This important set of reflections on the relation between race and nationalism corrects imbalances in the current literature. The essays, largely about geopolitically marginal nations, shed critical light on the discourse of race both there and at the centers of colonial power. They disaggregate race science from the usual exclusive association with discourses of racial purity such as those endorsed by the Nazis, showing that, until such views achieved predominance, most European race scientists—including major German figures—argued for the advantages of racial mixing as a source of national strength. Moreover, they decenter more humanistic disciplines such as folklore and archaeology while nevertheless demonstrating physical anthropology’s sometimes surprisingly harmonious dovetailing with those disciplines. Richard McMahon’s magisterial opening essay lucidly sets out these themes, particularly emphasizing the importance of attending to less well-known and politically weak nations’ efforts to define themselves racially; the other authors largely adhere to that agenda. Conversely, the closing essay by Catherine Nash, the most elegantly written and future-oriented in a generally attractive collection, complicates popular assumptions about genome science, suggesting that it perhaps unwittingly carries forward some of the older models that fueled various forms of racial prejudice—an argument that arguably could be further strengthened by etymological linkage with earlier meanings of race in French and genos in classical Greek, since both, as patrilines, combined the social recognition of descent with assumptions about the nature of transmission. Nash shows that the mapping of race onto nation has continued to infest genome projects despite their often-benign primary goals (notably in medicine).
In a second essay, McMahon emphasizes the transnational character of race science, thereby questioning its usual, and stereotypical, exclusive association with Nazi theories, and, using a mixed-methods approach, maps out the power relations that determined which national schools predominated. The transnational links among race scientists reproduced such hierarchies in patterns of publication and citation, producing an increasing convergence among hitherto quite varied local traditions of relating race science to the goals of individual nation-states as the discipline moved from a largely liberal orientation to an intra-European racism that came much closer to reproducing the colonial model and thereby contributed to the increasing uniformity of nationalist doctrines. In contrast, McMahon suggests, it was in reaction to the evolutionism of colonial scholarship that sociocultural anthropology rejected race science, especially “its craniology-based race fixity” (44) in the correlation of skull size and shape with mental capacity and collective psychologies. Several of these authors, notably Maria Sophia Quine, tellingly point to the impossibility of assuring the accuracy, representativeness, and, above all, the consistency of cranial measurements taken in the field and sometimes under protest.
Viewed retrospectively through the prism of the Nazi era, race science may seem to represent a rejection of common human origins. That, it emerges, is a gross simplification. Quine, for example, shows how the earlier Italian race scientists—with the exception of the now notorious Cesare Lombroso and his followers in “criminal anthropology”—attributed greater scientific validity to monogenism than to polygenism; according to Giustiniano Nicolucci and Paolo Mantegazza, in particular, the so-called inferior races—in the absence of plausible evidence of separate origins—could be deemed capable of sharing Europe’s civilizational achievements. Perhaps, as a Sicilian presumably accustomed to northern Italians’ common rejection of southerners as “African,” Nicolucci was aware of how easily polygenism could map onto pre-existing popular prejudices. Quine also illustrates the aesthetic aspects of Nicolucci’s race science; while this concern with outward appearance may also reflect a local cultural value, as in the concept of fare bella figura (looking good), it also shows up in the Yugoslav context discussed by Rory Yeomans, where it is further associated with claims to innate artistic capacities that recall present-day Italian claims to own the majority of the world’s great artworks. Maria Rhode notes a similar linkage of physiognomy with aesthetics in Polish race science. Reading these essays through the lens of current nationalisms further shows how race science, while claiming a positivistic epistemology, both shaped and was shaped by the cultural assumptions that it treated as evidence.
Race science was transnational; but, as Rhode demonstrates for the Cracow school in Poland, it also exhibited strong place-specific emphases. Moreover, by juxtaposing Cracow race scientists’ localist claims with their generalizations about non-Europeans, she also offers a particularly compelling demonstration of the importance of examining the local epistemologies and their relations with imperial science (as in Russia) for understanding global commonalities and differences. In contrast to Western European colonialism, which fixated on a European-Other binarism, the Japanese colonial anthropology of Korea sought (as Arnaud Nanta sagely observes) to justify colonial rule on the grounds of racial commonality until Japan’s 1945 defeat generated doctrines of Japanese uniqueness instead. In telling contrast, the Russian imperium and the multinational Yugoslav state, respectively (and persuasively) presented by Marina Magilner and Yeomans, sought historical evidence for racial mixing. Even Greece, in Ageliki Lefkaditou’s lucid exposition, embraced multiple racial origins despite its ethnological search, in folklore especially, for evidence of unbroken continuity with classical antiquity. On the other hand, as Maciej Górny demonstrates, claims for racial divergences among Eastern and Central European states fed both nationalist ideologies and the scientists’ professional advancement.
The uneasy relation of culture to race (or Volk to Rasse) becomes especially clear in Amos Morris-Reich’s account of three Jewish physical anthropologists and of Zionism’s growing influence on Jewish practitioners. Indeed, collectively the essays show how national needs and circumstances drove much race science, contradicting its objectivism, and they concomitantly illustrate the pitfalls of a science that often uncritically privileged measurement over other kinds of evidence.
This major scholarly collection explores the history of physical anthropology from intentionally unusual angles that challenge intuitive assumptions. It also charts engagements and altercations with humanistic ethnological scholarship, including folklore, amid a host of revealingly varied nationalist aspirations.
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[Review length: 958 words • Review posted on May 14, 2020]