Against the background of the paradigm shift in natural history that took place in the late eighteenth century, the influential works of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), De generis humani varietate nativa, Handbuch der Naturgeschichte, Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte, published beetween the last three decades of the eighteenth cnetury and the beginning of the nineteenth, offered the first modern racial classification of human varieties. This essay discusses the development of such an intellectual enterprise by especially focusing on the role of climatic and cultural factors in the variation of human nature, the theoretical presuppositions and methodological foundation of craniological classification and the alternative between variety and race. The aim is to show the theoretical, methodical and conceptual shifts as well as the ambivalences inherent to Blumenbach’s classification. Highlighting these arguable aspects would help to understand their controversial reception in the anthropology and history of science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
