Abstract
Few writers proved more influential in establishing the key co-ordinates for the colonial mapping of relations of time and space characterising the late Victorian period than John Lubbock. His 1865 text Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages helped to consolidate the view, in popular thought as well as in the developing practices of archaeology, that the time of distant colonial peripheries could be equated with that of the prehistoric past of metropolitan centres. Yet, while freezing the savage in the static time of the primitive, Lubbock took issue with degenerationist accounts in which the colonised appeared to have fallen from an earlier, higher level of development and, in some versions, to be caught in an un-stoppable, terminal decline. This was, he argues, a false reading of the relations between the time of the primitive and that of the metropolis, registering a failure to compensate for the perspectival mobility of the modern observer. „The delusion is natural,“ he wrote, „and like that which every one must have sometimes experienced in looking out of a train in motion, when the woods and fields seem to be flying from us, whereas we know that in reality we are moving and they are stationary.“1 Lorimer Fison, a Methodist missionary in Australia and, like Lubbock, keen to keep open the prospect that the savage might yet become civilised, held to a similar view in arguing that primitive peoples had indeed progressed, but had done so only very slowly. If they appeared to be standing still, this was „because their progress, like that of the so-called fixed stars, is imperceptible to us as we watch.“2
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John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man, Chicago 1978 (c. 1870), p.328.
Fison, cit.: Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880 – 1839, Melbourne 1997, p. 35.
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993.
Riad Akbur, The City as Imperial Centre: Imagining London in Two Caribbean Novels, in: Gary Bridge / Sophie Watson (eds.), A Companion to the City, Oxford 2000, p.66.
Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, Cambridge 2000, p.156.
Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, p.162.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Harmondsworth 1968 (c. 1859), p.133.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Princeton 1981 (c.1871), p.201.
Darwin, The Descent of Man, p.201.
Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts, Cambridge (England) 1979.
Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London 1993, p.48.
Richards, The Imperial Archive, p.55.
Richards, The Imperial Archive, p.47.
Richards, The Imperial Archive, p.56.
Richards, The Imperial Archive, p.58.
Richards, The Imperial Archive, p.58.
In The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), Harriet Ritvo discusses the concerns clustered around such questions of hybridity and mongrelism. For a challenging discussion of the currency of hybridity in nineteenth-century cultural theory, see: Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race, London 1995.
See Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire, London 1994, for a discussion of the refashioning of the figure of Dracula in nineteenth-century literature.
Richards, The Imperial Archive, pp. 58–60.
The classic text here is: Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society, Oxford 1971.
See Rosaleen Love, Darwinism and Feminism: the „Woman Question“ in the Life and Work of Olive Schreiner and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in: D.R. Oldroyd / Ian Langham (eds.), The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, Dordrecht, Holland 1983; Evelleen Richards, Huxley and Woman’s Place in Science: the „Woman Question“ and the Control of Victorian Anthropology, in: J.R. Moore (ed.), History, Humanity and Evolution, Cambridge 1989; Evelleen Richards, Redrawing the Boundaries: Darwinian Science and Victorian Women Intellectuals, in: Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context, Chicago 1997; and Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Chicago 1992.
Richards, The Imperial Archive, pp.61–62.
Such difficulties associated with making change visible had a more general provenance in the natural and physical sciences. See, for example, Flint’s The Victorians and the Visual Imagination for a discussion of contemporary debates concerning how best to make the mechanisms of glacial movement visible.
As cited in: William Ryan Chapman, Ethnology in the Museum: A.H.L.F. Pitt Rivets (1827–1900) and the Institutional Foundations of British Anthropology, D. Phil, Oxford University 1981, p.480.
Chapman, Ethnology in the Museum, p.480.
I have discussed elsewhere contemporary debates regarding the relative merits of different ways of making evolution perceptible in ethnology exhibition contexts, and especially with a view to teaching the gradualness of progress: see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London 1995, pp.179–186.
Although Dawkins was a Huxley protégé (he had worked with Huxley at the Geological Survey and drew on his support in securing the position of Curator at the Manchester Museum), he placed a different interpretation on the moral and religious significance of Darwinism. See Adrian Desmond, Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London, Chicago 1982, p.181.
W. Boyd Dawkins, The Museum Question, in: Museums Association Proceedings (1892), p.17.
Dawkins, The Museum Question, p.17.
Dawkins, The Museum Question, pp.19–20.
See 30 July, 1884 memorandum from Henry Higgins, Minutes of Museum Subcommittees, Liverpool Museum, vol.2, April 1879–July 1889.
Correspondence of Sir William Henry Flower, British Museum of Natural History.
David Murray, Museums: Their History and their Use, Glasgow 1904, p.259.
