Charles Gabriel Seligman

Charles Gabriel Seligman
Charles Gabriel Seligman
Born	24 December 1873 London
Died	19 September 1940
Nationality	British
Fields	ethnology
Institutions	Cambridge University of London
Alma mater	St. Thomas' Hospital
Notable awards	Fellow of the Royal Society[1]

Charles Gabriel Seligman FRS^[1] (24 December 1873 – 19 September 1940) was a British ethnologist. Born in London, Seligman studied medicine at St. Thomas' Hospital.

After several years as a physician and pathologist, Seligman volunteered his services to the 1898 Cambridge University expedition to the Torres Strait.^[2] Later, he joined expeditions to New Guinea (1904), Ceylon (1906-1908), and Sudan (1909-1912, again in 1921-1922). In 1905 he married Brenda Zara Salaman, who accompanied him on many of his expeditions and who he credited in his publications.

He served as chair of Ethnology at the University of London from 1913 to 1934.

Hamites

Seligman was an assiduous proponent of Hamitic theory, which held that caucasian North African "hamites" were responsible for all significant cultural developments in Africa. In his book The Races of Africa (1930) he wrote:

"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 'Europeans' - arriving wave after wave - better armed as well as quicker witted than the dark agricultural Negroes."^[3][4]

Seligman asserted that the Negro race was essentially static and agricultural, but that the wandering Hamitic "pastoral Caucasians" had introduced most of the advanced features found in central African cultures, including metal working, irrigation and complex social structures.^[3][5]

Selected works

• Melanesians of British New Guinea (1910)
• The Veddas (1911)
• Races of Africa (1930)
• The Pagan Tribes of Nilotic Sudan (1932)

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Myers, C. S. (1941). "Charles Gabriel Seligman. 1873-1940". Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 3 (10): 626–626. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1941.0026.  edit
2. ^ Ian Langham (1981). The building of British social anthropology: W. H. R. Rivers and his Cambridge disciples in the development of kinship studies. London: Reidel. 
3. ^ ^{a b} Edith R. Sanders, "The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective," Journal of African History, 10 (1969), 521-532
4. ^ C. G. Seligman, The Races of Africa, London, 1930, p. 96
5. ^ Peter Rigby, African Images, (Berg Publishers: 1996), p.68

External links

• Seligman biography at Minnesota Sate University EMuseum
• Catalogue of the Seligman papers at the Archives Division of the London School of Economics.

Persondata
Name	Seligman, Charles Gabriel
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	24 December 1873
Place of birth	London
Date of death	19 September 1940
Place of death