History of The Human Sciences

Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015, $75.00. xxiii + 718 pages, ISBN: 978-0-8032-5542-5

by

Hilary Howes

The central argument of Han F. Vermeulen’s Before Boas, which checks in at an impressive – indeed, somewhat daunting – 718 pages, is presented with admirable conciseness at the very beginning of the first chapter.  Both ethnography, ‘conceived as a program for describing peoples and nations in Russian Asia and carried out by German-speaking explorers and historians’, and ethnology, developed by ‘historians in European academic centers dealing with a comprehensive and critical study of peoples’, ‘originated in the work of eighteenth-century German or German-speaking scholars associated with the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of Göttingen, and the Imperial Library in Vienna’ (pp.1-2).  The formation of these studies, Vermeulen adds, ‘took place in three stages: (1) as Völker-Beschreibung or ethnography in the work of the German historian and Siberia explorer Gerhard Friedrich Müller during the first half of the eighteenth century, (2) as Völkerkunde and ethnologia in the work of the German or German-speaking historians August Ludwig Schlözer, Johann Christoph Gatterer, and Adam František Kollár during the second half of the eighteenth century, and (3) as ethnography or ethnology by scholars in other centers of learning in Europe and the United States during the final decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (pp.1-2).  Building particularly on existing research by Hans Fischer and Justin Stagl into the importance of Göttingen as a locus of early ethnographic work, Vermeulen pushes the earliest uses of the German terms Völkerkunde, Ethnographie, ethnographisch, and Ethnograph back by several years, and the concept, as Völker-Beschreibung (description of peoples), by several decades.  In the process, he also raises several significant overarching points, including the interconnectedness of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science in Western Europe and in Russia; the need to distinguish between ‘colonial anthropology’ and ‘anthropology developed in colonial contexts’; and the emergence of the ethnological sciences as part of global history (dealing with peoples and nations, defined primarily by their languages), rather than as part of anthropology (dealing with human varieties or ‘races’, defined primarily by their physical features).

Before Boas is divided into eight substantial chapters.  Chapter One, ‘History and Theory of Anthropology and Ethnology: Introduction’, and Chapter Eight, ‘Epilogue: Reception of the German Ethnographic Tradition’, usefully contextualise the real ‘meat’ of this study, namely Vermeulen’s exhaustive examination of little-known primary sources.  I particularly enjoyed Chapter Two, ‘Theory and Practice: G.W. Leibniz and the Advancement of Science in Russia’; Chapter Three, ‘Enlightenment and Pietism: D.G. Messerschmidt and the Early Exploration of Siberia’; and Chapter Four, ‘Ethnography and Empire: G.F. Müller and the Description of Siberian Peoples’.  As their titles suggest, these three interlinked chapters examine, respectively, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646-1716) development of a strict methodology in what would now be called comparative or historical linguistics; the itinerary, methods, and results of Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt (1685-1735), ‘the first scientifically trained explorer of Siberia’ and the first to ‘systematically conduct ethnographic research’ there (115); and the inauguration of ‘ethnography as a descriptive study of peoples’ by the historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705-1783).  In all three cases, Vermeulen points out, the general neglect by historians of these individuals’ contributions to the development of ethnography can largely be attributed to the ‘lack of published works’ (p.131).  An accurate assessment of Müller’s ethnographic work, for example, has only become possible with the very recent publication (in 2003, 2009, and 2010) of German and Russian editions of two of his manuscripts.

In addition to examining the published and unpublished writings of these three individuals – their correspondence, memoirs, reports, manuscripts, and maps – Vermeulen pays careful attention to their education and training, employment, contacts, and scholarly networks.  This approach emphatically underscores the remarkable mobility of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century savants, as well as the resulting interconnectedness of Western European and Russian science.  Vermeulen’s in-depth discussions of particular individuals and specific expeditions add valuable detail and nuance to existing scholarly work on Tsar Peter the Great’s ‘Petrine reforms’; the lower-level interactions he traces help flesh out contacts between figures at the top of the food chain.  For example, the establishment of an academy of sciences in Russia, which resulted in a significant influx of foreign scholars, is not described simply as a result of Leibniz’s meetings and correspondence with Tsar Peter the Great; rather, Vermeulen presents it as a multi-player process facilitated in large part by the Scottish head of the Apothecary Chancellery in Moscow, Robert Areskine (Erskine), and the Tsar’s main science adviser, Yakov Vilimovich Brius (Jacob Daniel Bruce).

In contrast to Chapters Two, Three, and Four, which blend seamlessly into one another, Chapter Five, ‘Anthropology and the Orient: C. Niebuhr and the Danish-German Arabia Expedition’, seemed to me to sit rather awkwardly within the structure of the book as a whole. Vermeulen introduces it by explaining that its ‘apparent lack of a colonial context … will give us occasion to further comment on the relation between ethnography and empire’, and that its ‘contributions to ethnological discourse were much less pronounced than Müller’s Siberian venture’, this being ‘a contrast that requires elucidation’ (p.218).  Perhaps it does, but 48 pages of elucidation struck me as excessive, particularly since Vermeulen’s main conclusion is essentially negative: the ‘new, “ethnic” principle’ introduced by German-speaking scholars in the Russian Empire, their ‘classification of “peoples” according to their languages’, was ‘not found in Niebuhr’s work’ (p.266).  As for Vermeulen’s insistence on the distinction ‘between “colonial anthropology” and “anthropology developed in colonial contexts”’ (p.28), I felt that this point, although undeniably important, was adequately made in Chapter Four.

