Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Historiography of Race and Physical Anthropology

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Handbook of the Historiography of Biology

Part of the book series: Historiographies of Science ((HISTSC,volume 1))

  • 91 Accesses

Abstract

In the early and mid-twentieth century, race was widely regarded among physical anthropologists (and most Americans) as an essential, biological component of human identity. Within that consensus, however, there were serious debates over the nature of race, heredity, identity, classifications, and scientific methods. More recently, historians have begun articulating a more complex and contested picture of racialist theorizing among anthropologists, not least by Boas himself, who was a leading racial scientist and one of the foremost cultural anthropologists in America. Histories that address the complex interplay between cultural and biological theory offer a different assessment of the persistent contradictions and complexity of the American racial landscape and its scientific representations.

This essay was adapted from Tracy Teslow, Constructing race: the science of bodies and cultures in American anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Charles King, a professor of international affairs and government, has authored one of the latest entries in the genre of popular histories that perpetuate this narrative, God’s of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex and Gender in the Twentieth Century (2019). The eager reception of his account by progressive critics is a good example of allure of this recurring narrative, and the difficulty scholars have had getting traction for a more complex account of racial and cultural theory and practice.

  2. 2.

    The OED lists 62 adjectival permutations on the word “race” (“race line,” “race man,” “race question,” etc.). The term itself has six definitions, the earliest dating from 1547. Zoological definitions and application to identifiable groups of people (biologically or otherwise) date from the late sixteenth century. Use of the term to designate a supposedly physically distinct group of people dates from the early eighteenth century. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  3. 3.

    For an early discussion of this problem, see Montagu 1942 and 1945, where he advocated for replacing “race” with “ethnic group.”

  4. 4.

    A term which itself has been critiqued as ethnocentric and racist. See, for example, Trouillot 2003, Pels 2008, and Bhabha 1994.

  5. 5.

    Reported to Malvina Hoffman by Stanley Field, September 9, 1931, Box 3, Malvina Hoffman Collection, 850,042–1, Special Collections, The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles, California.

  6. 6.

    Final Report, “Anthropology in the age of genetics: Practice, discourse, critique,” Wenner-Gren Foundation International Symposium #124, June 11–19, 1999, Teresópolis, Brazil, url: http://www.wennergren.org/history/anthropology-age-genetics-practice-discourse-critique

References

  • Allen GE (1984) The roots of biological determinism. J Hist Biol 17:141–145

    PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Allen JS (1989) Franz Boas’s physical anthropology: the critique of racial formalism revisited. Curr Anthropol 30:79–84

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson W (2006a) The cultivation of whiteness: science, health, and racial destiny in Australia. Duke University Press, Durham

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson W (2006b) Colonial pathologies: American tropical medicine, race, and hygiene in the Philippines. Duke University Press, Durham

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson W (2014) Racial conceptions in the global south. “Focus: relocating race”. Isis 105: 782–792

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Anderson W (2018) Thickening transregionalism: historical formations of science, technology, and medicine in Southeast Asia. East Asian Sci Technol Soc 12:503–518

    Google Scholar 

  • Armelagos GJ (2004) Du Bois, Boas and the study of race. Hamline Rev 28:1–28

    Google Scholar 

  • Armelagos GJ (2008) Biocultural anthropology at its origins: transformation of the new physical anthropology in the 1950s. In: Kelso J (ed) The Tao of anthropology. University Press of Florida, Gainesville, pp 269–282

    Google Scholar 

  • Armstrong E (1997) Interview with Kara Walker. In: Flood R et al (eds) No place (like home). Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker LD (1998) From savage to negro: anthropology and the construction of race, 1896–1954. University of California Press, Berkeley

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker LD (2010) Anthropology and the racial politics of culture. Duke University Press, Durham

    Google Scholar 

  • Bangham J (2015) What is race? UNESCO, mass communication and human genetics in the early 1950s. Hist Hum Sci 28:80–107

