9:51 a.m.
Dear all,
Don't miss the last term seminar in the Instructing Natural History Seminar Series:
Prof. Tim Fulford. “Empire of Skulls: Headhunting and the Discourse of Natural History in
the Late 18th Century”
Date: 7 December, 15.00–16.00 C.E.T.
Location: Hybrid: Zoom and the Rausing Room at the Department for History of Science and
Ideas at Uppsala . To register for the Zoom link, please email
instructingnaturalhistory(a)uu.se
Abstract:
"Skulls were the ultimate hard ‘facts' upon which Enlightenment natural
historians built a racist pseudo-science—a hierarchy of races in which Caucasians appeared
at the top and black people at the bottom. In this talk I shall examine the practice of
collecting the skulls of indigenous peoples as a consequence of an inherent feature of
Linnaean and post-Linnaean Natural History—the drive to gain scientific power by building
a universal classification of phenomena organised by agreed procedures of mensuration. I
shall investigate how European headhunting went hand-in-hand with British colonialism,
outline the racial theories constructed upon this ‘evidence’ and critique the biased
methods by which the skulls were interpreted as revealing indigenous people’s inferiority.
I shall focus on the headhunting network that centred on Sir Joseph Banks and linked two
of the foremost instructors in Natural History — the Gottingen professor J. F. Blumenbach,
whose lectures and manuals educated generations of Natural Historians, and the London
anatomist John Hunter, whose lectures and demonstrations placed native peoples nearer to
the apes than Europeans."
Bio:
Tim Fulford has written many books and articles on Romantic-era literature, science and
culture. Among his current projects are an edition, for Cambridge UP, of The Letters of
Thomas Beddoes. He has previously edited, with Sharon Ruston, the letters of Humphry Davy,
for Oxford. Before that, he published, with Cambridge, a co-written monograph on science
and literature in the early British Empire, focusing on the work of Joseph Banks. This was
entitled Bodies of Knowledge. His monograph on Wordsworth’s later poetry, Dialogues with
the Dead, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.
With best wishes,
Linda
Linda Andersson Burnett Ph.D.
Wallenberg Academy Fellow
Department of History of Science and Ideas / Inst. för idé- och lärdomshistoria
Uppsala University / Uppsala universitet
https://instructingnaturalhistory.com/
Latest publications / senaste publikationer:
'Collecting humanity in the age of Enlightenment: The Hudson’s Bay Company and
Edinburgh University’s natural history museum', Global Intellectual History (2022)
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'Humanity on the move in the era of Enlightenment and colonisation', Global
Intellectual History (2022)
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