'Shrieking savages' and 'men of milder customs': Dr Adolf Bernhard Meyer in new Guinea, 1873

Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840-1911), a German-Jewish medical scientist, naturalist and museum director, travelled and collected in northwest New Guinea between March and July 1873. He was one of the first German-born naturalists to visit New Guinea and the first to publish extensively in German on his field experiences there. Though his subsequent career as a museum director was built on the scientific results and collections from this expedition, after his death the expedition itself was largely forgotten and the publications resulting from it - including a lengthy travelogue and works on New Guinean physical anthropology, language and religious beliefs - were ignored or discredited. This paper re-examines this neglected corpus of scholarship and considers the ways in which Meyer's encounters with indigenous New Guineans influenced his contributions to discussions, in the European metropoles, of racial difference. On the one hand, Meyer's perceptions of Papuan physical and cultural identity were shaped by his pre-voyage readings, particularly of works by the British traveller-naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and the German psychologist and ethnologist Theodor Waitz, and by the constraints, on his post-voyage publications, of genre and discourse. On the other hand, these perceptions were constantly challenged in the field by his actual encounters with indigenous New Guineans and by the diversity and unexpectedness of their physical appearances, initiatives, demeanours and actions.