    Google Scholar 

  • Banner LW (2003) Intertwined lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and their circle. Alfred A. Knopf, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Barkan E (1992) The retreat of scientific racism: changing concepts of race in Britain and the United States between the world wars. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Barkan E (1996) The politics of the science of race: Ashley Montagu and UNESCO’s anti-racist declarations. In: Reynolds LT, Lieberman L (eds) Race and other misadventures: essays in honor of Ashley Montagu in his ninetieth year. General Hall, Dix Hills, pp 96–105

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhabha H (1994) The location of culture. Routledge, London/New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Brattain M (2007) Race, racism, and antiracism: UNESCO and the politics of presenting science to the postwar public. Am Hist Rev 112:1386–1413

    Google Scholar 

  • Braun L, Hammonds E (2008) Race, populations, and genomics: Africa as laboratory. Soc Sci Med 67:1580–1588

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Chakrabarty D (2000) Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Chung J (2014) Better science and better race?: social Darwinism and Chinese eugenics. Isis 105:793–802

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Clifford J, Marcus GE (eds) (1986) Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. University of California Press, Berkeley

    Google Scholar 

  • Cole D (1999) Franz Boas: the early years, 1859–1906. Douglas & McIntyre/University of Washington Press, Vancouver/Seattle

    Google Scholar 

  • Conklin AL (2013) In the Museum of man: race, anthropology and empire in France, 1850–1950. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooper F (1996) Review essay: race. Ideology, and the perils of comparative history. Am Hist Rev 101:1122–1138

    Google Scholar 

  • Cowlishaw G (2000) Censoring race in ‘post-colonial’ anthropology. Crit Anthropol 20:101–123

    Google Scholar 

  • Dain B (2002) A hideous monster of the mind: American race theory in the early republic. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Darnell R (1997) The anthropological concept of culture at the end of the Boasian century. Soc Anal 41:42–54

    Google Scholar 

  • Darnell R (1998) And along came Boas: continuity and revolution in Americanist anthropology. J. Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia

    Google Scholar 

  • Darnell R (2000) Review: reenvisioning Boas and Boasian anthropology. Am Anthropol 102: 896–899

    Google Scholar 

  • Darnell R (2001) Invisible genealogies: a history of Americanist anthropology. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln

    Google Scholar 

  • Dear P (2005) What is the history of science the history of? Early modern roots of the ideology of modern science. Isis 96:390–406

    Google Scholar 

  • Delgado AN (2020) The face of the Mexican: race, nation, and criminal identification in Mexico. Am Anthropol 122:356–368

    Google Scholar 

  • Descola P (2013) Beyond nature and culture (trans: Lloyd J). University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • di Leonardo M (1998) Exotics at home: anthropologies, others, American modernity. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Dominguez V (1994) A taste for ‘the other’: intellectual complicity in racializing practices. Curr Anthropol 35:333–348

    Google Scholar 

  • Douglas B (2008) Foreign bodies in Oceania. In: Douglas B, Ballard C (eds) Foreign bodies: Oceania and the science of race 1750–1940. Australian National University Press, Canberra

    Google Scholar 

  • Douglas B, Ballard C (eds) (2008) Foreign bodies: Oceania and the science of race, 1750–1940. Australian National University Press, Canberra

    Google Scholar 

  • Duara P (2018) Time and tide wait for no man: a response to Warwick Anderson and Michael M.J. Fischer. East Asian Sci Technol Soc 12:541–547

    Google Scholar 

  • Dubow S (1995) Scientific racism in South Africa. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Duster T (2003) Buried alive: the concept of race in science. In: Goodman AH, Heath D, Susan Lindee M (eds) Genetic nature/culture: anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp 258–277

    Google Scholar 

  • Duster T (2005) Race and reification in science. Science 307:1050–1051

    PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • El-Haj NA (2007) The genetic reinscription of race. Annu Rev Anthropol 36:283–300

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellison GTH et al (2008) An interdisciplinary perspective on the impact of genomics on the meaning of “race”, and the future role of racial categories in biomedical research. NTM J Hist Sci Technol Med 16:378–386

