Paper short abstract:

The paper presents the details of the research conducted by A.C. Haddon and W.H. Rivers during an expedition to the Torres Strait. The author will focus on describing the impact of the expedition on the historical models of relations between categories of race and nation present in British science.

Paper long abstract:

The paper presents the details of the research conducted by A.C. Haddon and W.H. Rivers during an expedition to Torres Strait. Its aim is to answer the question of how some specific concepts of nature of human bodies and procedures of demarcation of the research area helped to crystallize conclusions indicating the cultural, rather than biological, sources of diversity of the studied societies. Paradoxically, these conclusions were possible to reach to due to the application of natural science methods. In the paper, the author will focus on describing the impact of the expedition on the historical models of relations between categories of race and nation. Therefore, an important reference point for his analysis will be Haddon's earlier anthropometric projects and later papers. This choice will allow to present the process of discrediting thinking about the nation in a racial key. The author intends to show that the popularization of the "island" model of social structure combined with explicit conclusions that culture is not a function of race and race is not a function of geography, has strengthened the thesis about the cultural character of the nation. At the same time, as Keith Hart points out, it did not disassemble the existing mental order, but rather allowed for partial reconfiguration of the dominant worldview. The removal of racial terms did not mean the simultaneous elimination of the idea of human hierarchies, and the vision of a world made up of separate societies was compatible with the shape of the world seen through the prism of nation states.