A naturalist amongst amazonian indigenous peoples: A. R. Wallace's early ethnographic practices in the emerging british anthropology

Abstract

The research which resulted in this thesis consisted of three main steps: 1) a combined minute study of the secondary literature on A. R. Wallace’s scientific life and the following historical topics of study: Victorian ethnography, ethnology and anthropology; general nineteenth-century natural history and “race science”; evolutionism; travel writing; science and imperial globalisation; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Luso-Brazilian, Noth-American, and Continental European studies of Brazilian Indigenous peoples; Anglo-Brazilian relations; and history of the Amazon; 2) a combined analysis of primary sources concerning both Wallace’s life and science and the British scientific studies and cultural representations of human diversity between the 1840s and 1860s, collected in archives and libraries of various institutions in England and in online database; 3) a third combined perusal of the results of the two initial steps, merging them into the elaboration of the six article-like chapters constituting the monograph. In this thesis, I argue that ethnographic observational practices and studies of human diversity were two of the forefronts on Wallace’s scientific vocation, and that being enduringly interested in understanding the human species, he dedicated himself to contribute significantly to the development of ethnology and anthropology, solidifying a lasting anthropological legacy in Britain and elsewhere. Being this monograph a combination of thematic scientific biography and disciplinary history, the reader will follow the construction of Wallace’s social-scientific ideas about human diversity and vocational profile as a field observer while undertaking ethnographic observational practices amongst Welsh folk and extra-European Indigenous peoples, notably of the Amazon, between the 1840s and 1850s. In this process, the reader will also have the opportunity to take a look at the development of British ethnology and anthropology in a big picture. Wallace’s observational experiences and studies will be continually merged into and contrasted against the milieu of significant researchers of human diversity of his time, either those he read, interacted/shared ideas with or diverged. Sequentially, the reader will be taken through an analysis of the first responses to Wallace’s Amazonian ethnographic work and efforts to be seen as a sophisticated field observer of human diversity. Finally, I will present to the reader how crucial Wallace’s early ethnographic experiences were to the refinement of the observational theoretical potential of his later investigations in Asia, as well as to the establishment of his authority in learned circles of the study of humankind. The reader will therefore understand how Wallace was able to position himself, in the condition of formally uneducated naturalist, amongst reputed scholars struggling for the control and scientific consolidation of the “science of man”. Building upon previous studies of Victorian anthropology, this thesis provides a new illustration of the gradual development of anthropological thought and practices of observation in the 1800s through the initial trajectory of an eminent self-taught ethnographer and anthropologist.