    Google Scholar 

  • Elshakry M (2010) When science became western: historiographical reflection. Isis 101:98–109

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Evans A (2010) Anthropology at War: World War I and the science of race in Germany. University of Chicago, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Fabian A (2010) The skull collectors: race, science, and America’s unburied dead. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Farber P, Cravens H (eds) (2009) Race and science: scientific challenges to racism in modern America. Oregon State University Press, Corvallis

    Google Scholar 

  • Fields BJ (1982) Ideology and race in American history. In: Kousser JM, McPherson JM (eds) Region, race, and reconstruction: essays in honor of C. Vann Woodward. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 143–177

    Google Scholar 

  • Fischer MMJ (2018) Theorizing STS from Asia—toward an STS multiscale bioecology framework: a blurred genre manifesto/agenda for an emergent field. East Asian Sci Technol Soc 12:519–540

    Google Scholar 

  • Fox RG, King B (eds) (2002) Anthropology beyond culture. Routledge, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Fujimura JH, Duster T, Rajagopalan R (2008) Introduction: race, genetics and disease: questions of evidence, matters of consequence. Soc Stud Sci 38:643–656

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Fuller S (2000) Thomas Kuhn: a philosophical history for our times. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Fullwiley D (2011) The enculturated gene: sickle cell health politics and biological difference in West Africa. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Fullwiley D (2014) The ‘contemporary synthesis’: when politically inclusive genomic science relies on biological notions of race. Isis 105:803–814

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Gates HL Jr (2007) Finding Oprah’s roots, finding your own. Random House, Crown Publishing Group, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilkeson JS Jr (1991) The domestication of ‘culture’ in interwar America, 1919–1941. In: Brown JA, van Keuren DK (eds) The estate of social knowledge. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore/London, pp 153–174

    Google Scholar 

  • Goodman AH (2006) Seeing culture in biology. In: Ellison GTH, Goodman AH (eds) The nature of difference: science, society and human biology. Taylor & Francis, New York, pp 225–242

    Google Scholar 

  • Goodman A, Heath D, Susan Lindee M (eds) (2003) Genetic nature/culture: anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide. University of California Press, Berkeley

    Google Scholar 

  • Gould SJ (1981) The mismeausure of man. W. W. Norton, New York/London

    Google Scholar 

  • Graham R (ed) (1990) The idea of race in Latin America, 1870–1940. University of Texas Press, Austin

    Google Scholar 

  • Hallowell AI (1965) The history of anthropology as an anthropological problem. J Hist Behav Sci 1:24–38

    Google Scholar 

  • Hammonds E (2008) The nature of difference: sciences of race in the United States from Jefferson to genomics. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Fem Stud 14:575–599

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway D (1989) Primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. Routledge, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway D (1997) Modest-Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse TM: feminism and technoscience. Routledge, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Harding S (2011) Other cultures’ sciences. In: Harding S (ed) The postcolonial science and technology studies reader. Duke University Press, Durham, pp 151–158

    Google Scholar 

  • Harris M (1968) The rise of anthropological theory. Thomas Crowell, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrison F (1995) The persistent power of ‘race’ in the cultural and political economy of racism. Annu Rev Anthropol 24:47–74

    Google Scholar 

  • Harrison F (1999) Introduction: expanding the discourse on ‘race’. Am Anthropol 100:609–631

    Google Scholar 

  • Hart MB (2011) Jews and race: an introductory essay. In: Hart MB (ed) Jews and race: Writings on identity and difference, 1880–1940. Brandeis University Press, Waltham, pp xiii–xxxix

    Google Scholar 

  • Hartigan J (2013a) Mexican genomics and the roots of racial thinking. Cult Anthropol 28:372–395

    Google Scholar 

  • Hartigan J (2013b) Anthropology of race: genes, biology, and culture. School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe

