological descent, and cultivated a phobia of miscegenation and degeneration as undermining the nation’s moral fibre and physical robustness. Warnings against the nations’ physical degeneration had been powerfully sounded in Max Nordau’s phobic Entartung of 1893, and inspired Boy Scouts movements and a revival of gymnastics/sports clubs under ethnic auspices.

All cultural and linguistic diversity from the 1890s on tended to be couched in the language of “race” (metaphorically or not), or schematized along the taxonomies of physical anthropology. The notion of a “Nordic Race”, for example, hypothesized by the French anthropologist Joseph Deniker (Les races de l’Europe, 1899), was applied towards eugenics in America (Madison Grant, The passing of the Great Race, 1916) and extended into a racially inherited mentality by the notorious Hans F.K. Günther (Der nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen, 1925). In a parallel development, racial thought adopted the term “Aryan” (borrowed from Comparative Linguistics) to denote a superior race consisting of the speakers of the Indo-European languages. Georges Vacher de Lapouge, a philologist and anthropologist influenced by eugenics and by Arthur de Gobineau’s 1855 Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, published his L’Aryen: Son rôle social in 1899. Lapouge would later translate the work of American nordicists (Madison Grant, William Z. Ripley) into French, which, alongside the adoption of Gobineau’s thought in German racism through intermediaries like Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927; son-in-law of Richard Wagner), indicates the tight-knit transnational ramifications of this type of pseudo-scientific thought.

Thus, the trajectory of physico-ethnically inflected Romantic nationalism takes place in a century that leads from pre-scientific unsystematic vagueness to pseudo-scientific rigid determinism.

The 18th century witnessed, in two separate traditions, the emergence of a psychology of national characters and of a physiology of ethnic body-types. The former commenced with Montesquieu’s climatological explanation for different legal systems (L’esprit des lois, 1748). In a flanking discursive tradition, which led from 17th-century neo-Aristotelianism to Diderot/D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, the tendency had become ingrained to use nationalities as the primary taxonomical units for labelling and schematizing cultural characteristics in Europe.

Character, physiology, phylogeny

As a result, by the late 18th century, an anecdotally-based but systematically classified “characterology” of the different temperaments of the European nations, loosely correlated between the “cool” (melancholic, phlegmatic) North and the “hot” (sanguine, choleric) South was already in place. This was overlaid with the historical remembrances and myths of the freedom-loving tribal cultures of northern Europe (speaking Celtic or Germanic languages) resisting the imperialism of various southern-based power systems (the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Spanish and French monarchies, using Latin or Romance languages). Mme de Staël, in her De la Littérature of 1800, consolidated this North-South polarity as a framework for the study of literature and culture; it was to dominate the antagonisms between German and French medievalists and philologists throughout the 19th century, the Germans charging their French colleagues and their entire culture with levity, superficiality, conformism and arrogance, the French mistrusting their German colleagues and their culture for a perceived tendency to transcendent obscurantism and abstruse speculation. More than a century after Montesquieu, Hippolyte Taine’s famous use of the determinants of race, milieu and moment to explain the different characteristics of the various literatures of Europe (most famously in his Histoire de la littérature anglaise of 1864) would still echo this deterministic line of thought derived, ultimately, from Montesquieu.

Montesquieu had also been the presiding spirit for a physiological, biological  rationalization of the overdetermined characterological north-south polarity: L’esprit des lois had posited a causal correlation between climate, physical reaction to heat or cold, habitual body humours involved in that reaction, and different “temperaments” of those humours resulting therefrom inspiring different moral regimes. Another contributor to the biological-physiological turn had been Johann Caspar Lavater, whose widely read and widely translated treatise on physiognomy (Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe, 1775-78) had systematized an anecdotal correlation between facial traits and moral-emotional temperaments. To be sure, Lavater, like his philanthropically-minded contemporaries of the sentimental Enlightenment, including Herder, had aimed to chart the variety of humanity rather than reify its differentiations, and had given little space to racial identity or ethnic descent; but his ad hoc lucubrations on the characterological meaning of facial forms were systematized in physiological terms in the century following him.

The century between Lavater and Darwin saw the rise of craniometry. The notion of a “facial angle”, developed in 1792 by the Amsterdam anatomist, surgeon and polymath Pieter Camper, quantified the anecdotal physiognomical feature of the “low forehead” (as connoting a less developed intelligence, certainly in connection with a heavy lower jaw) into an “objective” measurement. This allowed Camper and later biologists to outline an ascending facial-angle scale leading from orang-utans by way of Africans and modern Europeans to the near-perpendicular perfection of classical Greek statues. Other methods of cranial measurement involved the position of the occipital aperture (comparatively analysed by Jouis-Jean-Marie Daubenton in 1784).

