Search

This article describes how the racial worldview of Aleš Hrdlička (1869-1943) shaped his unethical treatment of Native Americans during his expeditions to Alaska between 1926 and 1937. One of the main aims of the trips was to dig up and steal Native American skeletons, by stealth if necessary. As a globally lauded anthropologist from one of America's premier scientific institutions, Hrdlička's devotion to scientific progress provided the motivation behind his behavior. In his scientific philosophy, humans (and their bones) were nothing more than material, and all individuals were best classified into races based on physical characteristics. For Hrdlička, science sanctioned everything. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ObjectivesOur aim in this study was to understand how genetics ideas are appropriated and mobilized online toward the political projects of White nationalism and the alt right. Studying three different online venues, we investigated how genetics is used to support racial realism, hereditarianism, and racial hierarchy. We analyzed how these ideas are connected to political and metapolitical projects. In addition, we examined the strategies used to build authority for these interpretations.MethodsWe analyze three online venues in which genetics has been mobilized to advance racial realism and hereditarian explanations of racial differences. These were (a) the use of genetic ancestry tests in online nationalist discussions, (b) blogs and other venues in which the human biodiversity ideas are articulated, (c) activities surrounding the OpenPsych collection of online journals. Ethnographic and interpretive methods were applied to investigate scientific and political meanings of efforts to mobilize genetic ideas.ResultsWe found that White nationalists use genetic ancestry tests to align White identity with ideas of racial purity and diversity, educating each other about genetics, and debating the boundaries of Whiteness. "Human biodiversity" has been mobilized as a movement to catalog and create hereditarian ideas about racial differences and to distribute them as "red pills" to transform online discourse. The OpenPsych journals have allowed amateur hereditarian psychologists to publish papers, coordinate activity, and legitimate their project at the academic margins.ConclusionsThese various appropriations of genetics aim to further racial realism and hereditarian explanations of racial social and behavioral differences. Beyond these substantive aims, on a "metapolitical" level, they serve to reframe concepts and standards for political and scientific discussion of race, challenge structures of academic legitimacy and expertise, and build a cadre of ideological foot soldiers armed with an argumentative toolkit. As professional anthropologists and geneticists aim to accurately communicate their science and its implications for understanding human differences to the public, they must contend with these substantive claims and metapolitical contexts.

The Vrolik ethnographical collection consisted of roughly 300 skulls, mummified heads, skeletons, pelvises, wet-preserved preparations, and plaster models, collected by Gerard Vrolik (1775–1859) and his son Willem (1801–1863). Most prominent in this collection were the skulls, of which 177 remain in the collection of present-day Museum Vrolik. These skulls—a troubling heritage of colonialism and scientific racism—are the central subjects of this paper, which considers the changing meanings and values of these skulls for racial science over approximately 160 years, between ± 1800 and 1960. These shifting meanings are analysed using the skulls themselves as primary sources, including the labels, numbers and handwriting present on them or their stands. Central topics addressed will be matters of classification, hierarchy, scientific bias, and disciplinary development of racial anthropology from the study and collection of idealized national types to a quantitative craniometry of populations. This paper demonstrates that during 160 years of study of this same set of crania, the skulls of white European origin gradually lost racial relevance and were increasingly normalized, whereas the skulls of dark-skinned people of African descent continued to be categorized in a typological racial scheme and as such were increasingly othered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates the trajectory of the academic life of Seniha Tunakan (1908–2000) within the development of anthropology as a scientific discipline in Turkey and its transnational connections to Europe during the interwar period and up until the second half of the 20th century. Relying on the archives of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes in Germany, and the Prime Ministry's Republican Archives in Turkey, it focuses on the doctoral studies of Seniha Tunakan in Germany and her life as a female PhD researcher in the capital of the Third Reich, as well as her entire research career after her return to Turkey. Through Tunakan's career, the article also provides an analysis of the perpetuation of German race science in the Turkish context, shedding light upon the success of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics) and its transnational impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author also connects seroanthropology to other-than-serological racial methods (for instance in the discussion of "biometric nationalism", a term the author has previously developed in a great record of work). The historiography of race/racism in science has by now long simmered around the question of the racializing impact of colonialism, especially settler colonialism, in the understanding and ordering of human diversity in (post-) colonial societies. Another important reason for the focus on India lies in how race has been overlooked in the historiography of anthropology and other sciences in India. [Extracted from the article]

