Article
ID: CBB913980082

The Bengali Pharaoh: Upper-Caste Aryanism, Pan-Egyptianism, and the Contested History of Biometric Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Bengal (2017)

unapi
Physical anthropology Science and race Caste Nationalism Biometry 20th century Bengal (India)

Extant South Asian histories of race, and more specifically biometrics, focus almost exclusively upon the colonial era and especially the nineteenth century. Yet an increasing number of ethnographic accounts observe that Indian scientists have enthusiastically embraced the resurgent raciology engendered by genomic research into human variation. What is sorely lacking is a historical account of how raciology fared in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, roughly the period between the decline of craniometry and the rise of genomics. It is this history that I explore in this article. I argue that anthropometry, far from being a purely colonial science, was adopted by Indian nationalists quite early on. Various distinctive shades of biometric nationalism publicly competed from the 1920s onward. To counter any sense that biometric nationalism was teleologically inevitable, I contrast it with a radical alternative called “craftology” that emerged on the margins of formal academia amongst scholars practicing what I call “vernacular anthropology.” Craftology and biometric nationalism continued to compete, contrast, and selectively entangle with each other until almost the end of the twentieth century.

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Authors & Contributors
Clever, Iris
Barbosa, Thiago P.
Cristina Pecchia
Herza, Filip
Banta, Joshua Alexander
Weindling, Paul J.
Journals
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Perspectives on Science
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Current Anthropology
South Asian History and Culture
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Publishers
University of Minnesota Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Oxford University Press
Cambridge University Press
University of Chicago
Concepts
Physical anthropology
Science and race
Nationalism
Eugenics
Colonialism
Human genetics
People
Karve, Irawati
Washburn, Sherwood Larned
Dobzhansky, Theodosius
Quatrefages de Bréau, Jean Louis Armand de
Morton, Samuel George
Gould, Stephen Jay
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
Places
United States
Germany
Bengal (India)
Czechoslovakia
London (England)
Prussia (Germany)
Institutions
UNESCO
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