Many comparative anatomists in the following decades worked on archeological specimens, and their typologies were usually applied in a phylogenetic family-tree paradigm of “origin, descent and typical characteristics”, which dominated scientific thought from the linguistics of Grimm to the evolutionary biology of Darwin. Comparative-historical linguistics and comparative-historical anatomy were interlinked through the influence exerted by the Indo-European linguist August Schleicher (for whom the study of the descent of languages formed part of the study of the origins of mankind) on the Darwinian Friedrich Haeckel. Haeckel’s “family tree” model of the evolution of life (Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, 1866) was an adaptation of Schleicher’s genealogical organization of language relations; it was translated into French by the aforementioned Vacher de Lapouge.

Ethnology, evolution, descent

By 1800, the study of the diversity of humankind (ethnology) had split off from the study of the unifying characteristics of humanity (anthropology in the classical sense).  The term "ethnology" had been coined in Adam Franz Kollár’s description of the lands of the Hungarian Crown, Historiae iurisque publici Regni Ungariae amoenitates (1783); shortly thereafter, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Plan einer vergleichenden Anthropologie (1792) consolidated this ethnic interest, also advanced in Alexandre-César Chavannes’s Anthropologie ou science générale de l’homme, qui esquisse la séparation entre anthropologie physique et ethnologie (1788).

The scientific-taxonomic division of mankind into descent communities played itself out primarily in colonial relations of Europe’s empires with the wider world; but within Europe, the descent of the Celts was not just a linguistic crux, but also one which was addressed ethnographically: James C. Prichard’s Researches into the physical history of man (1808) fed into his The Eastern origin of the Celtic nations of 1831.

While terms like “Aryan” (partly replacing Blumenbach’s earlier usage “Caucasian”) gave a semi-linguistic sense of Europe’s racial position vis-à-vis the wider world, ethnic questions were also applied to Europe’s inner diversity. Ethnography was an especially important lens on identity and descent for nations whose place in the European taxonomy of identity and descent was marginal or unclear: Basques, Saami, Roma, Finns and Hungarians.

The rise of archeologically-oriented anthropology signalled the demise of an earlier, pseudohistorical paradigm of national descent. Late-medieval and Renaissance humanists had, on the basis of their reading of classical authors, traced modern nations back to tribal groups mentioned in classical texts – Trojans, Scyths, Gauls or otherwise. From the Milesian myth in Ireland to Sarmatianism in Poland, such affiliations had held sway in early-modern Europe; sometimes the continent’s post-classical ethnic upheavals were taken into account (such as the Gothic myth in Sweden and in Spain, taken from Jordanes), sometimes they were tacitly ignored (as in the Dutch “Batavian myth”). However, in the 19th century, as old-fashioned antiquarianism was ousted by the new systematics of comparative-historical philology and the systematic study of antiquity, Poland redefined its roots from Sarmatian to Slavic, in Ireland the Milesian myth was brought into line with the insights of Celtic philology, and Holland switched its ancestry from Batavian to Frankish-cum-Saxon-cum-Frisian. In general, the European nations began to see their origins in categories derived from the taxonomy of Comparative Linguistics. Conversely, in the nomenclature, not of individual languages but of language families, linguistics perpetuated some more ancient tribal appellations (Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Semitic, Aryan).

For many nations, the purity of their descent from the tribal ancestors of primeval antiquity was a question of national honour: Fichte and Grimm celebrated the fact that the Germans (unlike other nations who had migrated into their present-day territories in the course of recorded history and/or had changed their language in that process) could boast an unbroken continuity of descent from the tribes mentioned in Tacitus’s Germania; Danes cherished the historical continuity from Saxo Grammaticus; Iceland derived great prestige from the documented, unbroken continuity of its settlement. A similar celebration of autochthonous nativism informed Basque nationalism. Hungarians, on the other hand, recalled their Landnahme with pride and gloried in the right of conquest established in the 9th century by the Magyar tribes. For the Greeks, on the other hand, the imputation that they fell short of unmixed ethnic descent (advanced by Jakob Fallmerayer, who argued in 1830 that the present-day Greeks were (culturally Hellenized) Slavs and Albanians rather than linear descendants of the ancient Hellenes) was the major irritant provoking their cultural nationalism throughout the second half of the century. Variations on these themes can be encountered throughout Europe: Romanians, for instance, variously invoked their Dacian tribal rootedness and the persistence of the Latin language of the Roman conquerors.

National and racial identifications interacted in a peculiar way in England and France. Political thought in England had developed an ideological schematization whereby the country’s parliamentary institutions were traced back to Anglo-Saxon roots, while the tradition of royal power was seen as something imported from France by the conquering Normans, who had subjected the native Anglo-Saxons following the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The power struggle between representative government and royal prerogative was thus couched in ethnic terms. The schematization obtained widespread currency after its popularization in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), which, indebted to Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799-1805), saw medieval feudalism as the social expression of ethnic conquest and subjection. Within England, which always saw itself as the hybrid result of different migration waves overlaying an aboriginally Celtic substratum, ethnography was concerned with finding the contemporary physical residues of the succesive Celtic, Saxon, Danish and Norman ethnic strata. Also, various temperamental traits in the English self-image of their cultural “character” were typified in terms of descent and inherited temperament. Ethnography also affected how the relationship was conceived between the English heartland of the United Kingdom and its various outlying parts (Wales; Scotland with its “Saxon” Lowlands and “Celtic” Highlands; Ireland with its “Celtic” natives and “Anglo-Irish” or “Ulster Scots” colonial overlays). This was pursued in physical anthropology in John Beddoe’s The races of Britain: A contribution to the anthropology of Western Europe (1862).

