Concluding Discussion
Monday, February 8, 1999

 

Goals

• General review
• Discuss Thornton’s book
• Prepare for exam

Strategies

• Saartje Baartman: your questions, 20 min.
• what exam will look like, 10 min.
• Thornton: my questions and big concepts, 10 min.
• small groups, 15 min.
• full group, 30 min.

Saartje Baartman

• YOUR QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS
  • "power trip on the part of Europeans"
  • "how science can be dehumanizing"
  • Raises the question of when science goes too far in its drive for new knowledge.
  • Linkage between sexual exhibition and colonialism. Implications and ramifications of this: implications for European society and African society, other than objectification and dehumanization.
  • A medical connection between the dehumanization of blacks and the slides?
  • To see women’s bodies studied as abnormalities . . . Must be seen in order to know what was actually happening.
  • Prurient interests of Europeans
  • how Africans contributed to medical progress
  • the links between sexuality, the "Other," and the African human figure. During a time of great sexual repression in Europe and America, the African body (especially the female one) allowed whites access to a different and "wild" sexuality.
  • I think it is important to learn about the way in which women were objectified in this time period . . . The way the African race as a whole was often exploited, not only in slavery, but also in more visual ways, in museums, etc.
  • Did social Darwinism play any role in all of this, or did it occur later along the timeline? I’m curious as to the relationship between these European scientific curiosities and scienfically-based racist/supremacist attitudes which emerge later.

Study of human difference

• mid-18th c., development of European Enlightenment, main racial divisions began to be established; emergence of natural history
• Linnaeus, 1707-1778:
  • race as "type"
  • principes of taxonomy in biological sciences
  • distinguished European, Asiatic, African, and American man
  • attached character descriptions (ingenious vs. lazy)

 

Typological theory of race

• gained momentum as a result of the work of Cuvier
• and as physical anthropology was institutionalized
• from mid-19th c., craniometry

 

Charles Darwin, 1809-1882

• British naturalist
• expounded theory of evolution by natural selection, "survival of the fittest"
• On the Origin of the Species, 1859

 

Robert Knox

• The Races of Men, 1850
• 1817-1820, frontier army surgeon in South Africa
• began to classify South Africa’s peoples on anatomical grounds

 

Social Darwinism

• white supremacy is the natural outcome of a logical process where the survival of the fittest is manifestly seen to prevail.
• white, industrial civilization final stage of process that begins with hunters/gatherers

 

Sir Francis Galton, 1822-1911

• British meteorologist, statistician, biologist
• cousin of Darwin
• founder of eugenics: science of the "well-born," a social program dedicated to the improvement of racial "stocks"
• from 1860s, exploring inheritance of natural ability
• pioneer explorer in South West Africa, 1850-1852
• coined term in 1883
• coincided with the rising intensity of imperialist feeling in the 1880s

 

More Comments

• To just see the head of someone who could easily be my cousin or nephew displayed at the whim of colonists for questionable reasons is very disturbing. To process this class in a positive way, for me, would take more time and more information. Mostly, this class period made me feel rage about the imperialistic, ethnocentric, and degrading opinions and treatment that Europeans tended to take everywhere they went.

 

• More of a preface would be helpful. How racial classification is an impossibility, attempts at it are a slippery slope to movements like eugenics, the Holocaust, etc, to help show how 20th c. stereotypes and 1980s and 1990s notions of science, race, and racism are still prevalent. So that we don’t look at today’s class material as reflective of a historical moment far removed from the present day.

   

• I got the feeling that you were embarrassed by the topic and wholly unwilling to discuss it and the overall facts involved.
• The objectification of African sexuality did not come through that clearly however. It seemed as though this was merely a crude scientific study with in underlying force of racial superiority. I actually prefer that material like this is given to the student straight. Let us define the point that oversteps our boundary.
• I really don’t think that the connection between the white women’s purity and the African women’s erotic state were thoroughly explored.

Yes, this material should be taught.

• The way in which the Black woman and her sexuality is at the core of many of today’s racial issues in this country today. Those who are ignorant to the truth of the objectification that Black women have dealt with cannot fully understand them in today’s world. I do think that the connection between this view of African women and their health could have been more clear.

Points of Confusion and Inquiry

• I do not feel that this is a necessary lecture to include in the course.
• I would have rather heard more about healing and disease in Africa, especially in the present day. More of the common problems and issues and diseases that Africans face.
• I really do not understand the significance of today’s lecture in the context of this course. What does it have to do with epidemics in Africa? . . . . The topic is noteworthy because of its historical significance in terms of racism, but I believe it was inappropriate for this class.
• I really do not think that you should have made such a connection between the doctor who invented fistula surgery . . . You seemed to have drawn the conclusion that without the three black women, it would not have been possible.
• I thought the the inclusion of the Marion Sims story provided essential information about the ways European women benefited from experiments on African women.
• Why? My confusion stems from the ideas of trophy heads and displaying skeletons. What point did this prove?
• Why were these women’s bottocks so large?
• What happened to these two conditions?
• What evolutionary theories were proposed to explain the Hottentot Apron? How was it to serve a woman differently? "curtain of shame"
• Are the body parts of Baartman still on display in France or are they housed away from public view?
• Did Cuvier adhere to racist beliefs of Africans AND find positive qualities in Baartman?
• I am a little confused about how today’s story relates to the reading material, e.g. Thornton. What is pulling everything together? Is there some common, underlying theme?
• "How do I keep track of what’s important and what isn’t?"
• "How will I be tested on readings, on class information, timelines, etc.?"
• "How do I approach studying for this midterm exam?"

 

What the exam will look like?
Its purpose

• Test your knowledge of key terms, concepts, themes
• Oblige you to draw connections between the various stories and concepts we have studied.

 

My big arguments

• Healing traditions within Africa are strong, enduring, and mutable.
• Lower Congo healing traditions are part of the proto-Bantu tradition of farming peoples who colonized the southern half of the continent
• Conditions of historical trauma reinforce the need for African healing traditions, even if these change in relation to new conditions
• Africans have been especially gifted at mixing new healing traditions with old, especially under historical circumstances of racism, theft and bondage of persons, and coercive situations.
• We need to think of medicine and healing not only as bodily health, but as spiritual practices.
• We cannot separate out the history of racism and the scientific and commercial exploitation of African peoples from the history of medicine and health. Biomedicine and science are about power, and black people’s bodies have been used and abused as research specimens and sexual objects.
• The history of dehumanization, objectification, and manipulation of African peoples has been central to their struggles to keep their healing (spiritual and medical) traditions alive.

 

Questions about the Thornton book

• write your question down

Now join a small group

• collect your questions
• choose the two most important
• How did witchcraft figure in this story?
• What is the significance of the Stono Rebellion of 1739?
• How can we account for the popularity of the Antonian movement?
• Explain Kimpa Vita’s rise as a healer?
• How did fertility figure in Kimpa Vita’s story?
• What was the relationship between the Kimpasi Society and the Antonian movement?
• How did racism figure in this history?
• Who were the Vili? Why is it important to understand the two major trade routes of the export trade in this region?