C. G. Seligman

Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS FRAI ( Seligmann; 24 December 1873 – 19 September 1940) was a British physician and ethnologist. His main ethnographic work described the culture of the Vedda people of Sri Lanka and the Shilluk people of the Sudan. He was a professor at London School of Economics and was influential to prominent anthropologists, such as Bronisław Malinowski, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and Meyer Fortes.

Seligman was an advocate and published literature for the Hamitic hypothesis, stating the Cushitic, Berber, and Egyptians were thought to have linage with the speculated, and later debunked, Caucasoid Hamitic people, categorically different to the denoted "Negroids" of Sub-Saharan Africa. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. 1998. ''Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History''. Cambridge University Press, p. 233. His work in the 1920s and 1930s are now seen as white supremacist.

Life and career

Seligman was born into a middle-class Jewish family in London, the son of wine merchant Hermann Seligmann and his wife. Charles shortened his name to Seligman after 1914, when Britain was at war with Germany. He studied medicine at St Thomas' Hospital.

After several years as a physician and pathologist, he volunteered his services to the 1898 Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Strait. He later joined expeditions to New Guinea (1904), Ceylon (1906–1908), and Sudan (1909–1912, again in 1921–1922).

In 1905, Seligman married ethnologist Brenda Zara Salaman, and they traveled on many expeditions together. She had been educated at Bedford College and was skilled at languages. She was able to observe women's ceremonies that Charles was not allowed to see. He credited her in his publications.

From 1913 to 1934, Seligman served as chair of Ethnology at the London School of Economics. The Anthropology department's Seligman Library is named for him.

From 1933, he edited the Cresset Historical Series, a book series published by the Cresset Press in London.

Seligman was also a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Works

Hamites

Seligman is remembered for his detailed ethnographical work ''Races of Africa'' (1930), which recognises four major distinct races of the African continent: Bushmanoids (Bushmen), Pygmies, Negroids, and Caucasoids (Hamites). The Hottentots, Seligman maintains are a mixture of Bushmanoid, Negroid and Hamitic. As a staunch proponent of the Hamitic theory, in his work Seligman asserts that Hamitic Caucasoid North and Northeast Africans were responsible for introducing non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic languages (Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian) into Africa, as well as civilization, technology and all significant cultural developments. In this book, Seligman states his belief that:

"Apart from relatively late Semitic influence...the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites, its history is the record of these peoples and of their interaction with the two other African stocks, the Negro and the Bushmen, whether this influence was exerted by highly civilized Egyptians or by such wider pastoralists as are represented at the present day by the Beja and Somali....The incoming Hamites were pastoral Caucasians – arriving wave after wave – better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes."Sanders, Edith R., "The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective", ''Journal of African History'', 10 (1969), 521–532.

Following Giuseppe Sergi's (1901) classification of the Hamites, Seligman divides the Hamites into two groups: (a) "Eastern Hamites" and (b) "Northern Hamites". The former include the "ancient and modern Egyptians... the Beja, the Berberines (Barbara and Nubians), the Galla, the Somali, the Danakil and... Ethiopians". The latter branch includes the Berbers and the "Taureg and Tibu of the Sahara, the Fulbe of Western Sudan and the extinct Guanche of the Canary Islands".

Seligman acknowledged varying degrees of Negroid admixture among the Hamitic groups, but emphasized throughout his major works the essential racial and cultural unity of the various Hamitic peoples. In his ''Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan'' (1913), he writes that the Northern and Eastern Hamitic "groups shade into each other, and in many parts a Negro admixture has taken place, nevertheless, culturally if not always physically, either division stands apart from its fellow."Seligman, C. G., "Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan", ''The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland'', Vol. 43 (July – December 1913), pp. 593–705. The Hamites in general, and the Northern Hamites in particular, he asserted, have close "kinship with the European representatives of the Mediterranean race".Seligman, Charles Gabriel, ''The Races of Africa'', (Oxford University Press, 1967), 4th edn, p. 62. Drawing from Coon, Seligman also discusses fairer features observed among a minority of Berbers or Northern Hamites, such as lighter skin, golden beards and blue eyes. ''Races of Africa'', however, notably questions the belief held by some anthropologists in the early 20th century that these fairer traits, such as blondism, were introduced by a Nordic variety.

In addition, Seligman laid stress on the common descent of Hamites with Semites

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