The (Mis)appropriation of Biological Anthropology in Race Science and the Implications for Forensic Anthropology

Most biological anthropologists acknowledge that phenotypic human variation is distinct from human race. However, there is the potential for the research on human variation to be (mis)interpreted by the public as a reification of biological races. To explore this possible misuse, this study is a content analysis of articles (n = 1146) in the prominent race science journals Mankind Quarterly; The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies; and The Occidental Quarterly. The goal is to investigate how race science employs research in biological and forensic anthropology to justify arguments. Articles were evaluated according to country affiliation, discipline, data sets, racial/ethnic terminology, position on racial hierarchy, position on racial segregation and eugenics, focus of study, views of scientific community, and the average power index (PI). Additionally, specific examples of (mis)appropriation are highlighted. Though the primary discipline represented in these publications is psychology, biological anthropology maintains a presence. Skeletal and dental traits, genetics, and paleoanthropological data are used to argue for biological racial differences and taxonomic distinctions. The research of forensic ancestry estimation was regularly used to legitimize the concept of biological race. While the PIs of the articles are low, they are present on the internet and circulate within social media. The continued use of biological anthropology to reinforce racial essentialism should force practitioners to question the ethical implications of their research. Finally, we provide discussion regarding shiftsin methodology and terminology to address how biological and forensic anthropologists can rectify the damage this research may directly and indirectly cause.

The Logic of Skull Writing

In this essay I discuss the significance of theories and classifications that appear in the material and graphic form of race and place name inscriptions on human skulls. I argue that human skulls themselves provided a site for the inscription of raciological thought, a privileged location for abbreviating broader conceptions of differences and distributions of ‘human races’. I will draw on the history of race science in 19th-century Europe to explore how and why certain race and place names were inscribed onto skulls, and the effect of this form of inscription on the shaping of theories in the racial sciences during this period. The article especially considers the work of the French anthropologists Armand de Quatrefages and Ernest-Théodore Hamy, who systematically wrote inscriptions on the skulls they were studying in the context of Crania Ethnica, arguably the most ambitious project of global racial craniology undertaken in the late 19th century.

Transnational isolates: Portuguese colonial race science and the foreign world

This article examines scientific transnationalism as an art of engagement with, and avoidance of, the threats and promises of what was foreign to the nation. Portuguese racial anthropologists experienced a tension between remaining imperial-nationalistic in character, and internationalist in their activities simultaneously. They struggled to exclude foreigners from colonial field sites; they aimed at nativist authority based on total control of colonial data. Yet, they eagerly sought connections with foreign experts to capitalize provincial scientific authority within Portugal’s colonies. The essay conceptualizes this mode of transnationalism as also a kind of isolationism, an inward-oriented form of engaging with foreign sciences and scientists as ambivalently powerful and threatening strangers.

Risky migrations: Race, Latin eugenics, and Cold War development in the International Labor Organization’s Puno–Tambopata project in Peru, 1930–60

Histories of economic development during the Cold War do not typically consider connections to race science and eugenics. By contrast, this article historicizes the debates sparked by the International Labor Organization’s Puno–Tambopata project in Peru and demonstrates how Cold War development practice shared common epistemological terrain with racial and eugenic thought from the Andes. The International Labor Organization project’s goal of resettling indigenous groups from the Peruvian highlands to lower-lying tropical climates sparked heated debates about the biological specificity of Andean highlanders’ physiques and ability to survive in the tropics. Such concerns betrayed the antitypological consensus expressed in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Race Statements and defended by one of the main proponents of the resettlement project, the Swiss–American anthropologist Alfred Métraux. The concern with Andean racial types was central to the research agenda of the acclaimed Peruvian physiologist Carlos Monge, who endorsed modernization projects that did not entail moving highlanders outside of their traditional climate. The debates sparked by the Puno–Tambopata project demonstrate how Cold War development discourse grappled with racial and eugenic thought from Latin America and the Global South and thereby produced projects of indigenous “improvement.”

Milking economies: Multispecies entanglements in the infant formula industry

In 2016 the Chinese infant formula company Feihe International signed a deal with the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC) to process Canadian cows’ and goats’ milk for infant formula export to China. Our purpose in this paper is to understand how this deal – and the new Feihe formula factory located in Kingston, Canada – is underpinned by a series of multispecies entanglements across cow, human and goat mothers in China and Canada. To do so, we analyse official correspondence between the CDC, Feihe and City of Kingston; market reports for the dairy, goat and infant formula industries; and news articles about the Feihe infant formula plant. Conceptually, we develop an anti-colonial, multispecies entanglement framework to chart the violent inclusions, exclusions and typologizations that make milk and formula economies possible. We are specifically interested in how the Feihe–CDC deal (re)configures entanglements across species, nation, race, science and motherhood. To understand these relations, we heuristically imbricate two different sets of entanglements that underpin this deal: milk drinking, empire and genetic purity across race, breed and species; and motherhood, science and technology across humans, goats and cows. We use our threefold entanglement framework to better understand the violence of these imbrications and to work towards a multispecies feminist ethic in the infant formula industry.

‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

The Paleolithic imagination:Nature, science, and race in Anthropocene fitness cultures

The widespread uptake of the Anthropocene concept over the past two decades has seen a concomitant rise in cultural forms that trade on nostalgia for Paleolithic life. Mud running, CrossFit, and the Paleo diet exemplify this trend, with the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer at the center of their popular prescriptions for healthy living. In this article, we identify these practices as embodying the anxieties of the Anthropocene as well as its historical and racial elisions. By focusing on the oblique and subtle racializations of Anthropocene health and fitness cultures, we contribute to understandings of the cultural significance of the human body in the Anthropocene and the relationship between the biopolitics of health and geological life, arguing that the body is a key site through which the tensions and inequalities of the Anthropocene are played out. And by unraveling how the Paleolithic imagination is rooted in a distinctly capitalist, Euro-American attitude to the body in nature, we show the Anthropocene to be defined by uneven distributions of health as self-optimization, and health as environmental risk. The Paleolithic imagination demonstrates the tangled politics of race, science, and nature in the twenty-first century, in which global ecological instability, the biopolitics of health, the shadows of colonialism, and consumer capitalism converge.

Sexology and the national Other in the Soviet Union

Historians have pointed to overseas colonialism and 'race science' as influential in the construction of European sexual science. Soviet sexology arose on a 'semi-periphery' between Europe and colonised societies. The 'Others' against whom Russian sexual ideals were forged would be 'internally colonised' peasants and non-Russian ethnicities of the Soviet Union's internal orient. Pre-Stalinist sexology blended the 'sexual revolution' with European sexual science focused on workers in the Slavic urban industrial heartland; nationalities beyond this perceived heartland lagged behind and their sex lives required modernisation. Stalin virtually curtailed sexological research. After 1945 the party revived it to spur fertility, especially in Slavic urban centres where births had dropped below replacement rate. Ideological control constrained sexologists, confining them to silos, limiting internationalisation and cramping research. But new, heteronormative therapeutic measures, some from Western science, and others devised at home, were developed. Less vocal than Western or Eastern Bloc sexology, Soviet sex research continued to display anxiety about internal national and ethnic Others into the 1980s and beyond.