Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description, c. 1700–1800

Newberry, George T.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_12

George T. Newberry⁷

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

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Abstract

Animal metaphors were notoriously rife in Enlightenment racial science. Most famously, certain non-Europeans were likened physiologically and behaviourally to apes. This paper maintains that bird comparisons were also vital in discussing the bodies, behaviours, and abilities of non-European populations. Bird metaphors were used by some eighteenth-century theorists to imply differences between the intellectual and sensory capacities of Europeans and non-Europeans, and it was certainly no accident that the lowest animal on anatomist Charles White’s 1799 racialised chain of being was the snipe. This paper provides an account of how birds were used in figurative language to essentialise and dehumanise certain human groups across a broad range of ethnographic literature. In doing so, it offers an insight into the cultural and scientific understandings of birds at this time as expressed by naturalists, travellers, and anatomists. An implicit relationship is revealed between imperialist attitudes and the ongoing eighteenth-century conquest of the natural world.

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Notes

1.
Justin E.H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 137.
2.
Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812 (Williamsburg: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 29.
3.
Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 141.
4.
Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 53.
5.
David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 190–221.
6.
Robert Wokler, ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man’, in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd., 1988), 163.
7.
Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: John Hoskins University Press, 2011), 207.
8.
Caitlin Blackwell, ‘“The Feather’d Fair in a Fright”: The Emblem of the Feather in Graphic Satire of 1776’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36: 3 (2013), 371–72.
9.
Aaron Skabelund, ‘Animals and Imperialism: Recent Historiographical Trends’ History Compass 11:10 (2013), 801.
10.
Ingrid H. Tague, ‘Companions, Servants, or Slaves?: Considering Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 39 (2010), 111–30; Tobias Menely, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal, from Leviathan to Windsor-Forest’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33:4 (2010), 576; Skabelund, ‘Animals and Imperialism’, 802.
11.
Menely, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal’, 570.
12.
Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 130.
13.
Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man and in Different Animals and Vegetables (London: C. Dilly, 1799), 51.
14.
Ibid., 80.
15.
Ibid., 81–82.
16.
Ibid., 81.
17.
Robert Pitt, The antidote: Or, The Preservative of Health and Life, And the Restorative of Physick to its Sincerity and Perfection (London: John Nutt, 1704), 75–76.
18.
J.H. Elliot, The Old World and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 24–25.
19.
Henry Bouquet, ‘Reflections on the War with the Savages of North America’, in A New Collection of Voyages, Discoveries and Travels: Containing whatever is worthy of Notice in EUROPE, ASIA, AFRICA and AMERICA (London: J. Knox, 1767), Vol. II, 212.
20.
Ibid.
21.
Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (London: James Knapton, 1704), 107–8.
22.
Ibid., 108.
23.
John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (London: 1709), 34.
24.
John Nieuhoff, ‘Remarkable voyages and travels into Brazil, and the best parts of the East-Indies’, in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed from Original Manuscripts (London: John Walthoe, 1732), 143.
25.
See Jennifer L. Morgan, ‘“Some could suckle over their shoulder”: Male Travellers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770’ The William and Mary Quarterly 54: 1 (1997), 167–92.
26.
Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London: D. Henry and R. Cave, 1738), 107.
27.
Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages, 55.
28.
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica … In Three Volumes (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), Vol. II, 383.
29.
Ibid., 383.
30.
Sander Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 35.
31.
Elizabeth Sears, ‘Sensory Perception and its Metaphors in the Time of Richard of Fournival’, in Medicine and the Five Senses, eds. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 26; Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘The Art and Science of Seeing in Medicine’, in Ibid., 132.
32.
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics. Volume Fifth. Containing the History of Man in the Civilised State (Edinburgh, Bell and Bradfute; London: T. Cadell and Jun. and W. Davies, 1797), 120.
33.
Gilman, Inscribing the Other, 37.
34.
Ibid., 38.
35.
Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 136–37.
36.
Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 14.
37.
Ibid., 7.
38.
John Locke, Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: 1710), Book III, 1.
39.
Ibid., 4.
40.
Ibid., 7.
41.
Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 14.
42.
Londa Schiebinger, ‘The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 23:4 (1990), 401.
43.
David Hume, ‘Of National Characters,’ in Essay and Treatises on Several Subjects. In Four Volumes (London: T. Cadell, 1770), Vol. I, 329.
44.
Long, History of Jamaica, Vol. II, 370.
45.
Ibid.
46.
From ‘Dr. Thunberg’, ‘Gamon’ and ‘Spitsbergh’, in White, Regular Gradation, 67.
47.
Oliver Goldsmith, An History of Earth and Animated Nature (London: J. Nourse, 1774), Vol. V, 180.
48.
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and W. Creech, 1773), Vol. I, 6.
49.
Ibid., 208.
50.
Ibid., 496.
51.
Ibid., Vol. II, 442.
52.
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics. Volume Fourth. Containing the History of Man (Edinburgh, Bell and Bradfute; London: T. Cadell, 1795), 107.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Wokler, ‘Apes and Races’, 162.
55.
Burnett, Origin and Progress, Vol. I (Second Edition, 1774), 505.
56.
Ibid., 300–1. ‘Kolben’ is the Dutch surveyor of South Africa, Peter Kolbe (1675–1726).
57.
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 293.
58.
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984; 2009), 78.
59.
Tague, ‘Companions, Servants, or Slaves?’, 119.
60.
Menely, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal’, 568.
61.
William Blades, ‘Introduction’, in Juliana Berners, The Boke of Saint Albans (Facsimile Edition, 1486; London: Elliot Stock, 1881), 26.
62.
Goldsmith, An History of Earth, vol. V, 88–89. Sensory superiority is one of the first aspects of the eagle described here, interestingly: ‘The sight and sense of smelling are very acute.’
63.
Roger Lovegrove, Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation’s Wildlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 45–48; 116–40.
64.
Menely, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal’, 576.

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University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
George T. Newberry

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Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Brycchan Carey
Division of Humanities, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Greensburg, PA, USA
Sayre Greenfield
Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada
Anne Milne

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Newberry, G.T. (2020). Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description, c. 1700–1800. In: Carey, B., Greenfield, S., Milne, A. (eds) Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_12

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_12
Published: 23 September 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32792-7
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