Chapter Six, ‘From the Field to the Study: A.L. Schlözer and the Invention of Ethnology’, picks up where Chapter Four left off.  Having traced the concept of ethnography, in the form Völker-Beschreibung, to Müller’s research in Siberia (1740), Vermeulen concedes that the historian August Ludwig Schlözer (1735-1809) was ‘probably the man who invented the term Völkerkunde’ (270).  More importantly, Schlözer ‘was the first to initiate an “ethnographic method” into the study of history”; he employed the concepts Völkerkunde, Ethnographie, ethnographisch, and Ethnograph ‘in strategic passages that were central to his argument’, and ‘held a key position in the international network of scholars first applying the ethnos terms to designate a study of peoples’ (pp.270-271).  While I share James Urry’s (2016: 1) concern that the search for ‘points of origin for ideas and concepts … too often resembles that for the Holy Grail’, I could not help but be impressed by Vermeulen’s meticulously compiled table tracing the history of ‘Ethnological discourse in Asia, Europe, and the United States, 1710-1815’, from Leibniz’s historia etymologica in 1711-12 to B.G. Niebuhr’s Völker- und Länderkunde in 1815 (354-355).  A further valuable aspect of Chapter Six is the attention Vermeulen pays to the proliferation, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, of journals with Völkerkunde in their titles.  These were, in a sense, the first ethnological journals, but the phenomenon has largely been neglected by modern scholars.

Chapter Seven, ‘Anthropology in the German Enlightenment: Plural Approaches to Human Diversity’, offers an overview of anthropological studies in the German Enlightenment.  From a survey of major publications with the word ‘anthropology’ (or its French, German, Italian, and Latin equivalents) in their titles, Vermeulen concludes that anthropology was in fact a ‘polyvalent’ term, used not only for physical and biological approaches but for medical, theological, and philosophical ones (p.393).  He adds that anthropology ‘up until the eighteenth century … was very different from ethnology’; while the former ‘focused on human beings as individuals or as members of the human species’, the latter ‘dealt with particular kinds of human groupings, that is, peoples and nations’ (p.393).  This chapter, unlike the previous ones, is a summary rather than an in-depth study, and doubtless some historians of racial thought will feel that certain aspects or individuals should have been dealt with in more detail.  However, Vermeulen’s focus is on anthropology as an alternative approach to human diversity, and his main point – that ‘anthropology and ethnology developed in separate domains of learning’, and that ‘the distinction between civil (political) history and natural history remained very much alive in the eighteenth century’ (pp.392-393), despite various attempts to relate them – is an important one.

It is scarcely possible, in a book of this scope, to avoid a few minor errors and omissions.  For instance, Vermeulen states that the remains of the ‘main ship, commanded by [Jean-François de Galaup de] La Pérouse’ during his 1785-88 expedition to the Pacific, ‘have never been retrieved’ (p.343).  In fact the wreck of the Boussole was located by Reece Discombe at Vanikoro, Solomon Islands, in the 1960s, while the final resting place of its companion ship, the Astrolabe, has been known since at least the 1950s (Coleman, 1987; Tryon, 2008).  Investigations conducted in 1986 and 1990 by the Maritime Archaeological Section of the Queensland Museum recovered substantial amounts of material from both wrecks (Stanbury and Green, 2004).  Nor is Vermeulen correct to describe it as ‘a mystery why Blumenbach labelled [his] fifth [human] variety “Malayan”’ (p.373); as Bronwen Douglas has pointed out, in the third (1795) edition of his De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, Blumenbach explicitly justified his use of the name ‘Malay’ ‘on the linguistic grounds that this “variety of men” mostly spoke Malay’ (Douglas, 2008: 107).

These, of course, are mere quibbles.  I was rather more startled to find, in so thoroughly researched a monograph as Vermeulen’s, a passing reference to Gavin Menzies’ widely critiqued (if not debunked) 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (see Goodman, 2006; Henige, 2008; Melleuish et al., 2009; Rivers, 2004).  Any of the numerous credible studies outlined by Finlay (2004) could more effectively have been used to support Vermeulen’s essentially uncontroversial claim that ‘the Chinese sea voyages of Zheng He’, like ‘the Russian conquest of Siberia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, have ‘rarely been included in the canon of Western exploration’ (p.87).

Vermeulen’s close reading and careful analysis of little-known primary sources far outweigh these few flaws.  Before Boas is a substantial piece of scholarly work on a topic of ongoing interest.  It valuably complements the existing bodies of work dealing, on the one hand, with German-language contributions to the development of physical anthropology, and, on the other, with the history of British and American ethnology.  Historians of science, scholars of Enlightenment thought, and those interested in the peoples of Siberia are the obvious target audience, but I believe Before Boas also has much to offer to anthropologists, ethnologists, geographers, and historians, each of whom will learn a great deal about the history of their own discipline.

