ABSTRACT
"Anthropology" has become a popular concept in contemporary cultural studies. While allowing for the term "anthropology" to mean many different things when applying it to eighteenth-century thinking, it is important to include the emerging global view of mankind in that century and to pay attention to the ways in which this global perspective changed the view of humankind among those working in the fields of natural history and anthropology. Few scholars have noted that Louis Leclerc de Buffon and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach are important for Johann Gottfried Herder's anthropology. Herder is the first one to articulate positions that had remained mostly implicit in the work of earlier anthropologists like Buffon, Camper, and Blumenbach, who tended to avoid normative judgments in their anthropological texts. What Lichtenberg offers, in his Sudelbücher (The Waste Books), in which most of his aphoristic fragments are to be found, often amounts to a kind of counter-reading of contemporaneous natural history and anthropology.
