LCCS Literatures & Cultures Seminar Series: Peter Cryle, Why and how 'race' become a category in the scientific study of humans? Physical anthropology in France during the 1860s and 1870s
Event Details
- Date:
- Friday, 31 October 2014 - Friday, 31 October 2014
- Time:
- 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
- Room:
- Room 209
- UQ Location:
- Gordon Greenwood Building (St Lucia)
- URL:
- http://www.slccs.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=208993&pid=148992
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Dr Carles Gutierrez-Sanfeliu
- Phone:
- 56884
- Email:
- c.gutierrezsanfeliu@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Languages and Cultures
Event Description
- Full Description:
- In the 1860s and 1870s, there was a great deal of scientific activity in and around the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris. The kind of physical anthropology that dominated the society had nothing to do with anthropos, with the study of human kind in general. Leading members of the society were in fact sceptical about whether it was possible to to give a proper account of qualities shared by all humans. Rather, they were preoccupied with the identification of limited series of human beings who could be said to belong to the same race. An important focus of their activity was craniometry, the measurement of skulls. Inscribed in skulls, they hypothesised, were “characters” that were passed on through heredity.
This development in anthropology can easily be read as a key moment in the historical development of scientific racism. It could be seen as paving the way for Auschwitz eighty years later. But this paper will resist that shortened historical perspective, despite its great moral weight. There is, I will argue, a particular challenge for intellectual and cultural historians in examining how people thought about race at the time and what they were trying to achieve by studying it. I will take the example of a heated discussion that took place in 1872, just after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. A paper was presented to the society characterising the Prussian “race” as brutal, but this paper drew a strongly critical response from the society’s intellectual leaders, who declared that it was utterly unscientific to speak about race as if it were a national quality. By looking at what they said, I hope to show how their conception of a science of race, for all its scientific limitations, was importantly different from racism as we understand and condemn it today.
Directions to UQ
- Google Map:
-
- Directions:
- St Lucia Campus | Gatton campus.
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