European ethnography began as a moral argument blaming non-Europeans’ backwardness on indolence.

Evidence

There was nothing unusual about the theme of indolence as the essential characteristic of the non-European mentality. Earlier in the nineteenth century Georg Bernhard Depping, a French scholar, argued for the seriousness of studying empirically the manners and customs of other peoples – referring to it as the ‘moral part’ of geography and history, for which he proposed a new name ‘ethnography’ – by stressing what it could reveal about the effects of indolence versus industry. ‘When you compare the nations of Asia and Africa with those of Europe,’ he wrote, ‘you cannot fail to discover a striking difference between them. The former seem to be almost plunged into such a state of indolence as prevents them performing any thing great.’ Indolence, in fact, was the major theme of Depping’s work. It was the character of less civilised peoples and the cause of their condition. Such arguments were uncompromisingly empirical. ‘The savages of America are so indolent that they choose rather to endure hunger than to cultivate the earth’, he noted, while others were reduced by laziness to eating the broiled flesh of their own kind or even, in the case of one South American tribe, to a diet of mud and clay (kneaded, baked before a slow fire, and sometimes seasoned with a small fish or lizard). Depping drew a clear lesson from studying the manners and morals of the less civilised. ‘Shun idleness … You must not imagine that in countries where idleness and thoughtlessness become habitual, men can be as happy as in others.’ The decline of a people was due to the indolence of those who work in the fields, ‘to produce what is necessary for the subsistence of the inhabitants’. They were to be taught from their youth ‘not to waste in doing nothing a single moment that can be usefully employed’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 346

Categorization

• DEFINE: Depping coined ‘ethnography’ as the ‘moral part’ of geography and history — a definitional origin of the field worth capturing.
• SEED: Angle: the racist ‘lazy native’ trope is baked into the very founding definition of ethnography as a discipline — modern anthropology’s origin myth as colonial moralism.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and to how the ‘idle native’ stereotype morphs across colonial empires.