Overlooking whiteness? Discourses of race and primitiveness in accounts of the Ainu by Benjamin Douglas Howard and Henry Savage Landor (1893)

Bibliographic Data

ID18948514
AuthorsJohn L Hennessey (0000-0003-4041-6150, Lund University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume35
Issue4
Pages893-908
Publication date2024-08-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0275-7206 • E-ISSN: 1477-2612
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/02757206.2023.2164926
OpenAlexW4319842039
LanguageEN
References cited25

Nineteenth-century Victorian travellers in Northeast Asia were consistently captivated by the Ainu people indigenous to the Okhotsk region. In an age characterized by popular adventure fiction in which the trope of discovering a ‘lost white tribe’ figured prominently, it was perhaps not surprising that the Ainu, who were ethnically distinct from the neighbouring Japanese, would be described as ‘white,’ ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Aryan’ in a large body of travel writing and scientific texts. Why, then, did two of the longest English-language accounts of the Ainu published during this period show no interest in Ainu ‘whiteness’ and virtually none in questions of racial classification? Published the same year (1893) by two very different men, British-American humanitarian doctor Benjamin Douglas Howard and Italian-British provocateur and artist Henry Savage Landor, these books repeat hackneyed tropes of primitiveness, but remain surprisingly uninterested in explicit questions of race. This is particularly striking in that Landor later included a ‘lost white tribe’ episode in an account of his travels in the Philippines (1904). This article uses these works to reflect on the social constructedness of racial categorizations even in contexts far removed from their authors’ home society

Adventure · Art · Art history · Ethnology · Genealogy · Indigenous · Literature · Sociology · Tribe · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Australian History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture

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