The Representations of Indian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century American Anthropology
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4039579 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert E Bieder (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 165 |
| Publication date | 1996-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Indian Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0095-182X • E-ISSN: 1534-1828 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1185698 |
| OpenAlex | W2322653159 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 2 |
By the end of the eighteenth century, the interest in science roused a corresponding interest in the study of man.1 The great age of exploration had inundated Europe with fauna and flora from around the world and explorers and travelers returned with tales of people never before seen. The great Swedish botanist, C. Linnaeus, had devised a system of classification that promised to bring order to the biological world; to impose an order on human kind was now thought necessary. Social philosophers erected stages of progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization to better describe their world. Non-European peoples were duly assigned a rank on the scale of progress. This ordering was a political act. Europeans not only negotiated and then defined the borders among non-European peoples but also inscribed their inferiority. Although methodologies for the comparative investigation of cultures largely were absent, this did not prevent Europeans from constructing representations of non-European peoples, searching for their origins, reading2 their bodies, assigning differences and determining ranks. The authorial discourse of ethnology was a complex interweaving of multiple narratives that possessed power-laden meanings and resonances for the time. In America, early ethnology was both a political and ideological discourse addressing national and international constituencies. In the multiple ethnological narratives written during the nineteenth century, representations of Native Americans articulated different social agendas. Although other races received attention, Native Americans were the privileged object of ethnological scrutiny and knowledge. Because of the repatriation theme of this special issue, this article will explore concepts of the body and power along with how representations of Indians were constructed and what these representations meant in nineteenth-century ethnology and archaeology. The concept of the body underlies nineteenth-century ethnological theory. If historian Dorinda Outram is correct, eighteenth-century French scholars brought new meaning to representations of the body. Depersonalized and desacralized, the body became data. It was redefined symbolically, politically, and scientifically and was seen more as a specimen for observation
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Barbarism · Chiefdom · Civilization · Ethnology · Genealogy · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Repatriation · Scrutiny · Sociology · Theme (computing · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.24 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2005 - 2015 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |