Full Description
National Races explores how politics interacted with transnational science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This interaction produced powerful, racialized national identity discourses whose influence continues to resonate in today's culture and politics. Ethnologists, anthropologists, and raciologists compared modern physical types with ancient skeletal finds to unearth the deep prehistoric past and true nature of nations. These scientists understood certain physical types to be what Richard McMahon calls "national races," or the ageless biological essences of nations.
Contributors to this volume address a central tension in anthropological race classification. On one hand, classifiers were nationalists who explicitly or implicitly used race narratives to promote political agendas. Their accounts of prehistoric geopolitics treated "national races" as the proxies of nations in order to legitimize present-day geopolitical positions. On the other hand, the transnational community of race scholars resisted the centrifugal forces of nationalism. Their interdisciplinary project was a vital episode in the development of the social sciences, using biological race classification to explain the history, geography, relationships, and psychologies of nations.
National Races goes to the heart of tensions between nationalism and transnationalism, politics and science, by examining transnational science from the perspective of its peripheries. Contributors to the book supplement the traditional focus of historians on France, Britain, and Germany, with myriad case studies and examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial and national identities in countries such as Russia, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia, and among Jewish anthropologists.
Contents
List of Figures
Series Editors' Introduction
Introduction: Political Identities and Transnational Science
Richard McMahon
1. Transnational Network, Transnational Narratives: Scientific Race Classifications and National Identities
Richard McMahon
2. The Destiny of Races "Not Yet Called to Civilization": Giustiniano Nicolucci's Critique of American Polygenism and Defense of Liberal Racism
Maria Sophia Quine
3. A Matter of Place, Space, and People: Cracow Anthropology, 1870-1920
Maria Rhode
4. Yet Another Greek Tragedy? Physical Anthropology and the Construction of National Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century
Ageliki Lefkaditou
5. Jews between Volk and Rasse
Amos Morris-Reich
6. Classifying Hybridity in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Russian Imperial Anthropology
Marina Mogilner
7. Physical Anthropology in Colonial Korea: Science and Colonial Order, 1916-40
Arnaud Nanta
8. Racial Anthropology on the Eastern Front, 1912 to the Mid-1920s
Maciej GÓrny
9. Racial Politics as a Multiethnic Pavilion: Yugoslavs, Dinarics, and the Search for a Synthetic Identity in the 1920s and 1930s
Rory Yeomans
Conclusion: From National Races to National Genomes
Catherine Nash
Contributors
Index