Hilary Howes is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University, working on Professor Matthew Spriggs’ Laureate Fellowship project ‘The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific: A Hidden History’ (CBAP).  Her current research, which addresses the German-speaking tradition within Pacific archaeology and ethnology, builds on her PhD dissertation, published in 2013 as The Race Question in Oceania: A.B. Meyer and Otto Finsch between metropolitan theory and field experience, 1865-1914.  Following various stints as a research assistant, tutor, co-lecturer, guest lecturer, and associate course co-ordinator, she was employed most recently as Executive Assistant to the Ambassador at the Australian Embassy in Berlin, where her responsibilities included facilitating the repatriation of Australian Indigenous ancestral remains from German collecting institutions.

References

Coleman, R. (1987) ‘Missing: Explorer’s Disappearance Creates a 200-year-old Puzzle’, Australian Geographic 8: 86-99.

Douglas, B. (2008) ‘“Novus Orbis Australis”: Oceania in the Science of Race, 1750-1850’, in B. Douglas and C. Ballard (eds) Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940. Canberra, ACT: ANU E Press, pp. 99-155.

Goodman, D.S.G. (2006) ‘Mao and the Da Vinci Code: Conspiracy, Narrative and History’, The Pacific Review 19(3): 359-384.

Finlay, R. (2004) ‘How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of  America’, Journal of World History 15(2): 229-242.

Henige, D. (2008) ‘The Alchemy of Turning Fiction into Truth’, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 39(4): 354-372.

Melleuish, G., Sheiko, K. and Brown, S. (2009) ‘Pseudo History/Weird History: Nationalism and the Internet’, History Compass 7(6): 1484-1495.

Rivers, P.J. (2004) 1421 Voyages: Fact and Fantasy. Ipoh: Perak Academy.

Stanbury, M. and Green, J. (eds) (2004) Lapérouse and the Loss of the Astrolabe and the Boussole (1788): Reports of the 1986 and 1990 Investigations of the Two Shipwrecks of the French              Explorer at Vanikoro, Solomon Islands. Fremantle, W.A.: Australasian Institute for Maritime   Archaeology.

Tryon, D. (2008) ‘Vale Reece Discombe (1919-2007)’, Pambu: Pacific Manuscripts Bureau Newsletter 24: 10-11.

Urry, J. (2016) ‘Book Review: Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment’, TAJA: The Australian Journal of Anthropology 0 (Early View): 1-2, accessed 2     December 2016, accessible @: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/taja.12217/full

Marianne Sommer, History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules, London and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2016, 544 pages, cloth $50.00 ISBN 9780226347325.

by Chris Renwick

UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation – is probably best known to the public for the “world heritage site” status it has awarded to buildings, structures, and places including the Acropolis, the Galapagos Islands, and the Taj Mahal since it was founded in 1945. Given this role as a guardian of the globe’s heritage, it might surprise some people that UNESCO’s first director – and the man who insisted it include science as well as education and culture in its remit – was Julian Huxley (1887-1975). Grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog”, Thomas Henry Huxley, Julian was a distinguished biologist in his own right and a public intellectual who had written numerous best-sellers, including Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), been Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, and even won an Oscar for his documentary film, The Private Life of Gannets (1934). Julian Huxley’s connection with UNESCO made perfect sense. A campaigner for what he called “evolutionary” or “scientific” humanism, he believed there was no good reason to exclude the stuff of which we are made from our concept of heritage.

Huxley’s vision is one of the three overlapping evolutionary programmes – the others belonging to the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) and the Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (b. 1922) – that Marianne Sommer has weaved into the compelling History Within. Charting almost 100 years across 15 deeply researched and packed chapters, Sommer tells a story about the efforts to come to terms with the biological, social, and cultural meaning of evolution during the twentieth century. Focusing on an evolving understanding of heritage, through which thinkers fused biology, society, and culture whilst avoiding reductionism, History Within documents a complex intergenerational project to provide us with a scientifically-informed account of what it is to be human. In so doing, Sommer takes us from the early twentieth-century world of what historians have called “mainline” eugenics, in which categories like race had essentialist properties, to the triumph of diversity, in both politics and biology, 70 years later.

Central to Sommer’s argument about those developments is the idea that they were both made possible by and a direct consequence of networks that included not only scientific and political ideas but also technology and modes of communication. Whilst Huxley went so far as resigning his university chair to devote more time to communicating his ideas to a wider public, Osborn worked as both a professor of biology at Columbia University and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. Cavalli-Sforza, a former student of the British population geneticist R. A. Fisher, integrated his work at Stanford with the latest advances in computing, helping to lay foundations for both the Human Genome Diversity Project and the National Geographic-funded Genographic Project. Immersing ourselves in each of these thinkers’ worlds takes us from an effort to illustrate and encourage people to engage with human evolution through dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History to electronic maps showing the migration of genes across the globe. At each stage, new research techniques made it possible to look deeper into ourselves and increased the amount of information that accounts of human history could include. But they also furnished people like Osborn, Huxley and Cavalli-Sforza with new ways of thinking about humans and opened up new possibilities for people to engage with them.

