ABSTRACT This essay examines a dispute between the French and German anthropological communities in the aftermath of the Franco‐Prussian War. While the debate ostensibly revolved around the ethnological classification of the Prussian population presented in Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages's La race prussienne, this overlays much deeper points of contention, presenting a case study of how commitments to nationalism and internationalism in late nineteenth‐century science were not mutually exclusive but could operate in a highly synergistic manner, even during periods of (...) intense international crisis. In the controversy, a group of scholars attempted to reconcile national rivalries with a commitment to scientific universalism and define how anthropological ideas of race and progress related to political developments. The French and German communities retained similar views that anthropology was an international science and that politically defined nationality was separate from scientifically discerned race. Yet they nevertheless regarded their work as strongly affected by processes of national consolidation and employed the language of scientific universalism to accuse their rivals of misusing science for political purposes. (shrink)

Craniology – the practice of inferring intelligence differences from the measurement of human skulls – survived the dismissal of phrenology and remained a widely popular research program until the end of the nineteenth century. From the 1970s, historians and sociologists of science extensively focused on the explicit and implicit socio-cultural biases invalidating the evidence and claims that craniology produced. Building on this literature, I reassess the history of craniological practice from a different but complementary perspective that relies on recent developments (...) in the epistemology of measurement. More precisely, I identify two aspects of the measurement culture of nineteenth-century craniologists that are crucial to understand the lack of validity of craniological inference: their neglect of the problem of coordination for their presupposed quantification of intelligence and their narrow view of calibration. Based on my analysis, I claim that these methodological shortcomings amplified the impact of the socio-cultural biases of craniologists, which had a pervasive role in their evidential use of measurement. Finally, my argument shows how the epistemology of measurement perspective can offer useful tools in debates concerning the use of biological evidence to foster social discourse and for analyzing the relationship between theory, evidence, and measurement. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay examines a dispute between the French and German anthropological communities in the aftermath of the Franco‐Prussian War. While the debate ostensibly revolved around the ethnological classification of the Prussian population presented in Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages's La race prussienne, this overlays much deeper points of contention, presenting a case study of how commitments to nationalism and internationalism in late nineteenth‐century science were not mutually exclusive but could operate in a highly synergistic manner, even during periods of (...) intense international crisis. In the controversy, a group of scholars attempted to reconcile national rivalries with a commitment to scientific universalism and define how anthropological ideas of race and progress related to political developments. The French and German communities retained similar views that anthropology was an international science and that politically defined nationality was separate from scientifically discerned race. Yet they nevertheless regarded their work as strongly affected by processes of national consolidation and employed the language of scientific universalism to accuse their rivals of misusing science for political purposes. (shrink)