    Google Scholar 

  • Hazard AQ Jr (2012) Postwar anti-racism: the United States, UNESCO and ‘race’, 1945–1968. Macmillan, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Herrnstein RJ, Murray C (1994) The bell curve: intelligence and class structure in American life. Free Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Herskovits M (1953) Franz Boas: the science of man in the making. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Holt T (2000) The problem of race in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackson FLC (2000) Anthropological measurement: the mismeasurement of African Americans. Ann Am Acad Pol Soc Sci 568:154–171

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackson JP Jr (2001a) ‘In ways Unacademical’: the reception of Carleton S. Coon’s the origin of races. J Hist Biol 34:247–285

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackson JP Jr (2001b) Social scientists for social justice: making the case against segregation. New York University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackson JP Jr, Depew DJ (2017) Darwinism, democracy, and race: American anthropology and evolutionary biology in the twentieth century. Routledge, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Jacobson MF (1998) Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Kahn J (2012) Race in a bottle: the story of BiDil and Racialized medicine in a post-genomic age. Columbia University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • King RH (2004) Race, culture, and the intellectuals, 1940–1970. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore/London

    Google Scholar 

  • King C (2019) Gods of the upper air: how a circle of renegade anthropologists invented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century. Doubleday, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Koenig BA, Lee SS-J, Richardson SS (eds) (2008) Revisiting race in a genomic age. Rutgers University Press, Piscataway

    Google Scholar 

  • Kramer (2006) The blood of government: race, empire, and the United States and the Philippines. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

    Google Scholar 

  • Kroeber A (1956) The place of Boas in anthropology. Am Anthropol 58:151–159

    Google Scholar 

  • Kroeber A (1959) A history of the personality of anthropology. Am Anthropol 61:398–404

    Google Scholar 

  • Kroeber A, Kluckhohn C (1952) Culture: a critical review of concepts and definitions. Papers of the Peabody museum of American archeology and ethnology, Harvard University 47

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuhn TS (1962) The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuklick H (ed) (2008) A new history of anthropology. Blackwell Publishing, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuznar LA (2008) Reclaiming a scientific anthropology. AltaMira Press, Lanham

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis JE et al (2011) The mismeasure of science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on skulls and bias. PLoS Biol 9:6

    Google Scholar 

  • Lindee S, Radin J (2016) Patrons of the human experience: a history of the Wenner-Gren foundation for anthropological research, 1941–2016. Curr Anthropol 57:s218–s301

    Google Scholar 

  • Lindee MS, Goodman A, Heath L (2003) Anthropology and the age of genetics: practice, discourse, critique. In: Goodman A, Heath D, Susan Lindee M (eds) Genetic nature/culture: anthropology and science beyond the two-culture divide. University of California Press, Berkeley

    Google Scholar 

  • Lipphardt V (2015) Traditions and innovations: visualizations of human variation, c.1900–38. Hist Hum Sci 28:49–79

    Google Scholar 

  • Lipphardt V (2017) The body as a substrate of differentiation: shifting the focus from race science to life scientists’ research on human variation. Varia Hist 33:109–133

    Google Scholar 

  • Lipphardt V, Widmer A (eds) (2016) Health and difference: rendering human variation in colonial engagements. Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Lippman A (1991) Prenatal genetic testing and screening: constructing needs and reinforcing inequities. Am J Law Med 17:15–50

    PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Lippman A (1992) Led (astray) by genetic maps: the cartography of the human genome and health care. Soc Sci Med 35:1469–1476

    PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Liss J (1998) Diasporic identities: the science and politics of race in the work of Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois, 1894–1919. Cult Anthropol 13:127–166

    Google Scholar 

  • Little MA, Kennedy KAR (eds) (2010) Histories of American physical anthropology in the twentieth century. Lexington Books, Lanham

    Google Scholar 

  • Lopez IH (2005) Race and colorblindness after Hernandez and Brown. Chicana/o Latina/o Law Rev 25(1) Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43t5940z

  • Lowie R (1956a) Boas once more. Am Anthropol 58:159–164

    Google Scholar 

  • Lowie R (1956b) Reminiscences of anthropological currents in America half a century ago. Am Anthropol 58:995–1016

    Google Scholar 

  • Lyons AP, Lyons HD (2004) Irregular connections: a history of anthropology and sexuality. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln

