Abstract

SAUFER, Michael J.. Stars in Heaven: Outer Space and the Transformation of Anthropology in Early Modernity. Hist. graf [online]. 2016, n.46, pp.131-175. ISSN 1405-0927.

This essay argues that the contemporary historical literature overemphasizes the significance of New World encounters with cultural difference for the birth of modern anthropology between 1500 and 1800 a. D. It argues, instead, that a profound rupture that was caused by the rise of heliocentrism in the Sixteenth century cuts across the anthropology of this period. Using the work of Eighteenth-century anthropologists as its primary examples, it shows how central Copernicanism became to all anthropological work. It concludes by suggesting that we read the birth of anthropology through the lens of the history of science, rather than the history of culture.

Keywords : anthropology; astronomy; heliocentrism; Bartolomé de Las Casas; Johann Gottfried Herder.