Anthropology, especially biological anthropology, owes its origins to the scientific study of human racial differences. That dark history is well-acknowledged and, when it is taught, usually begins with the racism of early figures, such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach or, more recently, Earnest Hooton, and exonerates itself through a turn toward antiracist scholars such as Frank Livingstone and Franz Boas. Rarely, if ever, is this origin story critically appraised. This article aims to complicate the origin story of biological anthropology by examining how colonial subjects were involved in the development, testing, and refinement of racial theory, and thus of biological anthropology itself. Taking India as an example, I trace how Indians and the caste system were first the subjects and eventually the interlocutors of racial scientific theory and testing. This reorientation, I argue, is important for developing a more expansive and accurate version of the discipline's history and also for shining a light on its relevance to contemporary global racial conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argument: In 1909, Italian zoologist Daniele Rosa (1857–1944) proposed a radical new evolutionary theory: hologenesis, or simultaneous, pan-terrestrial creation and evolution driven primarily by internal factors. Hologenesis was widely ignored or rejected outside Italy, but Swiss-French anthropologist George Montandon (1879–1944) eagerly embraced and developed the theory. An ambitious careerist, Montandon's deep investment in an obscure and unpopular theory is puzzling. Today, Montandon is best known for his virulent antisemitism and active collaboration with the Nazi occupation of France at the end of his career. By that point, however, he had quietly moved away from hologenesis. This shift has gone unnoticed or been left unexplained in existing research. This article reexamines Montandon's theoretical outlook and reasons for championing Rosa's forgotten theory. It argues that while Montandon's adoption of hologenesis arose from a complex blend of scientific and personal factors, his previously overlooked early fieldwork with the Ainu played a key role. In contrast, hologenesis did not inform Montandon's later public antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the connected histories of Portuguese and French anthropology in the late nineteenth century. By looking at a Portuguese scientific institution, the Carlos Ribeiro Society, it considers how French race science, known as anthropologie, was adopted and adapted across the European Latin world as a type of "stranger-science." That is: as an authoritative outsider scientific formation, installed into national terrain in accordance with insider strategies for turning foreign elements into native forms of scientific sovereignty and modernity. French anthropology's international diffusion becomes meaningful in the light of the Portuguese incorporating what was foreign and modern as a means to generate vitality, and authority endogenously in their own national context. Hence, addressing the circulation of stranger-sciences can pave the way for an original conceptualizing of the transnational life of race science across and even beyond the Latin world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1909 Franz Boas conducted a massive study entitled Changes in Bodily Forms of Descendants of Immigrants. In this study, he demonstrated that Eastern and Southern European immigrants to the United States were not racially different from other Europeans because of what he called "the marvelous power of amalgamation." Boas's study dealt a blow to scientific racism because he demonstrated the plasticity and instability of racial types. Boas chose to emphasize the enormous gulf between the white and non‐white races. His research and advocacy were anti‐racist, but the way he promoted assimilation was racist. The next year W.E.B. Du Bois invited Boas to give the final lecture at the conference where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was officially incorporated. Boas presented "The Real Race Problem," in which he argued that the real problem was the "difference in type." To solve it, the Negro needed to amalgamate by "encouraging the gradual process of lightening up this large body of people by the influx of white blood." American anthropologists joined other Progressive Era reformers committed to assimilation, like the orphan train and Indian boarding school movements. They were each striving to be anti‐racist but went off the rails, contributing to the consolidation of whiteness and the perpetuation of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lee deftly connects how Brinton's work on the supposed natural inequalities of the races resonated with the line of thought articulated by the Supreme Court when it interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment in I Plessy v. Ferguson. When I was a graduate student pursuing my master's degree in anthropology at the New School, Lee Baker visited our department as part of our lecture series. He discussed the work of Daniel Brinton, an influential white male ethnologist who served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the late nineteenth century and a key figure in Dr. Baker's larger monograph. [Extracted from the article]

Ideas about biology, race, and theology were bound up together in nineteenth‐century scholarship, although they are rarely, if ever, considered together today. Nevertheless, the new genealogical way of thinking about the history of life arose alongside a new way of thinking about the Bible, and a new way of thinking about people. They connected with one another in subtle ways, and modern scholarly boundaries do not map well on to nineteenth‐century scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An assemblage of research articles, reflections, and conversations, I Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial i provides a unique and necessary contribution to recent conversations questioning the meaning, relevance, and legitimacy of anthropology as a discipline (Günel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020; Jobson 2020; Pandian 2019). I would recommend this work to scholars, students, and practitioners, especially those dubious of the efficacy of anthropology and museums. [Extracted from the article]