    Google Scholar 

  • M’charek A, Schramm K, Skinner D (2013) Topologies of race: doing territory, population and identity in Europe. Sci Technol Human Values 39:468–487

    Google Scholar 

  • Malik K (1996) The meaning of race: race history and culture in western society. Macmillan Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Mead M (1959) An anthropologist at work: writings of Ruth Benedict. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Mead M (1972) Blackberry winter. Morrow, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Mead M (1973) Coming of age in Samoa. William Morrow, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Mead M (1974) Ruth Benedict. Columbia University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Mead M, Bunzel R (eds) (1960) The golden age of American anthropology. George Bazilier, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyerowitz J (2010) ‘How common culture shapes the separate lives’: sexuality, race, and mid-twentieth century social constructionist thought. J Am Hist 96:1057–1084

    Google Scholar 

  • Michaels WB (2006) The trouble with diversity: how we learned to love identity and ignore inequality. Metropolitan Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Mills CW (1997) The racial contract. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

    Google Scholar 

  • Montagu M, Ashley F (1942) Man’s most dangerous myth: the fallacy of race. Columbia University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Montagu M, Ashley F (1945) On the phrase ‘ethnic group’ in anthropology. Psychiatry 8:27–33

    Google Scholar 

  • Mukhopadhyay CC, Moses YT (1997) Reestablishing ‘race’ in anthropological discourse. Am Anthropol 99:517–533

    Google Scholar 

  • Müller-Wille S (2007) Race et appartenance ethnique: la diversité humaine et l’UNESCO Déclarations sur la race (1950 et 1951) [Race and ethnicity: human diversity and the UNESCO declarations on race (1950 and 1951)]. In: 60 ans d’histoire de l’UNESCO [60 years of UNESCO history]. UNESCO, Paris, pp 211–220

    Google Scholar 

  • Murray SO (1999) The non-eclipse of Americanist anthropology during the 1930s and 1940s. In: Lisa V, Darnell R (eds) Theorizing the Americanist tradition. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, pp 52–74

    Google Scholar 

  • Outram SM, Ellison GTH (2010) Arguments against the use of racialized categories as genetic variables in biomedical research: what are they, and why are they being ignored? In: Whitmarsh I, Jones DS (eds) What’s the use of race?: governance and the biology of difference. MIT University Press, Boston, pp 91–124

    Google Scholar 

  • Peace WJ (2004) Leslie A. White: evolution and revolution in anthropology. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln

    Google Scholar 

  • Pels P (2008) What has anthropology learned from the anthropology of colonialism? Soc Anthropol 16:280–299

    Google Scholar 

  • Penny G, Bunzl M (eds) (2003) Worldly provincialism: German anthropology in the age of empire. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor

    Google Scholar 

  • Qureshi S (2011) Peoples on parade: exhibitions, empire, and anthropology in nineteenth-century Britain. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Rabinow P (1992) Artificiality and enlightenment: from sociobiology to biosociality. In: Crary J, Kwinter S (eds) Zone 6: incorporations. Zone Books, New York, pp 234–252

    Google Scholar 

  • Rabinow P (2008) Afterword – concept work. In: Gibbon S, Novas C (eds) Biosocialities, genetics and the social sciences–making biologies and identities. Routledge, London, pp 182–192

    Google Scholar 

  • Raina D (2019) The vocation of indigenous knowledge and sciences as metaconcept. In: Abu-Er-Rub L et al (eds) Engaging transculturality: concepts, key terms, case studies. Routledge, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Reardon J (2004) Race to the finish: identity and governance in an age of genomics. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Reardon J (2008) Race and biology: beyond the perpetual return of crisis. NTM J Hist Sci Technol Med 16:373–377

    Google Scholar 

  • Reardon J (2009) Anti-colonial genomic practice? Learning from Chacmool and the Genographic project. Int J Cult Prop 16:199–204

    Google Scholar 

  • Reardon J (2012) The democratic, anti-racist genome? Technoscience at the limits of liberalism. Sci Cult 21:25–47