As Sommer shows, these developments, which have created businesses that will decode genomes for a fee and the idea that heritage can be identified with our genetic makeup, have always existed within a complex and precarious set of political and cultural relationships. Indeed, History Within is most thought-provoking and insightful when it comes to the twentieth-century struggle to fashion a biology that worked productively with left and liberal politics. When allied with his science, Osborn’s somewhat unforgiving eugenics generated a story about humanity that was hierarchical and excluded races and groups. Huxley, however, saw eugenics as having more to do with equality of opportunity – an idea that provided the foundation for his later and more famous work on the UN Statements on Race, which declared race a social, not biological, category. Yet in a post-war world where Huxley’s once-progressive beliefs about eugenics suddenly sounded old-fashioned, Cavalli-Sforza transformed apparently empty biological categories into positive political statements. Genetic geography, with arrows and maps showing the global movement of people, told us about that a common humanity that stretched deep into the past and could be discovered within us.

As Sommer argues, though, problems have persisted, even with this apparent resolution to the challenge set by mid-twentieth-century biosocial progressives. One is the tendency to treat some communities as living fossils – reminders of some geographic and cultural staging post on the way to our own current state. Given that the science involves choices about which groups to sample, stories about genetic and cultural development map historical change in complex and politically fraught ways; for example, by making some people and places part of others’ pasts. At the same time, however, the constant pursuit of diversity in the biosocial sphere threatens to overload us with information, making it difficult to support a story about human heritage that is as coherent as it was when Cavalli-Sforza first started work – a scenario that will be familiar to anyone engaged with the politics of “big data”. Indeed, there is another order of questions that History Within alludes to, namely what all these developments in understanding our past might mean for our future. In the decades after the Second World War, when he was forced to drop eugenics as a frontline concern, Huxley wrote about something he called “transhumanism” – how our knowledge of biological and psychological science might be used to overcome our physical limitations. Diversity was an important part of this project because Huxley had come to believe that, given it was essential for evolutionary progress, society’s role was to compensate for its costs, such as disability. This was a very different answer, of course, to the one offered by earlier mainline eugenicists, who believed in the purity of races. In this respect, progressive social and political ideals have been integral to biology and our understanding of the human during the past 70 years. But with private companies becoming significant actors in the development and communication of these ideas, there are profoundly important questions about the ownership of human heritage, not to mention inequalities in participating in it and accessing any of its future benefits. Sommer offers us a profoundly important historical frame for thinking about this problem, not to mention the others that will emerge in future.

Chris Renwick is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of York and an editor of History of the Human Sciences. He works on the relationship between biology, social science, and politics, and is the author of British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

L’Âge d’homme preceded by L’Afrique fantôme, by Michel Leiris. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. Edited by Denis Hollier, in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon, Series: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, n°600. 1456 pages, 38 ill., ISBN: 9782070114559.

by Emmanuel Delille

A new edition of L’Âge d’homme (available in English as Manhood)[ref]Leiris, M. (1992) Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility, translated by Richard Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[/ref] by Michel Leiris (1901-1990), overseen by Denis Hollier, was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade at the end of 2014. It constitutes the second volume of Leiris’ selected works, the first volume being La Règle du jeu[ref] Leiris, M. (2003) La Règle du jeu, ed. Denis Hollier, in collaboration with Nathalie Barberger, Jean Jamin, Catherine Maubon, Pierre Vilar, and Louis Yvert. Paris: Gallimard.[/ref]. The edition presents selected autobiographical texts in addition to L’Âge d’homme, including L’Afrique fantôme. (The latter is often translated into English as Ghostly Africa, but will be soon published for the first time as Phantom Africa in a new translation by Brent Hayes Edwards).[ref]Available in English in February 2017: Leiris, M. (2016) Phantom Africa, trans. Brent Hayes Edwards. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[/ref] L’Afrique fantôme is an essay that is simultaneously controversial and foundational for French ethnology. Hollier’s editorial decision highlights Leiris’ contribution to the genre that we call autofiction, wherein autobiographical materials are rewritten using the techniques of fiction writing – in contrast to the raw journals kept by Leiris between 1922 and 1989. Hollier has proposed the general title L’âge d’homme fantôme[ref]Hollier, D. (2014a) ‘Préface’, in Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, XI.[/ref] to identify this corpus; following Edwards’ new translation of Phantom Africa, an English version of this title could be Phantom Manhood [ref]I am very grateful to Professor Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia University), who answered my questions about his new translation and suggested Phantom Manhood as a general title in English.[/ref]

The volume is imposing; for this reason, my analysis focuses solely on L’Âge d’homme, the best-known of Leiris’ books among the general public (L’Afrique fantôme is the object of another review article, in the Japanese academic journal Zinbun).[ref]Delille, E. (2017) ‘Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme, précédé de L’Afrique fantôme. Édition de Denis Hollier, avec la collaboration de Francis Marmande et Catherine Maubon, (Paris, Gallimard, Collection: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, n°600, 2014, 1456 pages, ill.)’, Zinbun: Memoirs of the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto University, 47: in press. [/ref] From my perspective, it is not, for all that, his masterpiece; however, this narrative has benefited from its long availability as a mass-market paperback, unlike L’Afrique fantôme. Of Leiris’ books, it is also the one closest to the genre of confessional literature: it reveals the author’s sexual obsessions, the pathological shame he felt, and how he turned to the psychoanalytic interpretation of myths to narrate his experience.

