Before Races: Barbarity, Civility, & Salvation in the Mar del Sur

Abstract

In the third edition of De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (‘On the natural varieties of mankind’), his landmark study of diversity within a common humanity, Blumenbach (1795:302–22) settled his long emergent fivefold classification of the ‘principal’ human varieties by naming them ‘Caucasian’, ‘Mongolian’, ‘Ethiopian’, ‘American’, and ‘Malay’. He justified the final term linguistically since the great majority of this variety spoke the ‘Malay idiom’, notwithstanding their dispersal across the immense space between Madagascar and Easter Island and the great variation in ‘beauty’ and other bodily attributes which saw the Tahitians divided into two ‘diverse stocks (races)’. One was ‘paler’ and facially very like Europeans, the other comparable in colour and features to ‘Mulattos’. This second Tahitian stock resembled Islanders seen in the western Pacific Ocean, amongst whom the New Hebrideans (modern ni-Vanuatu) ‘gradually’ approached the Papuas (‘Papuans’) and the New Hollanders who themselves merged imperceptibly with the ‘Ethiopian variety’. Accordingly, they might ‘not unfittingly’ be assigned to that category in Blumenbach’s ‘distribution’ which made the Malay variety transitional between the Caucasian — his original ‘medial variety of mankind’ — and one of the ‘two extremes’, the Ethiopian. Prime illustration of ‘insensible transition’ within and between varieties, the Malay confirmed his principled argument that humanity constituted a single species.