Visual Ethnography

A number of important anthropological question were first posed in modern form during the European Enlightement: what defines the human species in the abstract, what distinguishes human from animals, and what the natural condition of humankind. Carolus Linnaeus with his contemporaries human as three kind of human (homo) Such as Homo sylvestris ('forest man'), Homo troglodytes ('cave man') and Homo nocturnus ('night man').  1. Homo Sylvestris 

  Having thus laid before you the general lines on which I propose to deal with problems relating to race and nationality, I propose now that we should make a lightning trip round the world and cull, as we go, samples which will illustrate the kind of friction which arises wherever races or nationalities come into close contact. As I have already said, every country can yield us material for our study, but none on such a vast experimental scale as the United States of North America; we shall therefore commence our hurried survey in that country. Within the frontiers of the States is massed a population of 110 millions. When we look closely we see that over ten millions of these inhabitants are marked off from the rest by a frontier, a colour line, as sharply defined and jealously guarded as the frontiers of a kingdom. Across that racial frontier all legitimate social traffic is barred, the custodians of the frontier being those who stand on the white side of the line. Any at...

  I now enter the third stage of my argument. In the first I cited and discussed the various forms in which racial and national feelings are manifested by various peoples abroad; in my second I dealt with the nature of the various national movements at home. We now set out in search of the root from which the flower of our complex modern civilization has sprung. In the world of to-day we see many peoples exhibiting every phase in the evolution of that organization which permits mankind to live in massed populations. Fortunately for us there yet survive, in outlandish parts of the earth, remnants of native races retaining the primitive organization which guided mankind through that great hinterland of time lying between the emergence from apedom and the dawn of the modern world. For the student of sociology the immense primitive first stage of man's history is by far the more important. In his _Voyage of the Beagle_, Darwin draws a picture of the Fuegians which gives us a real insi...