Hollier soberly recounts the book’s context: after a period of anguish and impotence, Leiris began psychoanalysis in 1929 with Adrien Borel (1886-1966), one of the first French psychoanalysts, on the advice of his friend Georges Bataille (1897-1962). He then joined the Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic Mission (1931-1933) and published a long travel narrative, L’Afrique fantôme (1934). L’Âge d’homme soon followed (1935), although it only really began to take shape after a second series of psychoanalytic treatments (1933-34).

While Leiris was at the very beginning of his scientific career in the 1930s, it is obvious that he drew on two disciplinary genres in order to breathe new life into confessional writing: psychoanalytic and ethnographic narratives. Indeed, as in L’Afrique fantôme, Leiris began with the principle that writing in the subjective mode increases the value of the testimony contained in the book and brings it closer to the truth. Eight chapters tell the story of his childhood and adolescence until the age of reason: marriage, the publication of his first works, and the beginning of a scientific career. Parental figures, his brothers and sister, and his first romantic relationships haunt the narrative, even though the figure of the beloved brother is not as well developed as in The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu). Nevertheless, the text is not structured as a family drama in the strict sense; instead, the plot is organized around a painting by Cranach that represents two biblical figures: Judith and Lucretia (Cranach, 16^th century). Leiris saw in this diptych a kind of crystallization of his obsessions: two women who personify the two faces, desired and terrifying, of his fantasy. At one and the same time, woman is the object of man’s imperious desire (rape of Lucretia) and triumphant against her rapist (Judith decapitating Holofernes). The influence of psychoanalysis allowed him to identify his fascination with Cranach’s diptych with the concept of the castration complex, which Leiris believed explained his anxieties: “By psychoanalysis, I hoped to free myself from this chimerical fear of punishment, a chimera reinforced by the absurd power of Christian morality – which one must never flatter oneself that one has altogether escaped.”[ref]Leiris, M. (1992) Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility, translated by Richard Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 138. See also: Leiris, M. (2014) L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 889-890.[/ref] In Freudian psychoanalysis, the castration complex designates the anxiety that results from the Oedipus complex, which is to say the love children have for their mother, as it is checked by paternal power. This infantile fear represents a certain renunciation of the maternal object, but also an irreversible loss: it thus constitutes an existential anguish, which makes it susceptible to displacement onto substitute objects.

Yet one of the most interesting aspects of this new edition is precisely that it draws attention to the biblical personage with whom Leiris identifies: Holofernes. Indeed, in his foreword, Hollier justly stresses the disappearance of Judith and Lucretia in the conclusion of L’Âge d’homme; they are replaced by masculine figures, suggestive of homosexuality, that are designed to be more harmonious with the psychoanalytic theme of castration.[ref]Hollier, D. (2014b) ‘Notice: David et Goliath ou la castration’, in Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 1227.[/ref] He also reproduces some of Leiris’ corrected proofs, one of which is soberly entitled Psychanalyse (Psychoanalysis, December 1930).[ref]Leiris, M. (2014) L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 31.[/ref] which Leiris had originally intended to insert before a dream narrative.

From a historical point of view, we know that the interpretation of symbols played an important role in the beginnings of psychoanalysis, particularly in the first half of the 20^th century. This practice first appeared as a technique for interpreting dreams, with the goal of filling out the material obtained in the patient’s free associations while recounting a dream. For the therapist, it helped both to overcome mental blocks and to explain Oedipal fantasies to the patient. But psychoanalysts soon extended this practice to interpreting symbols in myths, religions, and literary texts; Freud himself based his analysis of infantile sexuality on Greek mythology and published an essay on the biblical figure of Moses.

Hollier also presents a previously unpublished letter written by Leiris to his wife, dated May 30^th, 1932. It explains that Borel’s virtue lay in his having understood that Leiris wanted to play the role of a mythological character: he would stage himself in the form of a new Holofernes[ref]Hollier, D. (2014b) ‘Notice : David et Goliath ou la castration’, in Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 1229.[/ref], in an autobiographical narrative where confession would have a cathartic function. Finally, Hollier observes that castration is also an explicit theme of two texts, contemporary with Leiris’ writings, that were published in 1930 in the journal Documents; this journal was edited by Bataille and lists Borel as one of its contributors.

