Claudia CastaÑeda is Lecturer at the Institute for Women’s Studies at Lancaster University in England.

Figurations-CL

By Claudia Castaneda

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2002 Claudia Castaneda
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822329589

Chapter One

Developmentalism and the Child in Nineteenth-Century Science

A short article titled “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant” was printed in the British journal of psychology and philosophy Mind in 1877. Written by a father-observer about his son Doddy, the piece included the following passage about a visit to the zoo:

It is well known how intensely older children suffer from vague and undefined fears, as from the dark, or in passing an obscure corner in a large hall, &c. I may give as an instance that I took the child in question, when 2 1/4 years old, to the Zoological Gardens, and he enjoyed looking at all the animals which were like those he knew, such as deer, antelopes &c, and all the birds, even the ostriches, but was much alarmed at the various larger animals in cages. He often said afterwards that he wished to go again, but not to see “beasts in houses,” and we could in no manner account for this fear. (Kessen 1965: 122)

The child’s fear of “beasts in houses” appears here as an unknown phenomenon in the midst of a familiar-and family-scene. Wishing to account for this fear, the biography’s author, Charles Darwin, turns not to the usual time of a biography, the time of a single life span, but to the “ancient” time of the “savage”: “May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times?” (122). The savage whose experience the biography’s author saw played out in the body of the child belonged not only to the individual child’s biography, but also to the past of human life.

This figuration of the child suggests that the matter at stake in the infant biography was not only that of the individual self (Steedman 1995), but also that of humanity as a whole, across time and space. That is, in the infant biography, the child was figured as an instance of the “human” through which the history of humanity could also be told.

In embodying the long-gone savage through the body of the child he observes, Darwin also invokes a specifically colonial ordering of human history that is achieved by what Fabian (1983) has called “temporal distancing.” Temporal distancing is a form of ordering applied to the peoples of the globe. It involves placing chronologically contemporary and spatially distant peoples along a temporal trajectory, such that the record of humanity across the globe is progressively ordered in historical time (see also Gamble 1992). It was by this means that the term “savage” signified not only the European in an ancient time, but even more so the so-called savage living in parts of the world considered remote by the scientists making these claims. Both establishing and relying on what amounted to a raciocultural hierarchy, temporal distancing made it possible to narrate human history by moving from one end to the other of the temporal trajectory along which the world’s peoples were arranged.

Fabian’s concept of temporal distancing provides an important framework for thinking about how the child, figured as a developing body, has been used in the making of global hierarchies and knowledges. Noting that temporal distancing “inform[ed] colonial practices in every aspect from religious indoctrination to labor laws and the granting of political rights,” Fabian asks, “what could be clearer evidence of temporal distancing than placing the Now of the primitive in the Then of the Western adult?” (Fabian 1983: 63). But the writing of human history was accomplished through more than simply temporal means. As the infant biography suggests, the Now of the primitive was not only placed in the time of childhood, but also in the child-body: the child was seen as a bodily theater where human history could be observed to unfold in the compressed time-span of individual development.

That the nineteenth-century child was figured in this way has begun to be discussed in literary and cultural studies concerned with colonial orderings of the world. This emerging literature on childhood and colonialism makes clear that the uses of the child as a figure of a colonial “other” were many and varied. Postcolonial literary theorist Jo-Ann Wallace (1994) has traced the child-figure in British colonial and postcolonial literature. She argues that savage/civilized and primitive/civilized dichotomies formulated in philosophical works informed nineteenth-century representations of the child in this literature. Reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education as key philosophical texts, Wallace notes, “It is as ‘primitive’ … that ‘the child’ represents to the West our racial as well as our individual past: the child is that ‘ancient piece of history,’ whose presence has left room … for the parent-child logic of imperialist expansion” (1995: 175).

