I know everyone likes reading what I write for class.  And allow me to apologize for the length of this one.  It's over 1000 words about anthropology in the Victorian era.  But I think it's actually fascinating.

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The Shift of the Native in Nineteenth Century Thought

The study of the rise of man into the mid-nineteenth century was much the comparison of European men with their dark-skinned counterparts across the colonized world. The reactions of the various travelers and armchair observers is telling of the progression and change in the way European academic culture was shifting as a whole. The conflict of religion with science as well as established tradition with new possibility saw the bedrock of academia morph into shifting sand. Who were these people that were being encountered by the civilized for the first time? What did their lifestyles prove or negate in what the Europeans thought about the world?

James Cowles Prichard typifies the beginning of this process of the discovery of “savages” around the world. Prichard set out to prove by ethnological study that man is monogenetic and that people all descend from a single line of parentage (49). Prichard saw the expansion of ethnology as an opportunity to show that every person in the world is of the same stock, and indeed is unified at the very core of his heritance through the biblically recorded personage of Noah (52). Notably, Prichard’s apologetic work in defining the common ancestry of man needed to explain the physical differences in the races of man and their subsequent dispersion through the world. Through arguments of comparative physiology, “Prichard’s… attempts to explain physical differences in monogenetic terms led him to speculations that have been regarded as foreshadowing Darwin” (50). He thought, however, that there existed “an unbridgeable gap between apes and humans” (51). Prichard set forth from that point to studying the “similarities of physical type, religion, political institutions, customs, and above all, language” in order to explain correlations across time and space (51). Prichard’s work laid the foundation for the various observers that the mid-1800s would see set forth from Britain and into the vast world beyond.

Sir George Grey was a governor of the British Empire during the mid-1800s. He moved between New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa as the Empire called for his services. “The cornerstone of his public career was native policy: combining naïve humanitarianism and imperialist realpolitik, it sought the advancement of native welfare through the systematic confiscation of tribal lands and the destruction of tribal institutions” (81). From Grey’s perspective, the natives in his realms were in a state of incivility which was dormant, waiting for the actions of those sent by God (the colonizers) to illuminate the way of civilization (83). Grey did not subscribe to the Christian idea that man had been in a state of advanced civilization but degenerated to savagery (83). Rather, he saw signs of sophistication and “design” in the aboriginal people’s daily routines (83). They people were merely not advanced to the point of the Europeans. Furthermore, Grey set forth a belief that a “divine power had set in motion a ‘progress of civilization’ governed by laws ‘as certain and definite’ as those of planetary movement” (84). Thus, white, European, Christian men could be the tools of the divine by bringing civilization to the savages.

Thomas Williams, a Methodist missionary to the Fijian islands, reveals a religious spin on the same idea of spreading civilization to aboriginal peoples. Williams spent much time making notes of the society and customs of native Fijians. He “spent years trying to decide whether the Fijians were ‘without natural affection’ beyond ‘mere animal attachments’” and finally concluded that it was “simply ‘misdirected affection’ that led sons to kill their widowed mothers, and daughters actually to weep when Christian charity forestalled the murder” (89). Williams saw the natives as a waiting mass waiting for the progressive influence of Christian faith and the influences it entailed. Eventually, the forces were combined in the minds of the Fijians. “The word of ‘Jiova’ was supported by European trade goods, Western medicine, and the force of British arms… When asked if he believed missionary preachings, the son of Somosomo’s king responded: ‘Everything that comes from the white man’s country is true; muskets and gunpowder are true, and your religion must be true’” (91). Natives had been melded down into a concept of those awaiting religion, goods, science, education, arts, and governance from the Europeans who were quickly colonizing them.

Francis Galton represents another trend in mid-nineteenth century anthropologists: those who had abandoned faith and looked to reason and science for answers. Galton experienced different people groups in Africa and noted their respective social structures—the nomadic Damaras people and the agrarian Ovampo. Galton pointed out the differences in their intellects, their physical appearances, and their civilizations. After the emergence of Darwinian Theory, Galton saw the application of the theory of survival of the fittest to cultural development. “Beyond steady labor, tameness, and prolonged development, there is little to distinguish ‘the nature of the lower classes of civilized man from that of barbarians’” (95). In this conception, those who are strongest become the most refined, whether in a European society or African tribal setting. Furthermore, Galton proposes that dogmatic belief in original sin is an attempt of man to understand that, “far from having ‘fallen from high estate,’ man was rising in moral culture faster ‘than the nature of his race could follow’” (95). In this sense, Galton sees religion as a coping mechanism to understand the progress of man into high levels of organization and understanding.

As European anthropology progressed, the view of the native was one of the major shifts that occurred. Opinion ranged from the point of pity for the native to being impressed with his achievement. Interestingly, there is little mention of the anthropologists in inclusion of society at large as being studied. The ideology went from an attempt to prove the validity of the Bible through tracing human ancestry to an explaining away of biblical concepts as products of evolutionary advance. England in mid-nineteenth century was a changing place, and the steps being taken in understanding others were only a move in reaching toward the modern understanding of itself.

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