These materials make a convincing argument that Leiris identified himself with a mythological character. It is unfortunate, however, that the editors chose not to present more context about the appropriation of psychoanalysis by writers of this generation, and that they even forgot to list Borel in their index. This oversight is all the more curious because the very interesting appendices of this new edition contain a Note remise au docteur Borel (Note delivered to Doctor Borel, 1929)[ref]Leiris, M. (2014) L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 912.[/ref], followed by Projets de mémoires (Ideas for Memoirs, 1930)[ref]Ibid., 913-915.[/ref], extracted from Leiris’ journal and contemporaneous with his psychoanalysis – a corpus of texts which should have been compared with those written by other former surrealists who undertook psychoanalysis with Borel.

And yet evidence indicating that these texts represent collective practices is not lacking, and editors might have remembered that in the Bible, Judith’s victims include not only Holofernes, but his army as well! Because in addition to Leiris and Bataille, we must also take into account Jacques Baron, Raymond Queneau, Colette Peignot (pseudonym: Laure), and Boris Souvarine, all of whom were in therapy with Borel. Moreover, Borel was not only a confidant of but also an intermediary between the members of this group, as their correspondence demonstrates. For example, in 1934, Baron revealed to Leiris that he too had taken the initiative of asking for help: “I’m not joking, but I’m heading to Privas to visit Doctor Borel! Tell no one about this idiocy, but I’m dreaming: I have all of hell in my head.”[ref]The original French text: “Je ne rigole pas, mais je pars pour Privas rendre visite au Docteur Adrien Borel. Ne souffle mot à personne d’une telle idiotie mais je rêve: j’ai tout l’enfer dans la tête.” Leiris, M. & Baron, J. (2013) Correspondance 1925-1973. Nantes: Joseph K., 149. The English translation here, by Marie Satya McDonough, is literal, because Baron’s expressions are not clear in French. We know that he suffered from depression after the War, but we must be wary of retrospective diagnoses. See also: Delille, E. (2016) ‘Michel Leiris & Jacques Baron, Correspondance. Édition établie, annotée et préfacée par Patrice Allain & Gabriel Parnet (Nantes, éditions Joseph K., 2013, 192 pages)’, Zinbun: Memoirs of the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto University, 46: 213-215.[/ref] That same year, Leiris wrote to Bataille: “If you see Borel after receiving this letter, give him my regards and tell him that I am trying hard to be good.”[ref]Bataille, G. & Leiris, M. (2008) Correspondence, trans. Liz Heron. Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Seagull Books, 105.[/ref] Similarly, in 1943 he wrote him about the posthumous publication of a text by Peignot: “Did you receive the Histoire d’une petite fille? All the copies planned have now been distributed, except Borel’s (but I expect to go and see him within a very few days).”[ref]Ibid., 160.[/ref] We thereby see how in the 1930s, psychoanalysis was a collective practice, much like automatic writing, introduced in The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs magnétiques) in 1920.[ref]Available in English as The Magnetic Fields: Breton A. & Soupault P. (1985) The Magnetic Fields, translated and introduced by David Gascoyne. London: Atlas Press.[/ref]

This intellectual social scene, enthusiastic about psychoanalysis, also had an impact on academic psychology. For example, after the suicide of the eccentric writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), Leiris was tasked with editing How I Wrote Certain of My Books[ref]Roussel, R. (2005) How I Wrote Certain of My Books, edited by Trevor Winkfield and introduced by John Ashbery. Boston: Exact Change.[/ref] (Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres, 1935), a posthumous autobiographical essay. The project led him to contact the psychologist Pierre Janet, a professor at the Collège de France and Roussel’s psychotherapist, in order to reconstruct his illustrious patient’s last days. Bataille would repeat the gesture in consulting Borel with regard to the posthumous edition of Peignot – and that is not all: in 1937, Leiris would join Bataille in founding a Société de Psychologie Collective, with Borel and Janet! This Society’s goal was to study the psychological factors in social facts. While it may be argued that this information is well-known, unfortunately the existing historiography on the crossed histories of psychoanalysis, psychology, and early 20^th century avant-gardes reveals that the collaborations between the literary world and academic psychology are relatively unknown. I am thinking in particular of Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau’s research,[ref]Bacopoulos-Viau, A. (2012) ‘Automatism, Surrealism and the Making of French Psychopathology: The Case of Pierre Janet’, History of Psychiatry 23(3): 259-276.[/ref] which is well documented but too focused on Breton, and where Leiris is literally forgotten. Beyond Borel and Janet, Leiris would consult other psychotherapists after the war, including Julián de Ajuriaguerra (1911-1993), who would later become, like Janet, professor at the Collège de France. To sum up, it would have been interesting to establish the similarities and the differences between L’Âge d’homme and the accounts, diaries, and fictions that Leiris’ contemporaries left on the practice of psychoanalysis.

Emmanuel Delille is a historian of medicine and health, currently Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He is an Associate Researcher at the Centre d’Archives en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences (CAPHÉS, École Normale Supérieure, Paris) and at the Centre Marc Bloch (CMB, Humboldt University, Berlin). One of his major interests is the history of psychiatry: intellectual networks and comparative history between France, Germany, and North America – particularly Canada. Other research projects include the history of the French psychiatric hospital Bonneval (Eure-et-Loir) and the history of the French scholarly society “L’Évolution Psychiatrique” (created in 1924). His work in intellectual history focuses on epistolary material, above all, letters between scientists involved in scholarly networks.

