'Le Pre´sident des Terres Australes': Charles de Brosses and the French Enlightenment Beginnings of Oceanic Anthropology

Abstract

In 1756, Charles de Brosses, President of the Burgundy parliament, published his Histoire des navigations aux terres australes , the first systematic summary of voyaging narratives by European navigators in the Antipodes. While historians of Pacific exploration have long recognised the significance of this text, its reflections on the human inhabitants of the South Seas appear never to have attracted critical attention. The present essay focuses on de Brosses's division of the main part of this 'fifth part of the globe' into regions he named 'Australasia' and 'Polynesia', and his speculations on the racial derivation and societal types of their native populations. It will be shown that these ideas had a major impact on how subsequent writers, especially Bougainville and J.R. Forster, understood the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. Similarly, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes will be considered in relation to de Brosses's wider ethnological corpus, and to a general flowering of anthropological thought in Enlightenment France.

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