Summary The article briefly introduces a path, that starts from the Franz Boas’ anthropological field research in British Columbia about sound, dance and motion among the Indians until the 1930s to the practice of dance and sound as a therapeutic issue in Franziska Boas’ work in New York.

Images are at the heart of strategies of persuasion. They render certain aspects visible and leave others unrepresented; and they may shape processes of scientific reasoning and imagination. By tracing diagrammatic images in the anthropological sciences throughout the 20thcentury, the contributions to this special issue highlight some dominant pictorial traditions for rendering human evolution and diversity visible. This article aims to provide an overview of and an introduction to the special issue ‘Visibility Matters’.

In the standard native tradition of Albanian studies, descriptive and empirical research has only confirmed their own ultimate goal of constructing national specificity and a particularly antiquated view of national culture. In this article, I show how and why an articulate analysis of the main intellectual traditions and their impact can provide fresh insights into grasping the cultural particularism of Albanian studies. Methodologically, a new picture of knowledge production must arise if we consider the historical, cultural, political and ideological terrain (...) on which certain influential ideas and practices in Albanian studies of people’s culture have emerged. The aim, then, is not to provide an exhaustive picture of a positive knowledge of culture and society, but to show the urgent need for avoiding any adoption of concepts that might be pure reconstructions of arbitrary and timeless structures and values, while rejecting any approach in terms of survivals and folklorism. (shrink)

In 1907, German anthropologist Theodor Mollison invented a unique method for racial differentiation, called ‘deviation curves’. By transforming anthropometric data matrices into graphs, Mollison’s method enabled the simultaneous comparison of a large number of physical attributes of individuals and groups. However, the construction of deviation curves had been highly desultory, and their interpretation had been prone to various visual misjudgements. Despite their methodological shortcomings, deviation curves became very popular among racial anthropologists. This positive reception not only stemmed from the method’s (...) utilities, but was related to additional interests of its protagonists which the method helped promote. Deviation curves provided a unique solution to the holistic–atomistic controversy in German anthropology. By giving separate measurements a consolidated visual form, they substantiated the idea that the attributes of certain social groups were part of distinct racial compounds. Deviation curves thus reinforced racial suppositions, in face of severe criticism on the ontological reality of race itself. Finally, deviation curves emphasized the biological singularity of disadvantaged human groups – Jews, Africans and also women – and of their divergence from ideologically defined physical norms. Disciplinary and social interests thus became intertwined in the formation of a scientific method, which is used to this day in physical anthropology. (shrink)