James E. Strick, Wilhelm Reich, Biologist. (London: Harvard University Press, 2015). 467pp. ISBN 9780674736092. (hardcover), £31.95

by Matei Iagher 

In his biography of Wilhelm Reich (1983), Myron Sharaf began the section on Reich’s scientific work with a warning that he did not have the requisite competence to judge this scientific work, and that the existing literature on this aspect of Reich’s work was too unreliable to be used  in making a critical assessment. This caveat could be read as a challenge for historians of science, but as the Reich archives only became available in 2007, the task of providing a competent, historical account of Reich’s biological work also had to wait. The wait has not been in vain, as with James Strick’s Wilhelm Reich, Biologist we now have a balanced and thoroughly researched account of Reich’s experimental work in the 1930s, which is likely to become the standard for any future historical investigation of Reich’s work.

Outside of a small circle of researchers and aficionados, Wilhelm Reich’s name does not immediately evoke associations with laboratory biological research. Rather, he is much more well-known as a psychotherapist, a psychoanalyst and Freudian dissenter, and above all, as a forefather of  the 1960s sexual revolution and as an intellectual source for later American and European counterculture. Much of the popular image of Reich is, even today, glazed over with an unsavory patina—an echo of the sensationalist reporting that tarnished his reputation in the 1950s, when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also made him the target of a witch hunt (Reich’s books were burnt, and he was eventually imprisoned for contempt of court). Part of the aim of Strick’s book is to destroy this popular, pseudo-scientific aura that hangs around Reich, by showing that some of his most controversial theories were rooted in serious, cutting edge research.

Methodologically, the book draws on an extensive engagement with the Reich archive (his laboratory notebooks, correspondence, research and personal images), which is used to reconstruct Reich’s working methods, theoretical commitments and the process whereby he obtained his results. In addition, this is very much a book about debates in early twentieth century biology (and Reich’s place within them) as well as a book about changing paradigms in the life-sciences. The word ‘paradigm’ is not accidental, as Strick mentions Kuhn, and particularly his notion of ‘revolutionary science,’ more than once, as a way of describing Reich’s biological work. As he writes in the introduction: ‘Scientists, then, whose names we associate with revolutions—Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Pasteur, Semmelweiss—all, by definition, faced staunch, often irrational resistance to their ideas, not least from the established scientific authorities of their day. I argue that Reich’s work on biogenesis in the bion experiments, and certainly the visceral reactions it provoked, need to be understood in this light’ (p.8). This is pretty illustrious company, to say the least, but it reflects Strick’s sense that Reich drew the short straw of history and that he deserves a posthumous rehabilitation.

Wilhelm Reich, Biologist thus sets out to perform this rehabilitation, by examining Reich’s theoretical and experimental work in biology, undertaken in Oslo between 1934-1939. The book’s seven chapters chart Reich’s discovery of the ‘bions’ (microscopic particles that Reich saw as intermediary between inanimate matter and life) and outline the process by which Reich tried (and ultimately failed) to get his research validated by the wider academic community. As Strick’s focus is on Reich’s work as a biological researcher, the book contains only scattered remarks about Reich’s work as a psychotherapist and a psychologist in the 1930s. It is regrettable that Strick did not explore the connection with psychology in more depth, both in the case of Reich himself, as well as by comparing Reich’s forays into biology with those of other contemporary psychologists (such as Freud and Jung, for example, who both based their psychological systems on biological theories). Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1979) or Shamdasani’s Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology (2003) might have helped to further contextualise the question of why an early twentieth century psychologist would look toward biology as a way of vindicating and expanding upon his psychological theories. At the same time, I can find no argument (other than the book’s already substantial length) for why the narrative does not continue beyond 1939, and into Reich’s American years.

The book’s first chapter (pp.16-63) examines the intellectual context of Reich’s experimental work, surveying the relevant debates in the turn of the century research in the life sciences (mechanism/vitalism, the concept of a specific life-energy, holism, dialectical materialism) and also surveys Reich’s personal journey from Viennese psychoanalyst to origin of life researcher. Chapter 2 (pp. 64-98) then proceeds to outline the process whereby Reich discovered the bions. As Strick explains, Reich was early on struck by an analogy between the amoeba’s extending of a pseudopod and the erection of the penis (p.61, 75). In a rather androcentric way, Reich argued that human sexuality in general was ‘functionally equivalent’ to the protist’s reaching out ‘toward the world’ with its pseudopod. Sexual arousal was rooted in the autonomic nervous system, which Reich claimed was a protozoan structure still present in the metazoan organism. Strick then traces the way in which Reich’s work on human sexuality precipitated his turn towards laboratory science.

