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- Convenors:
-
Diego Ballestero
(Universität Bonn)
Erik Petschelies (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)
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- Discussant:
-
Adam Kuper
(London School of Economics)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 02/025
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel address trajectories of the concept of race, its role in the processes of coloniality, its use to legitimize power relations/oppression and the importance of its historicization and deconstruction in the current processes of decolonization of anthropological practices
Long Abstract:
The concept of race became an issue for the sciences of man in the late 18th century. The works of naturalists such as the French Geoges Buffon (1707-1788) and the German Johann Blumenbach (1752-1840) promoted this concept in order to conceptualize differences as stable and transmissible elements from generation to generation. This led to a field of theorization that by the 19th century, and especially from the interpretations of Darwin's theories, turned the concept of race into an epistemological/ontological a priori from which to organize, interpret and describe all differences -social, economic, cultural, class or sex- within a framework of biological determinism.
Although the concept of race was used in various contexts and forms, it was in nineteenth-century anthropology, and in its intertwined relationship with European colonial enterprises, that the concept became a taxonomic device that established a hierarchical organization of human diversity and the Western individual defined himself on the basis of comparison and contrast.
Taking this aspect into account, the contributions of this panel address, but are not limited to: the trajectories, singularities, continuities and divergences of the concept of race in the history of anthropology, its use in the legitimization of power relations/oppression of the colonial/modern world system and the construction of identity imaginaries, its role as an articulating axis of the processes of coloniality, its articulation with other forms of universal hierarchization and finally the importance of its historicization and deconstruction in the current processes of decolonization of anthropological practices, provenance research and restitution processes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to discuss how the epistemology of Darwinism and its interpretation by Ernst Haeckel, guided German natural scientists Hermann von Ihering and Fritz Müller to position themselves in the ongoing debate on human races and their mixtures in Brazil during the 19th Century.
Paper long abstract:
In addition to the splendor of the nature, during the 18th and 19th century foreign natural scientists were impressed by the Brazilian racial diversity. The so-called mixture of races aroused from the encounter of European migratory waves and the kidnapping of millions of African people enslaved with native indigenous peoples, and became the object of study of medicine, law, physical anthropology, and biology in the 19th century. The “miscegenation problem”, as it was called by scholars, was soon pointed out by the economic and political elites as a fundamental cause of Brazilian social backwardness. Naturalists working in different fields of study turned to understanding races and their mixtures in the country. Charles Darwin's (1809-82) theory of evolution of species, as well as the interpretations of Darwinism proposed by Ernst Haeckel (1934-1919) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), served as a conceptual apparatus for foreign scientists residing in in the country, such as the Germans Hermann von Ihering (1850-1930) and Fritz Müller (1822-97) and the Swiss Emil Goeldi (1859-1917), as well as some of his Brazilian peers, such as Miranda Azevedo (1851-1907), to focus on the biology of human races based on empirical observation of the Brazilian case. This paper aims to discuss há the epistemology of the natural sciences, especially Darwinism and its interpretation by Haeckel, guided Ihering and Müller to position themselves in the debate on human races and their mixtures in Brazil.
Paper short abstract:
Irawati Karve (1095-1970), an anthropologist trained in Germany and working in colonial and post-colonial India, adapted racial frameworks and influenced key nationalistic projects. I formulate a methodological and theoretical note on the historiography of race for decolonizing anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
With the goal of contributing to the panel with theoretical and methodological suggestions on the historiography of race in anthropology, my paper examines the racializing knowledge production of Indian anthropologist Irawati Karve (1905-1970). Through STS-informed lenses that shed light both on “race” in knowledge practices and its effects, I analyze Karve’s research trajectory, practices, articulations, and its political implications.
Trained at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity in Berlin, Karve adapted racial frameworks to anthropologically grasp human diversity in India and influenced key debates amidst the country’s decolonization and nation-building. While she racialized Muslims in India, her long work in the region of Maharashtra used anthropometric methods to frame Marathi-speaking castes as a racially distinctive population worthy of the demarcation of their own state. I argue that Karve’s adaptation of such German racial approach—rooted in German coloniality—contributed to the further racialization of difference categories in India as well as to the racialization of nationalistic projects.
I conclude by arguing that we can benefit from defocusing on encyclopedic approaches and from avoiding both heroization and villanization in biographic assessments of anthropology. If we want to put forward a history of race in anthropology that is oriented towards decolonization, I suggest that we examine the production of racial_ized/izing knowledge precisely by exploring the nuances, transnational-colonial entanglements, and tensions in the work of anthropologists in post-colonial spaces. I argue that this step can construct a history of race and coloniality that contributes to advance the decolonization of anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to discuss the implications of race, gender and miscegenation through the eyes of forgotten 1930's anthropologist, Dina Dreyfus Lévi-Strauss. Her journals dating from her Brazilian years can be read as a looking glass for the complex experiences of racialisation across the Atlantic.
Paper long abstract:
Dina Dreyfus Lévi-Strauss is one of the rare French woman anthropologists to have gone on field research in the Américas before World War Two. Born from a french jewish father and a catholic Italian mother, Dina had studied with Paul Rivet and Marcel Mauss at the Institut d'Ethnologie in Paris before going to Brazil accompanying her husband, the newly appointed professor of the University of São Paulo, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Once there, she conducted investigations on physical anthropology amongst urban as well as native populations and published a textbook on the matter.
Her fieldwork and intimate journals dating from the 1938 mission show, among many other things, her attention to the bodies around her as well as to race relations as a fundamental of Brazilian society. As an intimate document, it testifies of her experience as she is looked back by the Brazilians, native, black, white and mixed raced people that put into question her self image and identity. Her personal uses of racial (and nowadays racist) language, as well as her particular situation as white women scientist in the field with her husband, make for an interesting example of the complex interplays of gender and race in the history of the discipline.
Through the study of the writings of Dina Dreyfus Lévi-Strauss I wish to interrogate the implicit notions of whiteness, (im)purity and virility in the context of 1930’s french anthropology, a young science that proclaimed itself as “anti-racist” and that defended a more “human” and “rational” style of colonisation.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the trajectories, singularities, continuities and divergences of the concept of race in the history of anthropology in German, France, and Lithuania as the legitimization of power relations of the imperial world system and the construction of identity imaginaries.
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses the trajectories, singularities, continuities and divergences of the concept of race in the history of anthropology in German, France, and Lithuania. The concept of race became an issue for the sciences of man in Lithuania on the late 18th century. In 1785–1787 at Vilnius university Georg Forster (1754–1794) gave anthropology and ethnography courses together with the course of “historiae naturalis”. Forster wrote on concept of race. He discussed the issues of race with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in the letters for Johann Gottried Herder (1744–1803). Forster declared the poligenist evoliutionist approach to the race. The debate on race later was used by sensualists and positivists as a framework of biological determinism. The concept of race as singular and continues was differently understood and involved in anthropological study of Lithuanian writer Povilas Višinskis (1875–1906) and Latvian ethnographer Eduards Volters (1856–1941) who studied Lithuanians. My analysis will focus on Georg’s Forster’s, Eduards’ Volters’, and Povilas’ Višinskis’ use of discourses of race in the legitimization of power relations of the imperial world system and the construction of identity imaginaries.