Not only has the child-as-primitive represented both the individual and racial past to the West, for Wallace, but the unequal child-parent relation in Western society has also provided a foundation for the colonial/imperialist order. “Indeed,” she argues, “it was an idea of ‘the child’-of the not yet fully evolved or consequential subject-which made thinkable a colonial apparatus officially dedicated to, in [British colonial educational administrator] Macauley’s words, ‘the improvement of colonized peoples'” (Wallace 1994: 176). The point here is not that colonizers treated the colonized in the same way as they treated their own children; on the contrary, by equating the colonized with the category “child,” colonial administrators enabled and justified the subjugation of peoples as part of a “specifically colonialist imperialism” (176).

To cite just one more example of how the child’s importance for nineteenth-century hierarchies of human difference has begun to be taken up in literary studies, Cora Kaplan has suggested that “protofeminist” writing in nineteenth-century Britain “emphasized the female child’s likeness to and/or identifications with racial, hybrid, or deformed others en route to presenting her adult [and no longer child] self as the ethical model of national subjectivity” (Kaplan 1996: 181). That is, in laying claim to normative adult status, the middle-class, white woman writer had to insist upon her difference from the normative adult’s others. By establishing the (female) child’s identity with those others (racial, hybrid, and deformed), and then distancing herself from childhood, she could establish her difference from the full range of others all at once. In order to achieve adulthood, the woman had to leave childhood behind in her own past, but she also had to leave behind childhood and all that it embodied as a “heterogeneous thing”: childlike femininity, raciality, hybridity, and deformity.

In this chapter, I argue that the child was also made a heterogeneous thing through its figuration-its embodiment-in nineteenth-century scientific discourses, where the child-body was used to conjure other kinds of bodies in the time and space of a “global” human history. Darwin’s infant biography published in Mind, for example, described the child’s fear as an effect “quite independent of experience” (Kessen 1965: 123). When the child expressed his fear of “beasts in houses,” according to the biography, he was expressing a “savage’s” fear that was recorded in his body by experiences occurring in humanity’s past. So too, femininity, raciality, hybridity, and deformity-among other attributes-were questions of the body as much as they were attributes of character, and these bodily attributes were constituted to an important extent through a colonial “global” scientific enterprise. The “nature” of the child and the human were not only concepts, then, but also forms of embodiment, which were themselves established through a web of world-making material and semiotic practices.

The “Nature” of Childhood

The literary and cultural analyses cited above provide an important starting point for describing the relation between the category of the child and other embodied categories, such as race, gender, and sexuality, that appeared in the scientific literature of the period. Although my principal interest concerns how the child was figured within this literature, it is important to note that the child-figure I will be describing did not belong only to the sciences. Instead, the sciences both drew on and contributed to a wider cultural domain.

Accordingly, nineteenth-century constructions of the child’s nature have been widely discussed in the recent historiography of childhood (Rose 1992; Hendrick 1990; James and Prout 1990; Cunningham 1991; Steedman 1990, 1995; Wallace 1995). Harry Hendrick’s account of British childhood since 1800, for example, suggests that with the advent of widespread child factory labor during the industrial revolution, an ideal child nature, previously constructed by and for elite British society, was extended by reformers and philanthropists to the working-class factory child (Hendrick 1990: 40-41). The idea of romantic childhood innocence and the evangelical conviction that childhood required adult investments of “time, concern, thought, and money” were woven together to form the ideological basis for campaigns organized to “reclaim the factory child for civilization” (41). Campaigns undertaken by socialist reformers in the name of rescuing the factory child from exploitative working conditions were also based on a similar conviction about the child’s nature (42; see also Steedman 1992).

According to Hendrick, these campaigns did not succeed in changing the lot of working children, but they did “establish the distinctive quality of child labour and, thereby, of children … and for the rest of the century, reformers, educationalists and social scientists strove to make real the ideal” (Hendrick 1990: 42). The child’s ideal nature subsequently became the foundation for a discourse of universal childhood that brought urban and rural, working-class and middle-class children under the disciplinary surveillance of the school and the law. “The school child” and “the juvenile delinquent” became discursive categories through which children became the objects of institutional efforts to restore the child to its “true nature” (46).