Thomas H. Huxley, Discourses: Biological and Geological. Essays, London 1896, p. 4.
Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970, Princeton 1996, p.145.
Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany, Chicago 2002, p.185.
Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism, p.181.
Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, Cambridge (UK) 1989, pp.43–47.
Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism, p.151.
I have elaborated this argument more fully in: Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memories: The Evolutionary Museum, Liberal Government and the Politics of Prehistory, in: Folk: Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society 43 (Autumn 2001), pp.49–75.
George Brown Goode, Museum-History and Museums of History (c.1888), in: Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (ed.), The Origins of Natural Science in America: The Essays of George Brown Goode, Washington 1991, p.310.
Goode, Museum-History, p.308.
I draw in this section on an earlier discussion: see Tony Bennett, Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics, in: Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science and Technology 6.3 (1998), pp.345–71.
Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, Cambridge (Mass.) 1993, p.2.
Stafford, Body Criticism, p.9.
Jean-Louis Comolli, Machines of the Visible, in: Teresa de Lauretis / Stephen Heath (eds.), The Cinematic Apparatus, London 1980, pp. 122–123.
Meg Armstrong, „A Jumble of Foreignness“: the Sublime Musayums of Nineteenth-Century Fairs and Expositions, in: Cultural Critique (winter 1992–93), pp. 199–250.
Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Bamum, Boston 1973.
Barbara T. Gates, Ordering Nature: Revisioning Victorian Science Culture, in: Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context, Chicago and London 1997.
See: Ben Singer, Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism, in Leo Charney / Vanessa Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Berkeley 1995.
For a useful discussion of this aspect of the culture of the sublime, see Phil Macnaghten / John Urry, Contested Natures, London 1998, pp.114–115.
As cited in: William White, The Function of Museums as Considered by Mr Ruskin, in Museums Association Proceedings (1893) p. 89.
Asa Briggs, Victorian Things, London 1988.
Gates, Ordering Nature, p. 182.
For a consideration of these issues, see: Peter Hamilton / Roger Hargreaves, The Beautiful and the Damned: The Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography, London 2001; and Daniel Pick, Stories of the Eye, in: Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, London 1997.
Alison Griffiths, “Animated Geography”: Early Cinema at the American Museum of Natural History, in John Fullerton (ed), Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema, London 1998.
WilliamUricchio / Roberta E. Pearson, Corruption, Criminality and the Nickleodeon, in: John Fullerton (ed.), Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema, London 1998.
Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organisation of Popular Consent in Nineteenth Century Britain, Cambridge 1984, p.173.
Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood, Cambridge (Mass.) 1989, pp.19–21.
There were other aspects to the regulation of the museum visitor’s vision in this period that should be noted The ordering of the relationships between visitors and museum displays so as to open up a distance between the observer and the observed is especially important in this regard Timothy Mitchell discusses the operation of this mechanism in international exhibitions, while Henrietta Reigel examines its functioning in ethnological collections, and Mark B. Sandberg looks at its consequences when integrated into the representational strategies of folk museums. See: Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, Cambridge 1988; Henrietta Reigel, Into the Heart of Irony: Ethnographic Exhibitions and the Politics of Difference, in: Sharon Macdoland / Gordon Fyfe (eds.), Theorizing Museums, Oxford 1996; and Mark B. Sandberg, Effigy and Narrative: Looking into the Nineteenth-Century Folk Museum, in: Leo Charney / Vanessa Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Berkeley 1995.
Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other, New York 1989, p.94.
McGrane, Beyond Anthropology, p.94.
McGrane, Beyond Anthropology, p. 96.
It is important to distinguish the position of museums from that of international exhibitions in this regard as the latter frequently comprised more open and, if not dialogic spaces, ones in which the colonised occasionally co-mingled with other visitors and thereby, according to Peter Hoffenberg, rendering the imperial gaze more interactive than usual: Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War, Berkeley 2001, pp.16–17.
Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Melbourne 1996, p.95.
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton 1999, pp.40–46.
Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory, Cambridge (UK) 1997.
Gyan Prakash, The Colonial Genealogy of Society: Community and Political Modernity in India, in: Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, London 2002.
Nicholas B. Dirks, The Crimes of Colonialism: Anthropology and the Textualisation of India, in: Peter Pels / Oscar Salemink (eds.), Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, Ann Arbor 2000; Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton 2001.
Gillen as cited in: McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p.62.
Elsie Masson cited in McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p.87.
I have discussed this elsewhere: see Bennett, Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes and Popular Instruction.
McGregor, Imagined Destinies, p.146.
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Bennett, T. (2004). Metropolis, Colony, Primitive. In: Kopp, K., Müller-Richter, K. (eds) Die ›Großstadt‹ und das ›Primitive‹. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-02937-9_4
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