A Hairy Tale: Eighteenth-Century Strands of Albinism and Race

Abstract

Besides his extraordinarily well-known collection of human skulls, the German anatomist and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) was an avid collector of human hair. Largely overlooked by historical research so far, Blumenbach’s samples of hair prove highly significant in the formation of eighteenth-century ideas about race. Among the samples, seven specimens of albino hair stand out. Up until the late eighteenth century, albinism had been understood as a singularly extra-European phenomenon of “white Negroes.” As such, albinism became deeply embedded in the evolution of theories of race. The evidence collected by Blumenbach through hair samples pointed, however, to another explanation: for Blumenbach, albinism was an illness and did not constitute a different human variety. Therefore, it did not challenge his theory about five human races. This article will argue that Blumenbach’s supposedly more “scientific” way of dealing with people with extraordinarily fair skin and hair did indeed foster his system of racial thought. By splitting up his observations on anatomical things like hair and skulls into the two realms of anthropology and anatomy, Blumenbach succeeded in bypassing the “problem” of the “white Negro” by separating it as an illness apart from his attempt to categorize humans anthropologically. The story of Blumenbach’s albino hair samples therefore fits perfectly into the context of the formation of the life sciences in the eighteenth century. It provides proof not only of a disciplinary differentiation between anatomists and anthropologists but also of the ongoing racial entanglement of the sciences.