Representing Race to the Public: Physical Anthropology in Interwar American Natural History Museums (2002)
Teslow, Tracy Lang (Author)
Richards, Robert John
University of Chicago
Edition Details: Advisor: Richards, Robert J.
Physical Details: 330 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation examines the construction of race in American physical anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s, and how contending views were presented to the public via museum displays and popular treatises. My study recaptures a debate that has been dismissed, ignored or distorted by a world that since the 1950s has turned decisively toward a view of race as socially constructed. Lost in this forgotten past are subtleties of method and theory that discriminate between a form of prewar racial science oriented toward nineteenth-century conceptions of race and one that gave rise to the cultural understanding of race that has been ascendant since WWII. The dissertation focuses on two anthropologists whose approaches to the problem of human difference reveal a diversity of conceptualization, approach and presentation in the scientific study of race. At the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Henry Field conceived an exhibition, the Races of Mankind, which presented a hierarchical, typological vision of unchanging difference characteristic of nineteenth-century racial theories, conveyed through 101 lifesize bronze sculptures by Malvina Hoffman that were presented as both artistic and scientific objects. Mounted through a process that was contested, fraught with disagreement and happenstance, the exhibition nonetheless created an experiential and imaginative space for visitors that reinforced hierarchical visions of superior and inferior, civilized and primitive. Harry L. Shapiro, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, pursued research in Polynesia, replicating and extending work by Franz Boas that undermined two key tenets of static racial classifications. In The Heritage of the Bounty, Shapiro confirmed the vigor of racial hybrids, contrary to Charles Davenport's assertions in Race Crossing in Jamaica. In Migration and Environment , a study of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii, Shapiro demonstrated that key physical features used to classify races were modified in new environments. Shapiro stressed careful consideration of environmental and sociocultural contexts, and rigorous scientific methods, to counter facile, divisive characterizations of race.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 63 (2003): 4067. UMI order no. 3070221.
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