The Ethnographic Roots of Joyce’s Modernism: Exhibiting Ireland’s Primitives in the National Museum and the “Nestor” Episode

Abstract

Concerned with ethnic affiliation and cultural distinctiveness, the work of late-Victorian ethnographic research yielded a “primitivist discourse” that lent a sense of scientific legitimacy to Western racial and ethnic stereotypes (Torgovnick 8). The subdiscipline of ethnology emerged as a response to the polygenist impulse among Enlightenment anthropologists who used comparative anatomy to develop distinctions between savagery and civilization, defining them as two separate species, specifically with respect to the slavery of Africans (Stocking 51). Ethnology in Britain is primarily associated with James Cowles Prichard, a physician, whose five-volume Researches into the Physical History of Man attempts to resolve the ethnological problem by demonstrating the unity of the human species on the basis of both biology and history (Stocking 51). This emerging field of inquiry studied the “linguistic, physical, and cultural characteristics of dark-skinned, non-European, ‘uncivilized’ peoples,” and it led to the formal founding of national museums throughout Europe (Stocking 47).