Between the last decades of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, something of paramount importance happened in the history of anthropology. This was the advent of a physical anthropology that was about the classification of ‘human races’ through comparative measurement. A central tool of the new trade was diagrams. Being inherently about relations in and between objects, diagrams became the means of defining human groups and their relations to each other – the last point being disputed (...) between the monogenists and the polygenists. James Cowles Prichard, a proponent of the comparative historical approach, was able to do without images in his pioneering Researches Into the Physical History of Man of 1813, but the third edition, which appeared in five volumes between 1836 and 1847, was richly illustrated with ‘ethnic types’ and skulls, including diagrams. What was happening is a process I engage with in detail for Samuel George Morton, who collected and distributed human skulls as lithographs in Crania americana (1839) and Crania aegyptiaca (1844). Along with the paper skulls travelled detailed instructions of how to look at them through a set of lines and to set their individual parts in relation to each other as well as to those of other types. Drawing on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Peter Camper, the Crania thus played a pivotal role in establishing what I call a diagrammatics of race – a diagrammatics that became overtly political with Types of Mankind (1854), which was written in Morton's honour by Josiah Nott and George Gliddon. (shrink)

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, population geneticists sought computational solutions to integrate greater numbers of genetic traits into their debates about the ancestral relationships of human groups. At the same time, geneticists’ longstanding assumptions about Jewish communities, especially Ashkenazim, were challenged by a series of social, political, and intellectual developments. In Israel, the entrenched cultural and political dominance of Ashkenazi Jews faced major social upheaval. Meanwhile, to counteract lingering anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, Arthur Koestler’s The (...) Thirteenth Tribe and Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai Wing’s The Myth of the Jewish Race argued that Jewish identity was not connected to biological ancestry from the ancient Israelites. Drawing on scientific publications and archived correspondence, this article reconstructs a transnational social history showing how geneticists responded to these shifting claims about Ashkenazi identity and ancestry. Many argued that these claims could be tested using new statistical models, which provided allegedly more “objective” estimates of ancestral gene frequencies and histories of population admixture. However, they simultaneously engaged in heated debates over the relative superiority of competing statistical approaches. These debates reveal how the transnational reverberations of Israeli ethnic politics and Euro-American anti-Semitism affected the development of new calculations for genetic admixture, permanently shifting the assumptions of population genetic research on Jewish populations as well as other human groups. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of the visual culture shared by a number of scientists studying human variation in the first half of the 20th century. This was a time when most scientists shared the conceptual and terminological framework of ‘racial classifications’ to capture the structure of human variation. Clearly, drawings – and later photographs – of people from all over the world constituted a crucial part of the well-established visual culture concerned with human variation. The article, however, focuses on (...) the representational tools for visualizing aspects of human variation that were not so obvious to the eye of the observer. It contextualizes researchers’ strategies of visualizing human diversity within the pictorial traditions of relevant fields, particularly physical anthropology and human genetics. Starting from 1900, the article demonstrates how scientists built up a rich visual repertoire for understanding human diversity, one that integrated maps, tables, photos, drawings, diagrams, family and phylogenetic trees. The representations included abstract and non-abstract elements, but increasingly rested on diagrammatic visualizations. Notably, although these diagrammatic visualizations grew in sophistication and methodological rigor, they were rarely used in academic textbooks. More often, mixed strategies of visualizations – diagrammatic elements integrated into non-diagrammatic images – were chosen as representations for human diversity. In the postwar period, most of those visualizations disappeared from scientific publications, but not from popular media. For the scientific publications, one can argue that a number of scientists paid specific attention to visualizations and their deterministic potential. Some argued that particularly maps and trees were altogether problematic in their visualization of human evolution and human diversity. Others sought out new and better ways of constructing trees and maps to visualize truth-claims about human diversity. Here, diagrammatic elements played a key role. Notably, researchers who employed typological approaches for physical anthropology, and who admitted that there was a moment of intuition in their practices, aspired to meet the demands of mechanical objectivity by establishing abstract inscriptions of their typological assessments. (shrink)

This special issue is the product of a conference, The Future of the History of the Human Sciences, which was held at the University of York in April 2016. The meeting brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and at various stages of their careers to reflect on what were identified as major challenges and opportunities for the research that History of the Human Sciences publishes. The articles included here are a sample of the responses that were (...) generated and contain reflections on not only the boundaries of history of the human sciences research but also the methods used within the discipline. As this introduction explains, the overall aim of the conference was to explore these questions in order to think about both future directions for research and ways in which we can ensure the field remains dynamic and vital. (shrink)