While Hendrick brings scientific discourses into the construction of childhood beginning in the 1880s (when movements for the scientific study of children’s development began to use the school as a laboratory [Hendrick 1990: 48]), Carolyn Steedman (1995) has suggested that the life sciences became central to nineteenth-century versions of childhood from a much earlier date. Steedman suggests that the child’s nature was figured in physiological terms from the eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century. While Steedman links the child’s figuration in scientific discourses to the making of the modern self ‘s interiority, rather than attending to what might be called its exteriority, or embodiment, as I wish to do here, her work on the child and its figuration has been important for my investigation of the child as a bodily figure of the human in global time and space.

The secondary literature on nineteenth-century childhood that I have cited so far generally identifies the child as a figure constituted in and for the West, or for European, Western, or modern culture. While this particular version of the child may indeed have been and continue to be significant in many parts of the Western world, I use the term “global” to refer to a more specific location of the scientific discourse in which the child appears. The primary scientific texts that I cite in this chapter were published in English-language journals, primarily by British scientific societies. As such, they are local to two global domains. One is the set of transnational locations in which they were written and published, together with the transnationally located texts they cited as references. This global is local primarily to Europe and the United States. The second is mapped by the wider scientific and imperial enterprise to which the texts I cite also belong.

The scientific texts I consider in this chapter inscribe the story of human development, which was, as cultural historian Ludmilla Jordanova describes it, “the story that the vast majority of nineteenth century scientists aspired to tell, whether in relation to the earth, organisms, the cosmos or civil society” (Jordanova 1986: 211). The child appears in these texts as a developing body through which stories of human development are narrated. But the making and ordering of scientific “facts,” as much recent work in the history of science, feminist science studies, and cultural studies of science has so convincingly argued, is both textual and other than textual. Scientific knowledge making involves an “amalgam of places, bodies, voices, skills, practices, technical devices, theories, social strategies and collective work” (Watson-Verran and Turnbull 1995: 117). Scientific practices, furthermore, use and form things-including bodies-as well as words. While this chapter is primarily based on textual renderings of the child-body, I link at least some of the practices relevant to the child’s textual figurations by using the notion of science as collection.

Describing nineteenth-century science in terms of collecting practices brings together the two globals mentioned above, while also signaling the existence of nontextual aspects of the scientific enterprise that were implicated in its textual inscriptions. By mid-century, scientific knowledge making in what can also be called the emerging sciences of (human) “life”-biology, embryology, physiology, anthropology, and others-was to be founded on direct observation of evidence. According to this dominant notion of scientific truth making, life’s laws and principles could only be arrived at empirically, from an adequate set of “facts.” In order to make a scientific claim about “life,” furthermore, the full collection of variations existing on the globe for a given life form, or species, should be obtained. Noting the difficulty of acquiring unusual specimens from different parts of the world, for example, one nineteenth-century zoologist listed all of the “uttermost parts of the Earth” to which fellow practitioners had traveled to carry out their research (Lankester 1885: 665). The data they collected would “clear up doubtful points in the scheme of relationships … which [the zoologist] has provisionally constructed” by filling in the missing items from an incomplete and merely local record of life (665).

Among the key questions motivating scientific investigations in the nineteenth century was that of “man’s place in nature” (Young 1985). Human history, told as a story of development, was narrated in part through the use of temporal distancing. For example, archaeologists investigating human life history, used “the inhabitants of the uttermost ends of the earth to flesh out the Palaeolithic discoveries of stones and bones” (Gamble 1992: 710). The use of the colonial world as a “global laboratory” for completing the record of human life history has been described by Gyan Prakash (1992), who details some of the peculiar means by which the stuff of scientific collection was procured in India. The practices he cites run from buying skulls from family members of the deceased, to measuring native visitors in the museum where those same skulls were displayed, to displaying and then photographing persons exhibited as live specimens (158). In many parts of the colonial world, as well as in Europe and the United States, fossils were unearthed, graves were robbed of their skeletal remains, autopsies were carried out on the unfortunate dead, and measurements of every imaginable kind were taken from the living as modern science materialized its “facts” as a global record of life.

Continues…
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