After moving to Oslo in 1934, Reich began to study the bioelectric potential of the human skin. The conclusion of this study was that ‘the sexual process, then, is the biological-productive energy process per se’ (73). As Strick shows, it was this idea that, around 1936, led Reich to study the electrical charges of microorganisms like the amoeba. The discovery of the ‘bions’ followed from there: Reich was instructed to soak moss in water for ten to fourteen days in order to obtain a fresh culture of amoebas. Unsure of, or unconvinced by the explanation that amoebas came from spores present everywhere in nature, Reich proceeded to observe the process under the microscope. He concluded that before protozoa were formed, a series of vesicular shapes (i.e. bions) could be clearly seen detaching from the moss and then assuming some of the signs of life, such as motility and inner pulsation. The bions could be further cultivated through successive generations, using various preparations. Over time, through variations in the ingredients, Reich was able to produce bions with different properties.

In chapter 3 (pp. 99-145), Strick charts Reich’s dialogue and collaboration with Roger du Teil, a French philosopher who took an early interest in the bion work, and who offered to perform control experiments and to lobby on behalf of Reich’s theories among his French colleagues. This chapter allows Strick to go into more depth about the criticisms that were leveled against the bions, such as the fact that Reich was merely looking at bacteria picked up through air contamination, or that the lifelike movement he was observing was merely Brownian movement. As Strick convincingly argues, both of these critiques fell wide of the mark. Reich took particular care to sterilize his preparations, over and above what normal sterilization procedures at the time would have required. In one such instance, he burned soot to incandescence, before sticking it into his culture media (p.133). Such temperature would have been enough to kill off any common bacteria. Curiously however, Reich’s bions formed faster when the preparations where boiled than when they were not. Regarding the issue of the lifelike movements of the bions, Strick notes that Reich was using a state of the art microscope not usually available to most laboratories at the time and that the failure of other researchers to identify these movement was also due to a lack of requisite high-end apparatus (p.102, 127).

In chapter 4 (pp. 146-185), Strick halts the narrative in order to discuss Reich’s theoretical commitments and methodology. As Strick argues, Reich considered his dialectical-materialist method (later rebranded as ‘energetic functionalism’) as essential to understanding his work on bions. The chapter is an interesting case study of what constituted the scientific-method for Reich (as opposed to other contemporary dialectical materialists such as Alexander Oparin or J.D. Bernal) and serves as a prelude to chapter 5, which discusses Reich’s work on cancer. As Strick shows, Reich had theorised (on the basis of his own materialist ontology) that cancer was an endogenous disease, brought about by bions formed from disintegrating organic material, well before he ever looked at cancer tissue under the microscope. In chapter 5 (pp.186-217), Strick traces the development of Reich’s ideas about cancer and the experiments (some of them frustrated by his falling out with one of the main cancer specialists in Oslo) he devised to test them.

While Reich’s ontology was no doubt productive in setting him on the track of an original cancer theory, the public articulation of that ontology may have well have set him up for the response that followed from his Norwegian colleagues. As shown in chapter 6 (pp. 218-269), Reich was the target of a bitter press campaign meant to discredit his work, and, as some hoped, to get him to leave the country. As Strick shows, in ‘the small town of Oslo,’ the academic establishment did not take kindly to a dialectical materialist who was also a Jew, with no formal training in biology, and who evinced a radical stance toward sexuality and unorthodox ideas about the origin of life and cancer. As Strick also demonstrates, Reich’s Norwegian detractors had a vested interest in attacking Reich and his work: they were competing for the same funding from the Rockefeller foundation, the only major funding body around in the Depression era (p.227). The book’s seventh chapter (pp.270-310) seeks to bring the story full circle, by returning to the issue of the specific life-energy first broached in the first chapter. This final chapter thus charts Reich’s discovery of the radiating ‘SAPA bions’ and his eventual conclusion that the energy emitted by these bions was the specific life-energy or, as he began to call it in 1939, ‘orgone.’

In the Epilogue, Strick asks himself: ‘Is this story of purely historical interest?’ (311). The answer, one is led to believe, is clearly ‘no.’ Much like Hasok Chang, who has put forward the idea of a history and philosophy of science that functions as ‘complementary science,’ Strick is interested in the way in which historical knowledge might be useful in uncovering and helping to reinstate forms of scientific knowledge that have been obscured or deliberately left out in the development of scientific disciplines (Chang, 2004).  At the same time, to ask what relevance Reich’s work might have today is a question that follows from the attempt to take Reich’s work seriously—something which, as Strick reminds us, few historians and scientists have done before. And to take it seriously means to consider the proposition that Reich was indeed looking at something real, that his bions were not merely the imaginary constructs of a deluded dilettante. Strick’s work makes the reasoned case that Reich was indeed on to something. What that something might be is not for the historian to decide. Nevertheless, Strick seems to write for more than just a historical audience, and biologically minded readers might want to pick up on some of the suggestions that are scattered throughout the book. Even so, as Strick shows, Reich’s work diverged so radically from everything that happened in biology in the decades since the discovery of the bions that it may prove as difficult to give it a fair hearing today as it was in the 1930s.

Matei Iagher obtained his PhD in the History of Medicine from UCL in 2016, with a thesis about the history of the psychology of religion. He is now working on turning his dissertation into a monograph.

References

Chang, H. (2004) Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shamdasani, S. (2003) Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sharaf, M. (1983) Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Sulloway, F.J. (1979) Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. London: Burnett Books.