Silvia Sebastiani

Silvia Sebastiani’s project investigates how Enlightenment anthropology redefined humanity through the intertwined concepts of civilisation, perfectibility, and reproduction. Emerging in the 1750s, these concepts formed a system that reshaped the boundaries between humans and animals, as well as hierarchies within humanity and between the sexes.

At the core of this transformation lies a double movement: the naturalisation of humanity – through its classification within the animal kingdom – and its historicisation – through narratives of progress from savagery to civilisation. Humans were thus both reduced to animals and positioned as their masters. The project argues that the shift from “generation” to “reproduction”, which redefined species through interbreeding, was central to the temporalisation of humanity and provided new tools for thinking about improvement, heredity, gender, and race.

Focusing on the orangutan as a boundary figure between human and animal, the project shows how Enlightenment debates both challenged and reinforced hierarchies, revealing the entanglement of universalism and exclusion in the making of the modern human sciences.