Science for the cosmopolitan: The culture of urbanity and the emergence of anthropology in the Kingdom of Naples, 1629--1800 (Italy)

The emergence of anthropology in early modern Europe has regularly been attributed to the West's confrontation with an external other. In particular, the discovery of the New World and the specter of its Indian populations have repeatedly been interpreted as the first occasion for the comparative study of man. This dissertation rather contends that the emergence of anthropology in early modern Europe is better understood in the context of its first proponents' perception of cultural difference as internal to their own socially eclectic urban habitats. Thus, this dissertation on the anthropological thought of the early modern Kingdom of Naples represents a case study of the significance of the urban experience for the first practitioners of anthropology. It argues that the changing symbolic rapport between the educated elite and the lower orders of Neapolitan society engendered by the process of urbanization constituted the cultural pre-condition for the comparative study of man. In other words, it accounts for the temporalization of the rapport between nations with the prior construction of cultural difference between the groups internal to the early modern urban community.