Scientific rhetorics in the emergence of British ethnology, 1808--1848: Discourses, disciplines, and institutions (James Cowles Prichard, England)

In this project, I apply rhetorical and sociological theories of scientific discourse, disciplinarity, and boundary-work to investigate the emergence of a new scientific discipline, ethnology, in the first half of the nineteenth century. British ethnologists adapted a wide array of rhetorical resources from contemporary scientific disciplines—including rhetorical strategies, conventional genres, and disciplinary arguments and evidence—in their efforts to legitimize ethnological conclusions and to institutionalize ethnology in the face of contending disciplines.; I analyze three important sites of emergent ethnological discourse. First, I explore the “rhetorical formations” (Condit) of race and science in a foundational pre-ethnological text, James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1836–47). Next, I show how an advocate of ethnological science performs “disciplinary boundary-work” (Gieryn) to reconstruct the map of British science in the 1847 Anniversary Address to the Ethnological Society of London. Finally, I apply theories of genre and disciplinarity (Bazerman; Berkenkotter and Huckin; Miller; Prior; Swales) to ethnological papers in the Journal of the Ethnological Society of London to understand how ethnologists transformed extant rhetorical strategies from other disciplines into a new ethnological rhetoric.; Ultimately, this project demonstrates how the processes of discipline formation and boundary maintenance are significantly shaped by emergent disciplinary discourse practices, as well as how the name of science itself functions as a legitimizing rhetorical resource within scientific disciplines.