One member of the audience asked for elaboration on the archaic suggestion that different types of humans are associated with various plants and animals. This was in reference to Linnaeus’ eighteenth-century work, Systema Naturae, wherein the author taxonomized all aspects of nature, including humans by varieties. Specifically, the question evoked thoughts about Linnaeus’ sexual system of botany, which categorized plants by the visibility of their sexual organs, among other things. This is a good example depicting that even when considering and studying plants, humanity still often prescribes to a fixed dichotomy between male and female, and shoehorns that application onto species and things where it may not fit.
The concept that humans come in assorted varieties was not an idea that Linnaeus originated, as there was already a tendency to sort humans according to humoral theory. Dr. LaFleur explained that humoral theory was a popular concept which thought that human form was vulnerable to influences of the environment in which it was born or lived. This obviously starts to turn into a sort of racial categorization, as the presentation exemplified while displaying Linnaeus’ works, that assigned different humoral dispositions to different continents. This made the Americanus into choleric, the Afer into phlegmatic, etc. These humoral dispositions also outlined personality and behavioral types. Of course, keeping in line with the imperial Western mindset of the time, all the traits of the Europaeus were fairly positive, while those of other groups, such as the Asiaticus, mostly included traits the Western world would condemn, with specific focus placed on sexual deviancy.
Dr. LaFleur especially noted the recorded travels of a man named William Davis from the sixteenth-century, as he gave his impressions of other cultures during his journey to Algiers. In his work he refers to the Turks as Sodomites, although he does not ever give an example of a time he actually witnessed sodomy, but instead spends much time focusing on the supposed extravagance of living and lewd nature of those people. While his characterization of the Turks reeks of Orientalism, it is interesting that he chose to use the word “sodomy” to describe them, when there is no indication that these people ever partook of any sodomy-related activity that he saw.
There is some credence to consideration of the Biblical story of the town of Sodom, which takes place in a non-Christian area of the world where darker-skinned people would have been in the majority. Davis may have related the current darker-skinned people he was meeting with that old record from Christianity, and simply taken the label from that, used here derogatorily. Dr. LaFleur considered that, and ultimately made conclusions in a slightly different direction, suggesting that the word “sodomy” could be functioning as a sort of “metaphorical clause for the profundity of difference” between Davis’ home experience and his travel experience. Davis saw that the culture and behavior of the people he met while traveling was different from what he was used to, and as such, he (and many others, still even today) concluded that different must be bad. This leads to the labeling and categorization, creating a world that distinctly places Europe and “Other” places in different groups, while rationalizing why they act differently by explaining their behavior through humoral theory.