Andrea Wulf
speaker
625 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Jun
Andrea Wulf’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
which are, and I think that's quite important, which are, because they're early ethnographers, they are actually traded, so they're not stolen.
And they give us a really good idea of Polynesian culture before European contact.
So I think that his contribution to science in that respect is more in ethnography than as a naturalist.
So very different.
And he kind of he approached every island kind of trying to understand, which was difficult.
But he, you know, he would say, you know, he he thought and he was mostly right.
He thought that there were more egalitarian than European societies or if they had a kind of.
class system, like they had, for example, in Tahiti, the kind of boundaries were much more fluid.
So he was very much interested in that.
And it shaped his political thinking, which then later made him a revolutionary in Europe, not by reading French philosophers, but by what he had seen in the South Pacific.
Yeah, I mean, he comes back and he becomes really, for a few years, you know, he becomes so famous, he becomes a public intellectual.
He picks a very public fight with Immanuel Kant, who wrote this essay about the human racism, which Kant wrote that therefore,
different human races, all defined by the color of their skin with, you know, Europeans as the kind of pinnacle of creation.
And Foster says, like, hold on a second.
All the people I've seen on my voyage don't fit into your need categories, because nature is really connected by nuances and by shapes, not by these kind of sharply divided kind of categories.
And
Kant is not very pleased about that.
So Kant then writes another article attacking Forster.
And it ends up being really a fight about methodology.
How do we gain knowledge?
Showing 241–260 of 625 · page 13 of 32
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