ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Buffon’s Dogs: Breeding, Empire, and the Visualisation of Race

• In Event: Genealogy & Inheritance between Passion, Law, and Science, II

English Abstract

This paper revisits Buffon’s Natural History and his diagram of dog varieties (1755) to challenge the idea that Buffon introduced a “genealogical method” or “genealogical style of reasoning” to natural history. In contrast to Linnaeus’s “logical” or “classificatory” approach to taxonomy, Buffonian genealogy supposedly laid the foundation for the modern concept of race (Doron 2012, 2016; Nelson 2021). Thus understanding Buffon’s approach to natural order not only as generational or historical, but specifically as “genealogical,” has effectively reinforced an already existing idea of Buffon as a forerunner to Darwin. As the quintessential manifestation of his supposedly “genealogical” style of reasoning, Buffon’s visualisation of the “order of dogs” is frequently reproduced in the historical literature, including in studies of evolutionary tree diagrams (Pietsch 2012). While acknowledging that Buffon described his diagram as “a kind of genealogical tree”, we argue that this was a comment about form, not content, and that this was not the only or the most prioritised comparison he proposed to help readers make sense of the diagram. Importantly, Buffon also compared his diagram to a “geographical map”, engaging a respected map engraver to produce it, while insisting on the importance of climate for what he called the “degeneration” of dog “races”. Rather than projecting the Darwinian paradigm back in time, we argue that Buffon’s ideas about variation and race were profoundly shaped by his interest in animal breeding, by religious dogma, and by contemporary discussions about displacement and interracial relations in the context of colonialism, empire, and enslavement.

Authors

• Jens Amborg, University of Uppsala

• Petter Hellström, Uppsala University