In France, feudal inequality was explained in similar terms, the high nobility deriving its prerogatives from an original “Right of Conquest” when Clovis and his Franks had conquered Roman Gaul (which itself contained an underlying Gallo-Roman duality deriving from Caesar’s conquest of Celtic Gaul.) Montesquieu could thus speak of his ancestors as nos pères, les anciens Germains. With the overthrow of aristocratic power, France in the 19th century developed a Romantic view, whereby native tribal democracy (that of the Gauls, who were now canonized into the nation’s true ancestors) had been put under the feudal yoke of the conquering Franks. That view was directly calqued on Scott’s evocation of English feudalism in Ivanhoe, which inspired Augustin Thierry’s Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normans (1825) and Amédée Thierry’s Histoire des Gaulois depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à l’entière soumission de la Gaule à la domination romaine (1828). The mixed and even antagonistic ethnic ancestry of France by the same token became a matter of anthropological interest: William Frederic Edwards, an English physician established in Paris, addressed an open letter to Thierry entitled Des caractères physiologiques des races humaines considérés dans leur rapports avec l’histoire (1829); this same Edwards (1777–1842) submitted a prize essay to the Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres, “Recherches sur les langues celtiques” (1831, printed 1833), and took cranial measurements so as to collect physical evidence for the ethnic background of the French population so as to determine its ambiguous (Celtic-Gaulish or Germanic-Frankish) descent.

Edwards was also a founding member of the Société Ethnologique de Paris, founded in 1839 in imitation of a similar London society that was active between 1837 and 1842 (and which was re-founded on the Parisian model later in the century). With representatives of European prominence such as the celebrated anatomist and physician Paul Broca (1824–1880), Paris (and the measuring methods and instruments developed there) became a leading centre for ethnological studies. An additional measuring instrument was, from the mid-19th century, the characterization of proportional cranial dimensions (dolichocephalic, brachycephalic) as indicators of descent (by the Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius). From the late 19th century, photography was, almost immediately after the development of portable photographic cameras, used as a recording instrument of facial and racial “types”. After 1900, additional measuring methods were introduced, from cranial volume (measured by filling skulls with fine-grained material such as millet or mustard seeds) to blood type and, more recently, DNA genetics. The initial emphasis on the face and skull, the main analytical focus from Lavater until well into the 20th century, meant that the correlation with brains and intelligence was never far removed from the study of heredity. Craniometry developed into an established part of the stock in trade of folklore research: folk culture was studied to establish the origin of the nation’s language, manners and customs, and physical type.

Conclusion

By 1900, linguists, archeologists and folklore scholars habitually schematized languages, societies and cultures in a classification foregrounding a “racial” identity-by-ethnic-descent. Conversely, the anthropological study of “races” (which, until the excesses of scientifically-rationalized racism in the 20th century, saw no need to temper its penchant for speculative and essentialist generalizations) habitually correlated physical types and their heritability with cultural or moral qualities like intelligence and “character” (psychological disposition or moral temperament). This conflation reified “national identities”, turning them from a political loyalty or historical contingency into an anthropological destiny. Conversely, it provided an apparently scientific, and therefore prestigious and incontrovertible, justification for nationalist enthusiasm.

Physical anthropology and ethnology had a direct impact on European nationalism and state-formation, not only by creating an academic framework for the cultivation of cultural difference, but also, directly, through the “Fourteen Points” brought by the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. In the United States, an immigration society with a recent history of mass slavery, the study of racial diversity and its application in the form of eugenics by adepts of the “Nordic Race” theory had become very popular; American ethnographical studies on Europe had led from William Z. Ripley’s The races of Europe (1899) to Madison Grant’s aforementioned The passing of the Great Race (1916) and Leon Dominian’s The frontiers of language and nationality in Europe (1917, a “study in applied geography”). Such “applied geography” had given intellectual support to the agenda of various diaspora nationalisms in North America. The Wilsonian programme for the Paris peace negotiations (in which Istanbul-born Dominian was an American delegation member), summarized in the “Fourteen Points”, intended, by applying the principle of “national self-determination”, to carve up the the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires into peacefully co-existing self-determing nation-states; and it was based on the template of a geography of ethnicity and “race”.

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For cultural ethnography and the interest in the different ethnic traditions as expressed through lifestyle, see the article on Manners and customs (survey-6).

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1.1.4.4/a https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462981188/ngVC3Z56hWsR5GiqOW6RhCuf http://show.ernie.uva.nl/survey-8