The Ethnological Society of London was founded in 1843 as an offshoot of the Aborigines' Protection Society (APS). Over three decades it had a chequered existence, with periods of low activity and a major schism contributing to a patchy continuity of its meetings and publications. It provided a forum for discussions of issues around what would now be classed as pioneering scientific anthropology from the changing perspectives of the period. In 1871 it became part of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
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At the time of the Society's foundation, "ethnology" was a neologism. The Société Ethnologique de Paris was founded in 1839,[1] and the Ethnological Society of New York was founded in 1842.[2] An earlier Anthropological Society of London existed from 1837 to 1842; it was concerned with phrenology,[3] and involved John Epps and Luke Burke. Burke's own Ethnological Journal appeared in 1848.[4]
The Paris society was set up by William Frederic Edwards, with a definite research programme in mind.[5] Edwards had been lecturing for a decade on the deficiency of considering the races as purely linguistic groups.[6] The Oxford English Dictionary records the term ethnology used in English by James Cowles Prichard in 1842, in his Natural History of Man, for the "history of nations". The approach to ethnology current at the time of the Society's founding relied on climate and social factors to explain human diversity. The debate of the time was still framed by Noah's Flood, and the corresponding monogenism of human origins.[7] Prichard was a major figure in looking at human variability from a diachronic angle, and argued for ethnology as such a study, aimed at resolving the question of human origins.[8]
Prichard commented in 1848 that the British Association for the Advancement of Science still classed ethnology as a subdivision of natural history, as applied to man.[9] It stayed in Section D for a period, but in 1851 it was classed in a new Section E for Geology and Geography, after lobbying by supporters including Roderick Murchison.[10] Around 1860 the discovery of human antiquity and the publication of the Origin of Species caused a fundamental change of perspective, with the older historical approach looking hopeless given the emergence of prehistory, but the biological issue gaining in interest.[11]
The APS was set up as a result of parliamentary committee activity, and was largely the initiative of Thomas Fowell Buxton. It produced reports, but in the wake of the Niger expedition of 1841 some of its supporters believed a case made on science was being sidelined in the activities of the APS.[12] The APS was founded by Quakers in order to promote a specific social and political agenda. The Ethnological Society, though primarily a scientific organization, retained some of its predecessor's liberal outlook and activist bent.
A prospectus for the Ethnological Society was issued in July 1842 by Richard King. The Society first met in February 1843 at Thomas Hodgkin's house;[13] or on 31 January, when Ernst Dieffenbach read a paper On the Study of Ethnology.[14]
King had been a student under Hodgkin at Guy's Hospital.[15] Among the other founders were James Cowles Prichard[16] and John Brown.[17] John Briggs became a Fellow in 1845, and Brian Houghton Hodgson, also representing the ethnology of India, was at some point made an Honorary Fellow.[18] The Society had Corresponding Members, who counted as Fellows.[19]
After Prichard's death in 1848, the intellectual leader in the Society became Robert Gordon Latham. Links to the Aborigines' Protection Society were retained through the common membership of Hodgkin and Henry Christy, though the break was not completely amicable.[20]
The Society saw a period of decline in the middle of the decade.[20] Among active members on the Council was William Devonshire Saull.[21] George Bellas Greenough was a vice-president.[22] James Hunt joined in 1854, and became a divisive figure because of his attacks on humanitarian attitudes of missionaries and abolitionists. He served as secretary from 1859 to 1862.[23]
Thomas Richard Heywood Thomson delivered a paper in 1854 to the Society on interfertility, casting doubt on comments of Paweł Edmund Strzelecki about female infertility among Aboriginal Australians after they had given birth to a child with a Caucasian father. The communication was well received, but as a contribution to the ongoing debate on race, was far from settling the significant underlying issue.[24]
The 1860s saw a revived interest in ethnology, triggered both by the recent work on the antiquity of man, and encounters worldwide with many peoples. The Society became a meeting-place not only for students of ethnology, but also for archaeologists interested in prehistoric societies. Thomas Henry Huxley, Augustus Lane Fox, Edward Tylor, Henry Christy, John Lubbock, and Augustus Wollaston Franks all figured prominently in the society's affairs after 1860.
During this decade the Ethnological Society became a very different institution.[25] The society's original members had mainly been military officers, civil servants, and members of the clergy, but by the early 1860s younger scientists had supplanted them.
The society's meetings and journal served as a forum for sharing new ideas, and as a clearing-house for ethnological data. In 1868 the Society set up a Classification Committee to try to get on top of the issues caused by haphazard reporting, and lack of systematic fieldwork.[26]
In the years after the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, the "Ethnologicals" generally supported Charles Darwin against his critics, and rejected the more extreme forms of scientific racism. The Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863 as an institutional home for those who disagreed with the Ethnological Society's politics. On the topic of race, the Ethnological Society retained views descending from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who had a five-race theory but was a monogenist, and Prichard. The post-Darwin concept of human speciation was unacceptable to those forming the Anthropological Society.[27]
The two societies co-existed warily for several years. The X Club, with members in common, supported the Ethnological Society's side of the debate.[28]
The Ethnological Society and Anthropological Society merged in 1871 into the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Initially the Ethnological Society did not aim to publish its own learned journal. Instead it adopted a suggestion of Robert Jameson, who edited the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, to have its transactions published there.[29] The early flow of published papers was in fact sparse.[30] Volume 46 from 1848 contained papers by George Ruxton and James Henry Skene contributed via the Ethnological Society.[31]
The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London was published in the years 1848 to 1856, a period in which four volumes appeared, and the Society's scientific activities were less marginal.[30] It was edited by Thomas Wright.[29] It then was published once more, under the title Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, from 1861 to 1869; it was re-named and published, from 1869 to 1870, again as Journal of the Ethnological Society of London,[32] and was edited by George Busk.[33]