Cães Canibais, Homens Simiescos, Harmonia da Criação. Representações da Alteridade na Alemanha do Século XVIII
The paper deals with the representation of otherness in 18th Century Germany. Departing from an episode narrated in Georg Forster’s account of James Cook’s second voyage around the world, attention is paid to the way in which an uncanny experience for Europeans - eating dog food - is narrated, and translated according to European discursive premises. The analysis of Forster’s considerations on the relativity of customs, on what is to be attributed to nature or culture, on what is to be considered innate or acquired provide the departing point for the reconstruction (and questioning) of strategies of representing of otherness. In the following parts, diverse ways of representing otherness are briefly analyzed (anatomical studies, collections of bodies and artifacts in natural history cabinets) and emphasis is put on the way in which non-European peoples are always ultimately the object of a process of reification. The scientific implications of Contemporary debates on race are also taken into account, namely the controversy between Georg Forster and Kant. The tension between ethnographie empiricism (Forster) and anthropological rationalism (Kant) is stressed and brought onto relation with the Enlightenment discourse on the “Other”. The conclusion focuses on the limits and utopian possibilities of the Enlightenment discourse, by juxtaposing it to the critique of Western rationalism as proposed by postcolonial studies.