Central to this paper is a survey held among Dutch scientists in 1951 after the publication of the first UNESCO Statement on Race. The Statement, issued by a committee of experts at UNESCO, was a condemnation of scientific racism and declared that race was a social myth. The statement led to strong international criticism from physical anthropologists and geneticists, because they disagreed with the dismissal of the concept of race and because they felt poorly represented on the committee of experts. This paper traces the reception of the first Declaration on Race among scientists in the Netherlands to demonstrate how the Statement's impact differed in different contexts. The survey about the Statement organized by Dutch anthropologists shows how Dutch racial scientists used the Statement to distance themselves from Nazi racial science by employing a rhetoric of humility, insistence on the difference between scientific findings and moral choices, suggestions for alternative conceptualizations of race, and a strategic internationalism to connect with the international community of experts. The success of this strategy can be concluded from the fact that one of the organizers of the Dutch survey, physical anthropologist Rudolf Bergman, was invited, very last minute, to participate in the expert meeting of biological scientists that formulated a second UNESCO Statement on Race, issued a year after the first. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article traces the development of Italian eugenics and scientific racism from their origins in nineteenth-century positivist anthropology to the 1938 Manifesto of Racial Scientists. I follow the biographical trajectory of the Sicilian racial thinker Alfredo Niceforo (1876–1960), the last member of Cesare Lombroso’s positivist school, a founding father of Italian eugenics and a prominent statistician throughout the fascist regime. I argue that the peculiarity of the Italian path to eugenics was its ‘internal orientalism’, caused by the poverty and perceived backwardness of the Italian South. Blending Niceforo’s biography with his ideas, I chart the social and intellectual history of Italian scientific racism from the transformation of Lombroso’s school to the fascist ‘Aryanization’ of Italians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, I review recent works in science studies and the history of science of relevance to biological anthropology. I will look at two rhetorical prac-tices in human evolution--overstating our relationship with the apes and privileging ancestry over emergence-- and their effects upon how human evolution and human diversity have been understood scientifically. I examine specifically the intellectual conflicts between Rudolf Virchow and Ernst Haeckel in the 19th century and G. G. Simpson and Morris Goodman a century later. This will expose some previously concealed elements of the tangled histories of anthropology, genetics, and evolu-tion--particularly in relation to the general roles of race and heredity in conceptualizing human origins. I argue that scientific racism and unscientific creationism are both threats to the scholarly enterprise, but that scien-tific racism is worse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the practice of exhibiting indigenous peoples in public as objects of human biological study at the turn of the 20th century in Europe and South America. In particular, it looks at the "Primera Exposición Antropológica Brasileña", an anthropological exposition held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1882 and the "Congresos Internacionales de Antropología Física y Prehistórica," physical anthropology expos held near the end of the 19th century. The article states that the scientific community at the time promoted these exhibitions without opposition not only as a means to study human biology, but to further theories of social Darwinism and point out what they considered evolutionary differences between races.

By the end of the nineteenth century an earlier ethnological tradition, based mainly on the description of 'exotic peoples', had given way to a more scientistic, biologically determinist anthropology. The latter sought, through physical measurements, to explain the racial origins of humankind, taking it for granted that races existed and explaining scientifically how the world's peoples could be categorized on racial grounds. In this scheme the Jews presented a special problem, for most anthropologists assumed them to be racially pure and yet they looked like the majority populations wherever they lived. Thus, despite their small numbers, and despite the fact that anthropologists devoted more time to colonial subjects, almost all race scientists had something to say about the racial origins of the Jews and about how this question spoke to broader anthropological concerns. Stone examines how, at the moment when the discipline of anthropology became institutionalized, it dealt with the Jews in its racial schemas. Although many of the thinkers examined here were soon to be eclipsed, the article presents a snapshot of racial thinking at a crucial juncture in the development of anthropological thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article Gibel Azoulay critiques the tenacity of the correlation between ‘race’ as a socio-political notion and ‘race’ as a biological entity in academic circles in general and medical research in particular. Legacies of nineteenth-century scientific racism percolate into the public sphere, facilitating a uniquely US American cultural consensus that imagines and markets external physiological features as gross criteria for making distinctions, highlighting the medicalization of race in pharmaceutical, medical and genetic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]