Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s ‘New Hollander’

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dc.bibliographicCitation.firstPage31
dc.bibliographicCitation.lastPage56
dc.bibliographicCitation.volume33/34
dc.contributor.authorKühnast, Antje
dc.date.accessioned2021-02-17T10:25:54Z
dc.date.available2021-02-17T10:25:54Z
dc.date.issued2020
dc.description.abstractThe colonisation of Australia, at the end of the eighteenth century, coincided with the birth of (physical) anthropology. In Germany, it was the Enlightenment naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who began to utilise human skulls as scientific evidence for his hypotheses on human diversity and origin. He assigned selected skulls to be representative of each of his five human ‘varieties’. Due to this very fact, Blumenbach’s own historiographical representation is ambiguous – he has been depicted as both the forerunner of race sciences that were to follow in the 1900s and the humanist and universalist defender of human unity and universal value in the times of slavery. This article discusses how Blumenbach throughout his writing on humanity incorporated his notion of Indigenous Australians. In 1775, he outlined a sequence of human skulls, including those of ‘New Hollanders’, long before he began to assemble his (in)famous skull collection. Roughly fifteen years later, he obtained the skulls of two Indigenous Australian men which then represented the ‘black race’ of his diversified South Pacific ‘Malay variety’. The ‘Neuholländer’ in Blumenbach’s work, arguably, also reflects the tension inherent in his aim to scientifically prove humanity’s unity on the basis of its diversity.
dc.identifier.doi10.35515/zfa/asj.3334/201920.03
dc.identifier.urihttp://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/776
dc.language.isoeng
dc.relation.issn16179900
dc.relation.journalZeitschrift für Australienstudien / Australian Studies Journal
dc.relation.volumeZeitschrift für Australienstudien / Australian Studies Journal; Vol. 33/34
dc.rightsL::The Stacks License
dc.subject.ddcddc:900
dc.subject.fieldaustralianstudies
dc.subject.fieldhistory
dc.titleJohann Friedrich Blumenbach’s ‘New Hollander’
dc.typearticle
dc.type.versionpublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typePublication
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Zeitschrift für Australienstudien / Australian Studies Journal; Vol. 33/34 (2019/2020)