The Birth of Physical Anthropology in Late Imperial Portugal
In this article I analyze the emergence of the field of physical anthropology in the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that Portugal’s relatively peripheral position combined with a complex internal conjuncture of political instability and economic impotence gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. I describe the various national and international exchanges leading to the birth of this naturalist anthropological tradition at the University of Coimbra, drawing particular attention to the foundational role played by the technological assemblage of large osteological collections aimed at the study of the somatic characteristics of the metropolitan “white” population. I situate these technical developments in the context of wider sociocultural and politico-economic processes of both “nation building” and “empire building.” These processes had a strong effect on the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of answers that seemed compelling and acceptable to early physical anthropologists.
Guardian Angel on a Nation’s Path
In this paper I analyze the trajectory of Brazilian physical anthropology from the late nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, framing it within the prevailing historical and sociopolitical context. The focus will be on the research and reflections of anthropologists at the Museu Nacional (National Museum) in Rio de Janeiro, one of Brazil’s most influential anthropological research centers, from 1870 to 1930. The main aim is to understand why these anthropologists distanced themselves from explanatory approaches that placed mestizos and other non-Europeans on inferior levels in the hierarchy of human races. I argue that the position taken by physical anthropology at the National Museum was the result of far-reaching intellectual and political dynamics operating well beyond academic borders. Anthropologists from the National Museum—and Edgard Roquette-Pinto in particular—shared the nationalist ideals defended by a portion of the early twentieth-century Brazilian intelligentsia. It is also argued that, contrary to some historical interpretations, the antideterministic position of physical anthropology at the National Museum was independent of the Boasian influence. Although there were superficial similarities between the Boasian ideas and those of a segment of the physical anthropology produced in Brazil, the most significant influences came from other, locally produced sources.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.