The History of Transdisciplinary Race Classification: Methods, Politics and Institutions, 1840s–1940s (2018)
McMahon, Richard (Author)
British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 51
Issue: 1
Pages: 41-67
A recently blossoming historiographical literature recognizes that physical anthropologists allied with scholars of diverse aspects of society and history to racially classify European peoples over a period of about a hundred years. They created three successive race classification coalitions – ethnology, from around 1840; anthropology, from the 1850s; and interwar raciology – each of which successively disintegrated. The present genealogical study argues that representing these coalitions as ‘transdisciplinary’ can enrich our understanding of challenges to disciplinary specialization. This is especially the case for the less well-studied nineteenth century, when disciplines and challenges to disciplinary specialization were both gradually emerging. Like Marxism or structuralism, race classification was a holistic interpretive framework, which, at its most ambitious, aimed to structure the human sciences as a whole. It resisted the organization of academia and knowledge into disciplines with separate organizational institutions and research practices. However, the ‘transdisciplinarity’ of this nationalistic project also bridged emerging borderlines between science and politics. I ascribe race classification's simultaneous longevity and instability to its complex and intricately entwined processes of political and interdisciplinary coalition building. Race classification's politically useful conclusions helped secure public support for institutionalizing the coalition's component disciplines. Institutionalization in turn stimulated disciplines to professionalize. They emphasized disciplinary boundaries and insisted on apolitical science, thus ultimately undermining the ‘transdisciplinary’ project.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Kröner, Hans-Peter;
(1999)
Von der Vaterschaftsbestimmung zum Rassegutachten: Der erbbiologische Ahnlichkeitsvergleich als “österreichisch-deutsches Projekt” 1926-1945
(/isis/citation/CBB000111948/)
Article
Sébastien Meyer;
(2020)
« C’est ainsi qu’on fondera l’anthropologie bohémienne ». Enquête ethnogénique et éclectisme savant au xixe siècle
(/isis/citation/CBB984262240/)
Article
Brown, Mark;
(2003)
Ethnology and Colonial Administration in Nineteenth-Century British India: The Question of Native Crime and Criminality
(/isis/citation/CBB000330743/)
Thesis
Biles, John Walter;
(2005)
Race before Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001561620/)
Article
Carhart, Michael C.;
(2009)
Polynesia and Polygenism: The Scientific Use of Travel Literature in the Early 19th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000953761/)
Book
Reynaud Paligot, Carole;
(2006)
La république raciale: paradigme racial et idéologie républicaine, 1860--1930
(/isis/citation/CBB000772831/)
Article
Ashley Kerr;
(2017)
From Savagery to Sovereignty: Identity, Politics, and International Expositions of Argentine Anthropology (1878–1892)
(/isis/citation/CBB576404806/)
Article
Ricardo Roque;
(2022)
The Latin stranger-science, or l’anthropologie among the Lusitanians
(/isis/citation/CBB649474947/)
Article
Duedahl, Poul;
(2009)
Læst og påskrevet---Om racebegrebet hos Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001022216/)
Book
Baker, Lee D.;
(2010)
Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001035564/)
Book
Bindman, David;
(2002)
Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000301542/)
Book
Piroska Balogh;
Dezső Gurka;
(2019)
Changes in the Image of Man from the Enlightenment to the Age of Romanticism: Philosophical and Scientific Receptions of (physical) Anthropology in the 18-19th Centuries
(/isis/citation/CBB052431813/)
Article
Bronwen Douglas;
(2013)
Philosophers, Naturalists, and Antipodean Encounters, 1748-1803
(/isis/citation/CBB254586561/)
Article
Maarten Couttenier;
(2017)
‘With the Risk of Being Called Retrograde’. Racial Classifications and the Attack on the Aryan Myth by Jean-Baptiste d'Omalius d'Halloy (1783–1875)
(/isis/citation/CBB808676145/)
Article
Müller-Wille, Staffan;
(2014)
Race and History: Comments from an Epistemological Point of View
(/isis/citation/CBB001421206/)
Article
James J. Harris;
(2020)
The “Tribal Spirit” in Modern Britain: Evolution, Nationality, and Race in the Anthropology of Sir Arthur Keith
(/isis/citation/CBB950685485/)
Article
Morris-Reich, Amos;
(2013)
Anthropology, Standardization and Measurement: Rudolf Martin and Anthropometric Photography
(/isis/citation/CBB001320136/)
Article
Yinghong Cheng;
(2017)
“Is Peking Man Still Our Ancestor?”—Genetics, Anthropology, and the Politics of Racial Nationalism in China
(/isis/citation/CBB750070549/)
Book
Melissa N. Stein;
(2015)
Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934
(/isis/citation/CBB729336001/)
Article
Rusert, Britt;
(2013)
Delany's Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation
(/isis/citation/CBB001201822/)
Be the first to comment!