Human Singularities: Reconfiguring the Concept of Race in Eighteenth-Century Culture

While eighteenth-century race classifications were based mostly on skin colour, other aspects of human anatomy were often involved — integuments, limbs, possession of a tail — leading to the study of ‘singularities’ of nature, such as goat-legged satyrs, tailed humans, and porcupine men. The term ‘singularity’ designates the quality of that which is one of a kind, but also, a type of variation characterized as much by excellence as by rarity. ‘Singularity’ is useful as a concept for emphasizing the multidimensional nature of racial theories, since it makes clear the coexistence (and, at times, confusion) of various registers of discourse, such as mythology, ethnology, natural history, and medicine, describing extreme variations and pathological conditions (‘monstrosities’) among humans. Human ‘singularities’ play a crucial role in the anthropological theories of François Bernier, Carl Linnaeus, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, and others, who grappled with the question of human diversity. Their categorizations, which include ‘monsters’ and unusual human forms, broaden the scope of human variation beyond skin colour, touching on anatomical anomalies, and examine the implications of such classifications for understanding human nature. The various case studies collected in Benoît de Maillet’s Telliamed call into question the reliability of testimony in natural history and highlight the persistence of fantastical ideas in shaping early anthropological thought.

This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .