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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 addresses fieldwork-based ethnographic research undertaken parallel to anthropological studies of race during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Two cases from the extensive ethnographic archive will be analyzed.
Paper long abstract:
Scientific studies of race became important during the nineteenth century. Yet ethnography as the description of peoples and nations (ethnographia) had been introduced during expeditionary fieldwork in Northern Asia during the eighteenth century. Recent research demonstrates that in the fifty years before Malinowski’s magnum opus 220 ethnographers produced 365 ethnographic accounts worldwide. Our edited volume, Ethnographers Before Malinowski, presents some of this neglected work. We will focus on two such cases from Germany and Portugal. Adolf Bastian, the founder of the Berlin Ethnological Museum and “father of modern German ethnology,” published 80 books, five of which are ethnographic accounts of his work in Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Two of his closest associates, Franz Boas and Karl von den Steinen, conducted ethnographic fieldwork and collected artifacts in Canada and Brazil respectively. All three were natural scientists, who were aware of physical anthropology but preferred to carry out ethnographic fieldwork and focus on material and spiritual culture. They were part of a relativist and anti-racist movement spreading out from Berlin. Henrique de Carvalho was a Portuguese explorer, who joined an exiled Lunda prince during a journey to return to the Lunda empire’s capital in Central Africa and published an extensive account, Etnografia e história tradicional, in 1890. Carvalho considered but then rejected physical anthropology (by refusing to collect bones and by criticizing the data obtained from skulls) in order to focus on ethnography. These cases show that ethnographic research was often preferred over physical anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the spaces of coloniality and the racialization of the bodies of Pueblos Originarios in the late 19th century Argentina. For this purpose, the research of the German anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (1872-1938) on a Qom group (Formosa, Argentina) will be analyzed.
Paper long abstract:
In 1899, the Uruguayan actor José Podestá (1858-1937) recruited a group of Qom (Formosa, Argentina) for the theatrical adaptation of the narrative poem El Gaucho Martin Fierro, which was to be presented in Spain. In order to cover the expenses of the travel Podestá decided to exhibit the Qom at the Exposition Universelle de Paris (1900). This required the registration of the Qom in an official registry that granted them the legal status of Argentine citizens. This situation generated vehement condemnation from the bourgeois sectors of Argentine society.
Pressured by public opinion and the journalistic repercussions of the case, the Minister of Justice ordered the detention of the Qom and their temporary accommodation in a space proper of the colonial order: an asylum of the Catholic Church. This situation was used by the German anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche (1872-1938), chief of the Anthropology Section of the Museum of La Plata (Argentina), to carry out anthropometric studies and photographs.
From this case, I first analyze the use of spaces of coloniality as key material/abstract sites for the development of anthropological practices. I then inquire into the articulation of material technologies, epistemic elements and discursive regimes of "otherness" in the racialization of indigenous bodies. From this I account for the necessity and differential use of racialized bodies in the dramatic arts, the legal doctrine and anthropological practices.
Paper short abstract:
This work analyses the relations between anthropology, art, and racism through the images of the Naples Colonial Exhibition in 1940. It was a moment of constitution and dissemination of racism, revealing the concept materialization of race and the action of anthropology in this historical process.
Paper long abstract:
Constructions about the other take part of the history of anthropology since its beginning and were heavily present on universal and colonial exhibitions, which was an occidental exhibition tradition on the XIX and XX centuries. Marked by the empires that defined themselves through these constructions, these exhibitions constitute a moment where the colonial object's construction coincides with the colonizer subject's construction. The effort of this work is to describe and analyze a hierarchized and exoticizing otherness production that uses artistic and architectonic European traditions to materialize the concept of race, to justify and legitimate the domination and violence on lands and people under colonial rule.
Addressing the Naples Colonial Exhibition of 1940, I explored this exhibition tradition in a precise historical moment of Italy history, that allows comprehending the Italian colonialism, its survivals with the images, and relations with contemporary racism. This exhibition was only possible because of the extensive network of anthropologists, researchers, and professionals with diverse backgrounds that contributed to the production of knowledge about the African populations in the Italian colonies. This network acted in relation to fascism, where together they produced a racist theoretical basis that justified the Italian colonial rule and attested to your supposed superiority. In this way, the Naples Colonial Exhibition reveals the imbrication between different fields of knowledge that served to colonialism as a way to legitimate violence and colonial rule. Anthropology has an important role in this process, contributing to the production of a hierarchized otherness fixed in time.
Paper short abstract:
This proposal intends to analyse how the idea of race was structural for the Portuguese colonial system and how anthropology and some of its practitioners participated in this process in the first half of the 20th century. The sources of analysis are documents, including images, and interviews.
Paper long abstract:
The intention of this proposal is to provide an analysis of how the idea of race was structural and structuring for the Portuguese colonial system and how anthropology and some of its practitioners participated in this process. Over several centuries, it is possible to find differences based on skin colour, as in Brazil, but the paradigm of differentiation according to which skin colour is evoked in discourse, knowledge (scientific/ non-scientific), legislation and propaganda emerges most evidently in the first half of the 20th century. This logic was applied to the overseas populations of the so-called Portuguese colonial empire, with territories in Asia and Africa. Colour, based on different chromatic scales, created in various international contexts, was considered an objective criterion of identification, but it often referred to the supposedly scientific criterion of race. In addition to intending to identify and differentiate individuals, the idea of race also intended to rank them on a scale of civilization, in terms of physical aptitudes and moral qualities. For that reason, “race” was considered a useful criterion for organizing, exploiting and governing colonies. This presentation will also explore the possibilities to include hues when the criterion of colour was not easily identifiable or was subjective. The sources of analysis are documents, including images, and interviews. Finally, implications for contemporaneous topics such as the need to review how colonial history has been told in books and museums along with the urgency of promoting anti-racist education, reducing discrimination and promoting more inclusive societies, will be discussed.
Paper short abstract:
Race and Carcerality in the Post-colonial Colony
Paper long abstract:
Does Puerto Rico’s prison system harbor any of the same kinds of structural racism as the United States mainland? In this paper, I argue that the question is misplaced. The predicament of Puerto Rican carcerality arises from the island’s place in a world order dominated by new sorts of empire; an imperial order that invisibilizes race, impoverishes Blackness, and penalizes poverty. But there is another side to all this. Despite race’s invisibility in Puerto Rico, the only ever national study to measure racial disparities in Puerto Rican prisons found that Puerto Ricans who identify as Black are over-represented in correctional facilities. In probing the paradox of persistent racial disparities despite race’s invisibility, I argue that Puerto Rican carcerality foreshadows a racialized prison boom in the Latin American post-colonies that is now well in the making.