‘Hottentots’ and the evolution of European racism
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Springing from the argument in recent scholarship that ‘race’ is a doctrine that emerged only in the post-Enlightenment, this essay develops a theory concerning the ideological history of ‘racism’, understood in its modern Western sense. While it is impossible to examine all forms of Western racism, the author focuses on evolving reactions in European travel accounts, belles-lettres and anthropology to the Khoikhoi, popularly known as ‘Hottentots’, a people that became proverbial as the most wretched and degraded of all ‘savages’. The question posed is why the Khoikhoi, a relatively peripheral and cooperative people, attracted this virulent hatred. Challenging the assumption of the small body of modern scholarship on the Khoikhoi, I maintain that this spite derived not simply from a sense of the Hottentots’ ‘Otherness’, but more accurately from the awareness that this people upset models of ethnicity that supported the Western vision of the non-European world. Europeans needed to neutralize the ideological threat represented by the Khoikhoi, a programme that culminated in the development of the modern science of ‘race’. ‘Race’, and its corresponding ideology of ‘racism’, I conclude, involves not merely the exclusion, but an approximation and appropriation of the ‘Other’ into Western systems of thought: the ultimate and fatal destiny of this highly distinct and independent culture.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it