Orang-utans, tribes, and nations: Degeneracy, primordialism, and the chain of being

Abstract

This article explores how early anthropological writing (1830s and 1840s) on the nation faced the question: How natural was the nation? In exploring development of the nation from the tribe, colonial ethnological writers in Southeast Asia also explored the limits of primordialism. Debates on the humanity of the orang-utan represented the search for these limits. The theme of degeneracy underpinned these connections. Degeneracy was a complex belief that connected the civilized nation to the savage tribe. Two methodologies underpinned this discourse: scientific rationality and imagination. Many contemporary studies focus on how scientific rationality created distance between the colonized and the colonizer. Imagination, however, also connected the civilized to the savage. These connections occurred amid the divisions caused by colonial rationality. This was a romantic view of identity, which connected identity to nature. In doing so, a question of primordialism emerged: What were the primordial limits of the nation?