    Google Scholar 

  • Reardon J (2017) The Postgenomic condition: ethics, justice and knowledge after the genome. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Reardon J, Dunklee B, Wentworth K (2006) Race and crisis. Social Science Research Council forum on “Is race ‘real’?” June 2006. http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Reardon/

  • Reich D (2018) Who we are and how we got Here: ancient DNA and the new science of the human past. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Reverby S (2000) Tuskegee’s truths: re-thinking the Tuskegee syphilis study. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

    Google Scholar 

  • Saada E (2012) Empire’s children: race, filiation and citizenship in the French colonies. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Schaffer G (2008) Racial science and British society, 1930–1962. Palgrave Macmillan, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Selcer P (2012) Beyond the cephalic index: negotiating politics to produce UNESCO’s scientific statements on race. Curr Anthropol 53:s173–s184

    Google Scholar 

  • Seth S (2014) Introduction. “Focus: relocating race”. Isis 105:759–763

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Shah N (2001) Contagious divides: epidemics and race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. University of California Press, Berkeley

    Google Scholar 

  • Sleeboom-Faulkner M, Patra PK (2011) Experimental stem cell therapy: biohierarchies and bionetworking in Japan and India. Soc Stud Sci 41:645–666

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Smith LT (2013) Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Smocovitis VB (2012) Humanizing evolution: anthropology, the evolutionary synthesis and the prehistory of biological anthropology, 1927–1962. Curr Anthropol 53:s108–s125

    Google Scholar 

  • Sommer M (2010) DNA and cultures of remembrance: anthropological genetics, biohistories and biosocialities. BioSocieties 5:366–390

    Google Scholar 

  • Spencer F (ed) (1982) A history of American physical anthropology, 1930–1980. Academic, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Spencer F (ed) (1996) History of physical anthropology: an encyclopedia. Garland Reference Library of Social Science, Routledge, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Spencer F (ed) (1997) History of physical anthropology. Garland Publishing, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Stepan NL (1982) The idea of race in science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. Archon Books, Hamden

    Google Scholar 

  • Stepan NL (1991) “The hour of eugenics”: race, gender, and nation in Latin America. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

    Google Scholar 

  • Stepan NL (1998) Race, gender, science and citizenship. Gend Hist 10:26–52

    Google Scholar 

  • Stern AM (2005) Eugenic nation: faults and frontiers of better breeding in the United States. University of California Press, Berkeley

    Google Scholar 

  • Stern AM (2011) ‘The hour of eugenics’ in Veracruz, Mexico: radical politics, public health, and Latin America’s only sterilization law. Hisp Am Hist Rev 91:431–443

    Google Scholar 

  • Stocking GW Jr (1963) Matthew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the uses of invention. Am Anthropol 65:783–799

    Google Scholar 

  • Stocking GW Jr (1966) Franz Boas and the culture concept in historical perspective. Am Anthropol 68:867–882

    Google Scholar 

  • Stocking GW Jr (1968) Race, culture and evolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Stocking GW Jr (1974) Racial capacity and cultural determinism. In: The shaping of American anthropology, 1883–1911: a Franz Boas reader. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Stocking GW Jr (1992) Ideas and institutions in American anthropology. In: The ethnographer’s magic and other essays in the history of anthropology. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison

    Google Scholar 

  • Stocking GW Jr (ed) (1996) Volkgeist as method and ethic, essays on Boasian ethnography and the German anthropological tradition. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison

    Google Scholar 

  • Stocking GW Jr (2001) Delimiting anthropology: occasional essays and reflections. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison

    Google Scholar 

  • Stoler AL (1997) Racial histories and their regimes of truth. Polit Power Soc Theory 11:183–206

    Google Scholar 

  • Stoler AL (2001a) Tense and tender ties: the politics of comparison in North American history and (post)colonial studies. J Am Hist 88:829–865

    PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  • Stoler AL (2001b) Matters of intimacy as matters of state: a response. J Am Hist 88:893–897

