July 2007 Newsletter, Vol. 36, No.3
Guggenheim 2007
Warwick Anderson, Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health, Professor of the History of Science, and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As part of his fellowship, Anderson studies race science in the 20th century
I plan to examine the character and scope of a transnational network of research on race mixing, or miscegenation, in the twentieth century. This project reveals a global scientific debate on racial segregation, assimilation, and absorption, led by U.S.-based biologists, physical anthropologists, and sociologists. Between 1910 and 1940, scientists conducted more than 20 major scientific investigations of the effects of miscegenation in the Pacific, North America, Southeast Asia, South Africa and the Maghreb.
The project concentrates largely on the extensive and influential series of studies of race mixing organized through the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, one of the major pre-World War II sites for the training of physical anthropologists. But it moves beyond these Harvard anthropologists to place their work in relation to other frontier studies of human biology in the Pacific and elsewhere, tracing an emerging “miscegenation map” of the new world. These Harvard anthropologists were probably the major group studying race mixing, yet so far they have largely escaped historical scrutiny.
Instead, historians of race science focus on Davenport and Steggerda’s 1929 study of race mixing in Jamaica. But even when it was published its vehemence in condemning race mixing was roundly condemned by other investigators of miscegenation. If you look at the broad picture, other researchers during this period were ambivalent or even positive about the effects of race mixing.
The extraordinary thing is that the great mass of scientific work on miscegenation, including these widespread Harvard studies, has been ignored – it’s a real gap in the study of the science of race. It seems that historians of biology have focused on a few unrepresentative biologists investigating race crossing, and missed the dozens of physical anthropologists who studied the same phenomenon. Since historians of anthropology generally concentrate on social and cultural anthropology, they, too, have missed this group.
The Harvard anthropological program before World War II was probably the leading player in training physical anthropologists in the U.S. Virtually all the graduate students were sent off around the world to study race mixing. Most of them came back skeptical about racial classification altogether. The racial classifications that they had learned didn’t work in the field; their data didn’t fit the old racial schema. After the war many of them – by then often calling themselves biological anthropologists – fought against racial classification in the American Anthropological Association and at UNESCO.
This is another way of talking about the decline of race in science in the 20th century. It points to another cause of that decline and it alters the timing of that decline, for these physical anthropologists were turning against racial classification even in the 1920s. It is a story of how field experiences can sometimes change scientists’ sensibilities and sympathies.
