Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
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Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (May 11, 1752-January 22, 1840) was a German physiologist and anthropologist.
Blumenbach was born at Gotha, studied medicine at Jena, and graduated in 1775 with his MD thesis De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, University of Göttingen), which is considered one of the most influential works in the development of subsequent concepts of human races.
He was appointed extraordinary professor of medicine in Göttingen in 1776 and ordinary professor in 1778. His later works included Institutiones Physiologicae (1787), and Handbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie (1804). Blumenbach died in Göttingen in 1840.
[edit] Blumenbach's racial classification system
On the basis of his craniometrical research (analysis of human skulls), Blumenbach divided the human species into five races: the Caucasian race, the Mongolian or yellow, the Malayan or brown race, the Negro, Ethiopian, or black race, and the American or red race.
Blumenbach's Malayan race roughly equates to Australoid and was made up of Australian aboriginals, the people living in Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore. Some people of this ethnic makeup also live in parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma and Thailand. The majority of the Malayan race have light brown to dark brown skin and speak a language that comes from the Malayo-Polynesian or Austronesian family of languages.
Three of the three major languages are Bahasa Melayu, Indonesian, and Tagalog (which is the basis of the Filipino language). Malays tend to have more prominent eyelids than East Asian people, as well as lower-bridged noses. The term was used to distinguish them from their northern Asian neighbors, such as the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Mongolians.
His Mongolian race included all East Asians and some Central Asians. This is a separate concept from the Mongoloid race as defined by Carleton S. Coon, which included Southeast Asians, Pacific Islanders, and American Indians. Blumenbach excluded Southeast Asian islands from his definition as he considered them to be part of the Malay race; Pacfic Islanders as he considered them to be part of the Ethiopian race; and American Indians as he considered them to be part of the American race. He thought they were not inferior to the race he called Caucasian, and were potentially good members of society. Ethiopians included the peoples of most of Africa, Australia, New Guinea and the other Pacific islands.
In Blumenbach's day, physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., went hand in hand with declarations of group character and aptitude. The fairness and relatively high brows of Caucasians were held to be apt physical expressions of a loftier mentality and a more generous spirit. The epicanthic folds around the eyes of Mongolians and their slightly sallow outer epidermal layer bespoke their supposedly crafty, literal-minded nature.
The dark skin and relatively sloping craniums of Ethiopians were taken as wholesale proof of a closer genetic proximity to the primates, despite the fact that the skin of chimpanzees and gorillas beneath the hair is whiter than the average Caucasian skin, and that orangutans and some monkey species have foreheads fully as vertical as the typical Englishman or German.
Blumenbach's work included his description of sixty human crania (skulls) published originally in fasciculi as Collectionis suae craniorum diversarum gentium illustratae decades (Göttingen, 1790-1828).
Blumenbach's classification system and the scientific concept of human races was widely accepted for about two hundred years, but in the late twentieth century, Homo sapiens came to be seen as monotypic, i.e. not being divisible into races or subspecies.
Later in life, Blumenbach encountered in Switzerland 'eine zum Verlieben schönen Négresse' ('a negro woman so beautiful to fall in love with'). Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other individual Africans as Europeans differ from Europeans'. Furthermore he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind 'concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities'.<ref>Jack Hitt, “Mighty White of You: Racial Preferences Color America’s Oldest Skulls and Bones,” Harper’s, July 2005, pp. 39-55</ref>
These later ideas were far less influential than his earlier assertions with regard to the perceived relative qualities of the different so-called races.
[edit] Notes
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