The race question in Oceania : A. B. Meyer and Otto Finsch between metropolitan theory and field experience, 1865-1914

Abstract

This thesis examines the written, visual and material records produced by two late nineteenth-century German traveller-naturalists in Oceania, Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911) and Otto Finsch (1839-1917). I probe these records for traces of Indigenous agency and discuss the impacts of their authors' personal encounters with actual Oceanian people on their understandings of human difference, locating this discussion within the context of racial science in late nineteenth-century Europe and the complex relationship between field experience and metropolitan publication and reception. By identifying countersigns of Indigenous agency embedded in Meyer's and Finsch' s representations of their experiences in Oceania, I trace the ways in which these experiences informed their contributions to broader debates in the European metropoles: the unity or plurality of the human species, the breadth of variation within supposedly homogeneous 'races' and the extent of overlap between them, the importance of field experience in the human sciences, the standardisation and mobilisation of travellers' observations for metropolitan audiences, and the relative worth of physical, cultural and linguistic data for taxonomic purposes.

I interrogate the processes by which racial knowledge about Oceania's inhabitants was produced from the 'raw material' of encounters, the various forms in which this knowledge was embodied - scientific monographs and journal articles, public lectures, sketches, photographs, plaster casts (moulages) of human faces, collections of cranial and skeletal materials -and the extent to which field experience was permitted to confront or contradict metropolitan theories of race. I show that Meyer and Finsch experienced profound transformations in their beliefs about human difference, with respect both to manners and customs and to physical features, as a result of their encounters with actual people in Oceania.

I conclude, however, that their ability to communicate these changes to influential colleagues in the metropole was limited by a rigid professional vocabulary, essentialist tools and technologies, and an epistemologically and ideologically unreceptive audience. Show more