Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe : Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe was increasingly conflated with race. The essays in this book document this reality but also seek to modify and qualify it by exploring anomalies, complexities, and contradictions, in line with recent postcolonial theory (co-presence and interaction as well as domination) that emerge when seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts. Within this volume, the nineteenth-century terminology will be used defining ethnography as cultural and anthropology as physical or biological. The vocabulary of race, ethnicity, tribe, and nation is understood to be historically contingent and will be discussed in individual essays. These chapters evaluate artists who responded to ethnographic and anthropological information (from racial sorting to identity politics) by producing images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued that information. The artists discussed here had various interactions with the field: some were friends, colleagues, or partners of ethnographers, others illustrated ethnographic publications, and all were familiar with some of the literature. This book presents a range of different voices that resisted or facilitated practices of ethnic othering to which ethnography and anthropology contributed. In some cases, such as Christian Schad's portrait of Agosta and Rasha, both directions remain in tension. The Norwegian Carl Arbo and the Russian photographers of the Turkestan Album and the Types of Nationalities of Central Asia, however, produced constructions of physical and cultural racism, while the Austrian painter Leopold Carl Müller, the Hungarian designers of the Gödöllö colony, and the Russian illustrators Mikhail Yezuchevskii and Vasilii Vatagin created images projecting multicultural unity that reflected enlightened, albeit self-interested, government policies. Theories of Eastern linguistic origins and migration patterns inspired artists as diverse as Paul Gauguin and painters in Austro-Hungary to visualize the kinship of Occident and Orient in minority populations of, respectively, the Breton Celts and Roma. Indigenous perspectives are represented by the Sámi printmaker John Savio and the "hybrid" Danish-Greenland artist Pia Arke whose art challenges repressive colonial practices and restores lost narratives and identities. A similar agenda informs the work of Berlin filmmaker Philip Scheffner who enables self-representation by the marginalized through interviews with Roma citizens and archival voice recordings of Southeast Asian and African prisoners of war. Our authors seek, overall, to uncover instances of connections, variability, and the fluidity of ethnic identity, subject to geopolitical circumstances and the orientations of those formulating the constructions. They aim to unsettle and complicate monolithic fixed categories and binary structures of racial alterity and to undo the certainties of ethnic categorization. ## Affiliations and Networks There are many compelling historical reasons to consider these particular countries and ethnic groups collectively, apart from their exclusion by Said in his book Orientalism (1978). To begin with, their geopolitical identities from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries were frequently in flux, presenting an array of shifting alignments, inter-relationships, and ethnic diversity. Norway had been a in Chapter 8 by Margaret Dikovitskaya. She analyses Imperial photographs of Turkestan to expose disparaging attitudes towards Central Asian Muslims in which images of nomadic tribesmen and villagers, crumbling ruins, undeveloped landscapes, and antiquated technologies are contrasted with Russian generals, conquered fortresses, and modern methods of production. Dikovitskaya, it should be noted, was one of the early voices calling for a challenge to the scholarly erasure of race in Russian ethnography. 61 ## Ethnography, Anthropology, and Art The essays in this book interrogate the many forms of racial definition, whether physical (the visible body), biological, environmental, linguistic, or cultural. The chapters are organized according to geographic regions, but can also be considered in chronological couplings to provide information about stages of development in anthropology and ethnography at a given time. In effect, they serve as snapshots within the larger continuum of issues and techniques with which the fields were engaged. Several essays mention texts from the eighteenth century, when historians agree that the origins of racial seeing and sorting are to be found. These occurred in a constellation of activities: Kant's theories of race as inherited physical traits discussed initially in a series of writings from the 1760s; Herder's invention of Volksgeist that evaluates the role of environment, language, and culture in national character; descriptions of global man by Johann Reinhold Forster in voyages with Captain James Cook (1772-5); and human racial taxonomies included in Carl Linnaeus' botanical studies (Systema Naturae 1758) and foregrounded in Blumenbach (De generis humani varietate native 1775). 62 (Linnaeus, it should be noted, was the subject of research by the Austro-Swedish entomologist Felix Bryk, the close colleague and friend of the German painter Christian Schad. Both are discussed in Chapter 10.) From the beginning, these endeavors to map and describe human difference were encoded with Eurocentric rankings reliant on visual constructions based on "typical" specimens of selected salient characteristics. This is, according to Johannes Fabian's critique, the "rhetoric of vision" that is the "privileged metaphor of a scientistic anthropology, " where "observation and/or representation (in terms of models, symbol systems, and so forth) . . . persist in denying coevalness to its Other. " 63 As noted in chapters by Berman and Pushaw, the Sámi and Finns were classified among the Asian Mongolians and excluded from the "beautiful" Caucasian race that included Europeans. "Gypsies" were grouped together with Indians by Kant and other scholars, and compared to Egyptians, as discussed by Robert Born and Dirk Suckow in Chapter 4. Linnaeus located the Sámi in the category of Homo Monstrosus. 