    Google Scholar 

  • Sturgeon JC (2007) Pathways of ‘indigenous knowledge’ in Yunnan, China. Alternatives Global Local Polit Theory 32:129–153

    Google Scholar 

  • Sullivan S, Tuana N (eds) (2007) Race and epistemologies of ignorance. State University of New York Press, Albany

    Google Scholar 

  • Teicher A (2020) Social Mendelism: genetics and the politics of race in Germany, 1900–1948. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Teslow T (2016) Constructing race: the science of bodies and cultures in American anthropology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Tilley H (2014) Racial science, geopolitics, and empires: paradoxes of power. Isis 105:773–781

    PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Trouillot M-R (2003) Anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness. In: Global transformations: anthropology and the modern world. Palgrave Macmillan, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Tuck E, Yang KW (2012) Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization Indigeneity Educ Soc 1:1–40

    Google Scholar 

  • Tucker WH (2002) The funding of scientific racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund. University of Illinois Press, Urbana

    Google Scholar 

  • Tylor EB (1871) Primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. J. Murray, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Valentine L, Darnell R (eds) (1999) Theorizing the Americanist tradition. University of Toronto Press, Toronto

    Google Scholar 

  • Wade N (2014) A troublesome inheritance: genes, race and human history. Penguin, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Wade P, Beltrán CL, Restrepo E, Santos RV (eds) (2014) Mestizo genomics: race mixture, nation, and science in Latin America. Duke University Press, Durham

    Google Scholar 

  • Wailoo K (2001) Dying in the City of the blues: sickle cell Anemia and the politics of race and health. University of North Carolina Press, Durham

    Google Scholar 

  • Wailoo K (2003) Inventing the heterozygote: molecular biology, racial identity, and the narratives of sickle-cell disease, Tay-Sachs, and cystic fibrosis. In: Moore DS, Kosek J, Pandian A (eds) Race, nature, and the politics of difference. Duke University Press, Durham, pp 235–253

    Google Scholar 

  • Wailoo K, Pemberton S (2006) The troubled dream of genetic medicine: ethnicity and innovation in Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

    Google Scholar 

  • Wailoo K, Nelson A, Lee C (eds) (2012) Genetics and the unsettled past: the collision of DNA, race, and history. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick

    Google Scholar 

  • Washington HA (2006) Medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present. Harlem Moon, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Watkins RJ (2008) Knowledge from the margins: W. Montague Cobb’s pioneering research in biocultural anthropology. Am Anthropol 109:186–196

    Google Scholar 

  • Weidman N (2004) Constructing scientific psychology: Karl Lashley’s mind-brain debates. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Weindling P (1993) Health, race and German politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Weisberg M, Paul DB (2016) Morton, Gould, and bias: A comment on ‘The mismeasure of science’. PLoS Biol 14:e1002444

    PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  • White L (1963) The ethnography and ethnology of Franz Boas. Texas memorial museum bulletin, vol 6. Texas Memorial Museum, Austin

    Google Scholar 

  • Whitmarsh I, Jones DS (2010) What’s the use of race? Modern governance and the biology of difference. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams VJ Jr (1996) Rethinking race: Franz Boas and his contemporaries. The University of Kentucky Press, Lexington

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams VJ Jr (2007) What is race’: Franz Boas reconsidered. In: Campbell JT, Guterl M, Lee RG (eds) Race, nation and empire. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

    Google Scholar 

  • Yudell M (2014) Race unmasked: biology and race in the twentieth century. Columbia University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Zimmerman A (2001) Anthropology and anti-humanism in Imperial Germany. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Tracy Teslow

Authors
  1. Tracy Teslow
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tracy Teslow .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Michael Dietrich

  2. University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, MN, USA

    Mark Borrello

  3. Tel Aviv, Israel

    Oren Harman

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Teslow, T. (2020). The Historiography of Race and Physical Anthropology. In: Dietrich, M., Borrello, M., Harman, O. (eds) Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Historiographies of Science, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_18-1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_18-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74456-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74456-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Religion and PhilosophyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation