‘You can either use the present to explain the past. Or you can use the past to explain the present,’ John Shea tells me. ‘But you can’t do both.’ To make sense of the past – and of ourselves – is not a simple job of gathering together scientific data until we have the truth. It isn’t just about how many fossils we have or how much genetic evidence. It’s also about squaring the stories we have about who we are with the information we’re given. Sometimes this information becomes slotted into the old stories, reinforcing them and giving them strength, even if it needs to be forced like a square peg into a round hole. Other times, we have to face the uncomfortable realisation that a story must be ditched and rewritten because however hard we try it no longer makes sense.
But the stories we’re raised on, the tales, myths, legends, beliefs, even the old scientific orthodoxies, are how we frame everything we learn. The stories are our culture. They are the minds we inhabit. And that’s where we have to start.
How did scientists enter the story of race?
ONCE, A LONG TIME AGO, I floated around the earth in the space of minutes.
I was on a ride at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, Florida, my little sisters and I perched alongside each other in a slow mechanical boat, buoyed by sugar. ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’ chimed in tinny children’s voices, while minuscule automata played out cultural stereotypes from different countries. From what I can recall, there were spinning Mexicans in sombreros and a ring of African dancers laughing alongside jungle animals. Indian dolls rocked their heads from side to side in front of the Taj Mahal. We sailed past, given just enough time to recognise each cultural stereotype, but not quite enough to take offence.
This long-forgotten vignette from my childhood is what comes back to me on the drizzly day I approach the eastern corner of the Bois de Vincennes woodland in Paris. I had heard that somewhere here I’d find the ruins of a set of enclosures in which humans were once kept – not as cruel punishment by the authorities, and not by some murderous psychopath. Apparently they were just ordinary, everyday people, kept here by everyday people, for the fascination of millions of other everyday people, for no other reason than where they happened to come from and what they happened to look like.
‘Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,’ American anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in 1973. These webs are ours only until someone comes along to pull at the threads. The nineteenth century had marked an age of unprecedented movement and cultural contact, turning the world into a smaller place than it had ever been. It was less mysterious, perhaps, but no less fascinating. And people wanted to see it all. So in 1907 there was a grand Colonial Exposition on this overgrown site in Paris, within the Bois, in what was known as the Garden for Tropical Agriculture, recreating the different parts of the world in which France had its colonies.
Eight years earlier, the garden had been founded as a scientific project to see how crops in distant lands might be better cultivated, helping to bring in more income for colonisers back in Europe. This exposition went a step further. To exotic plants and flowers it added people, displaying them in houses vaguely typical of the ones they might have left behind, or at least how the French imagined them to be. There were five mini ‘villages’ in all, each designed to be as realistic as possible so visitors could experience what normal life was like for these foreigners. It was an Edwardian Disneyland, not with little dolls, but actual people. They transformed the tropical garden into nothing less than a human zoo.
‘In Paris, there were many exhibitions with human zoos,’ says French anthropologist Gilles Boëtsch, former president of the scientific council at the National Center for Scientific Research, who has studied their dark history. There was a circus element to it all, a cultural extravaganza. But there was also a genuine desire to showcase human diversity, to give a glimpse of life in the faraway colonies. According to some estimates, the 1907 Paris Exposition attracted two million visitors in the space of just six months – a hit with curious citizens who wanted to see the world in their backyard.
Wherever they were held, most evidence of human zoos has long disappeared, most likely deliberately forgotten. The Garden for Tropical Agriculture is one rare exception. That said, the French authorities don’t appear to want to brag about it. It’s tucked behind some quiet and well-to-do apartment blocks with barely any signposting. Greeting me as I enter is a Chinese arch that was once probably bright red, but has since faded to a dusty grey. As I walk under it down a gravel path, the place is peaceful but dilapidated. To my surprise, most of the buildings have survived the last century fairly intact, as though everything was abandoned immediately after the tourists left.
To one side is a weathered sculpture of a naked woman, reclining and covered in beads, her head gone, if it was ever there at all. A solitary jogger runs past.
For European scientists, zoos like this offered more than fleeting amusement value. They were a source of biological data, a laboratory stocked with captive human guinea pigs. ‘They came to the human zoos to learn about the world,’ explains Boëtsch. Escaping the bother of long sea voyages to the tropics, anatomists and anthropologists could conveniently pop down to their local colonial exhibition and sample from a selection of cultures in one place. Researchers measured head size, height, weight, colour of skin and eyes, and recorded the food these people ate, documenting their observations in dozens of scientific articles. With their notebooks, they set the parameters for modern race science.
Race itself was a fairly new idea. Some of the first known uses of the word date from as recently as the sixteenth century, but not in the way we use it now. Instead, at that time it referred to a group of people from common stock, like a family, a tribe, or perhaps – at a long stretch – a small nation. Even until the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, many still thought about physical difference as a permeable, shifting quantity. It was rooted in geography, perhaps explaining why people in hotter regions had darker skins. If those same people happened to move somewhere colder, it was assumed their skins would automatically lighten. A person could shift their identity by moving place or converting to another religion.
The notion that race was hard and fixed, a feature that people couldn’t choose, an essence passed down to their children, came slowly, and in large part from Enlightenment science. Eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, famous for classifying the natural world from the tiniest insects to the biggest beasts, turned his eye to humans. If flowers could be sorted by colour and shape, then perhaps we too could fall into groups. In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, a catalogue published in 1758, he laid out the categories we still use today. He listed four main flavours of human, respectively corresponding to the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, and each easy to spot by their colours: red, white, yellow and black.
Categorising humans became a never-ending business. Every gentleman scholar (and they were almost exclusively men) drew up his own dividing lines, some going with as few as a couple of races, others with dozens or more. Many never saw the people they were describing, instead relying on second-hand accounts from travellers, or just hearsay. Linnaeus himself included two separate sub-categories within his Systema Naturae for monster-like and feral humans. However the lines were drawn, once defined, these ‘races’ rapidly became slotted into hierarchies based on the politics of the time, character conflated with appearance, political circumstance becoming biological fact. Linnaeus, for instance, described indigenous Americans (his ‘red’ race) as having straight black hair and wide nostrils, but also as