64 Despite the effusive praise for tribal cultures and the opposition to slavery expressed by many writers around 1800, European superiority was a given. Within the white Caucasian West, however, distinctions were drawn. Barbara Larson's Chapter 7 traces Gauguin's representations of Celts to his interest in comparative linguistics and non-Western races. "Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery (in painting, photography, prints, film, and design) of race construction primarily in Scandinavia and the empires of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia at a time when the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and publications on race were debating competing theories of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. These regions, while on the periphery of continental Europe, largely marginalized in the scholarship of nineteenth-century art history, and ignored by Edward Said (Orientalism 1978), have been central locations for theorizing white identity and for containing diverse ethnic populations that have generated substantive ethnographic study and regional conflicts since the eighteenth century. This anthology explores art that engaged with ethnography and anthropology to shape visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures, both indigenous (Roma, Sámi, Inuit, and Celts) and migrant or colonial (Muslims and Blacks), chiefly between 1850 and 1930, but extending into the early twenty-first century. The essays in this book contribute to postcolonial research by documenting colonial-style treatment of minority groups and by seeking to qualify binary systems through explorations of anomalies, complexities, and contradictions that emerge when seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts. This book presents a range of different artistic voices that responded to ethnographic and anthropological information by producing images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued that information. The authors seek to uncover instances of connections and variability, to establish the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and to challenge the certainties of racial categorization"-- Provided by publisher Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery of race construction in Scandinavia, Austro Hungary, Germany, and Russia. It covers a period when historic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and theorists of race were debating competing conceptions of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. Beginning in 1850 and extending into the early 21st century, this book explores how paintings, photographs, prints, and other artistic media engaged with these discourses and shaped visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures in countries associated with theorizations of white identity. The chapters contribute to postcolonial research by documenting the colonial-style treatment of minority groups, by exploring the anomalies and complexities that emerge when binary systems are seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts, and by representing the voices of those who produced images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued ethnographic and anthropological information. In doing so, Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe uncovers instances of unexpected connections, establishes the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and challenges the certainties of racial categorization. Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Contents 6 Illustrations 8 Introduction 12 Chapter 1: From Folk to a Folk Race : Carl Arbo and National Romantic Anthropology in Norway 36 Chapter 2: From “Northern Dweller” to “Distinguished Among His Race”: The Transformation of the Nordic Colonial Subject, 1900–1935 62 Chapter 3: Decolonizing the Archive: Pia Arke and Stories from Scoresbysund 80 Chapter 4: Brigands and Virtuous Musicians: Representations of Roma (“Gypsies”) as Oriental Other in the Eastern Part of the Habsburg Monarchy during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 96 Chapter 5: Leopold Carl Müller’s Scenes from Egyptian Life: Ethnography, Race, and Orientalism in Habsburg Vienna 118 Chapter 6: A Hungarian Treasure Chest: The Art Colony at Gödöllő in Critical Perspective 160 Chapter 7: The Journey West: Gauguin, Philology, and the Celts of Brittany 178 Chapter 8: In the Beginning Was the Image: Russian Ethnography and Colonial Photography in Turkestan, 1860s to 1870s 198 Chapter 9: Children of the Narod: Early Soviet Children’s Books’ Racialization of Childhood 218 Chapter 10: From Sideshow to Portrait: The Ethnographic Vision of Christian Schad 238 Chapter 11: Anthropological Histories and Techniques in Philip Scheffner’s Films 254 Contributors 270 Index 273 From folk to a folk race : Carl Arbo and national romantic anthropology in Norway / Patricia G. Berman -- Brigands and virtuous musicians : representations of Roma ("Gypsies") as oriental other in the eastern part of the Habsburg Monarchy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / Robert Born and Dirk Suckow -- Children of the narod : early Soviet children's books' racialization of childhood / Marie Gasper-Hulvat