This paper analyses the anthropological Wallace Line and its political afterlife. After extended travels in the region, the British naturalist explorer Alfred Russel Wallace – better known as the co-discoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection – proposed in the 1860s that the region could be divided into two biological zones, separated by what came to be known as Wallace’s line.Īs well as this famous faunal line, separating the woodpeckers and orangutans from the cockatoos and wallabies, Wallace defined a human line, separating Malays in the west from Papuans in the east. The difference between these two people had already been noticed by early European travellers, together with the difference in flora and fauna. One important structuring concept for the human diversity in this region was the difference between people with frizzy hair and darker skins in the east and light brown people with straight hair on the western islands. They were, in a region that until 1945 (New Guinea 1962) was for the most part under the control of the Dutch Empire, an international, mostly European, group of scientists, including – among others – French craniologists, British and German naturalist travellers and Dutch anthropologists. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, insular Southeast Asia attracted natural historians, medical experts, physical anthropologists and (more recently) geneticists, each hoping to explain the supposed variety in human types. The human diversity of insular Southeast Asia has long been a source of wonder and the subject of various strategies of scientific inquiry. It shows how colonial and racial concepts can be appropriated by local actors and dismissed or emphasised depending on political perspectives. This, however, did not diminish the conceptual power of the Wallace Line, as the idea of a boundary between Malays and Papuans was taken up in the political arena during the West New Guinea dispute and was employed as a political tool by all parties involved. The paper shows how anthropologists failed to find definite markers to quantify the difference between Malay and Papuan/Melanesian. These medically trained anthropologists aimed to find out if the Wallace Line could be more precisely defined with measurements of the human body. It follows several anthropologists who travelled to east Nusa Tenggara (the Timor Archipelago, including the islands of Timor, Flores and Sumba), where Alfred Russel Wallace had drawn a dividing line between the races of the east and the west of the archipelago.
This paper examines racial science and its political uses in Southeast Asia.
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