Book cover placeholder

Copyright

Marianne Sommer

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-260-0
Hardback978-1-80511-261-7
PDF978-1-80511-262-4
HTML978-1-80511-265-5
EPUB978-1-80511-263-1

Language

  • English

THEMA

  • JBSL1
  • JBSL13
  • JHM
  • JHMC

BIC

  • J
  • JFSL1
  • JHM
  • JHMC

BISAC

  • SOC070000
  • SOC002010
  • SOC008000

Keywords

  • diagrams
  • anthropology
  • race and diversity
  • history of science
  • visual representation
  • family trees

    The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’

    Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020

    • Marianne Sommer (author)
    FORTHCOMING
    This is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the ’human family tree’ was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever―does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Are human individual genomes mosaics made up of different ancestries? Sommer examines the epistemic and political role of these visual representations in the history of ‘race’ as an anthropological category. How do such diagrams relate to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies but also to liberal and humanist concerns?

    The Diagrammatics of 'Race' concentrates on Western projects from the late 1700s into the present to diagrammatically define humanity, subdividing and ordering it, including the concomitant endeavors to acquire representative samples―bones, blood, or DNA―from all over the world. Contributing to the ‘diagrammatic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, it reveals connections between diagrams in anthropology and other visual traditions, including in religion, linguistics, biology, genealogy, breeding, and eugenics.

    Endorsements

    Sommer explores the history of visual portrayals of human population relationships and evolutionary trees from pre-Darwinian times up through the early 21st century.  This is an important and timely book that should be read by both professionals and the general public as it shows how these portrayals have been used both to justify racism and to debunk the very concept of human races.

    Prof Alan R. Templeton

    Washington University

    Table of Contents

    Acknowledgements

    About the Author

    Introduction


    Part I. Building a Diagrammatics of ‘Race’ in the Emerging Field of Anthropology

    1. Esthetics, Diagrammatics, and Metrics: The Beginnings of Physical Anthropology

    2. Samuel George Morton and His (Paper) Skulls

    3. Kinship Denied and Acknowledged

    4. Prichard’s Third Edition of Researches (1836–47) and Nott’s and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854)

    5. Codifying a Diagrammatics of ‘Race’


    Part II. Maps, Scales, and Trees as (Intertwined) Diagrams of Human Genealogy and Evolution

    6. The First Tree of the Human ‘Races’: Mappa Mundi, Chain of Being, and Tree of Life

    7. Map, Scale, and Tree in Natural History

    8. Map, Scale, and Tree in Darwin, Haeckel and Co.: The Genealogy of the Human Species

    9. Map, Scale, and Tree in Darwin, Haeckel and Co.: The Genealogy of the Human ‘Races’

    10. About Treeing…


    Part III. Radicalizing versus Deconstructing the Family Tree of the Human ‘Races’

    11. Denying Even the Tree-Structured Human Kinship

    12. Meandering Rivers and Synthetic Networks against Polygenism

    13. The Reaffirmation of the Polygenist ‘Tree’

    14. Cable or Tangled Skein?

    15. Missing Links to the Eugenic Pedigrees


    Part IV. The Tree, the Map, the Mosaic, and the Network in Genetic Anthropology

    16. The History, Geography, and Politics of Human Genes

    17. Genetic Trees, Admixture, and Mosaics

    18. Gene Flow and Ancient DNA: Trees with Connecting Branches

    19. The (Diagrammatic) Narratives of Genetic Revolutions

    20. Deconstructing the Tree Diagram to a Mess – or at least a Net


    Postscript

    References

    List of Illustrations

    Index


    Contributors

    Marianne Sommer

    (author)
    Chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at University of Lucerne

    Marianne Sommer holds the chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Prior to that, she has held postdoctoral positions and professorships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Pennsylvania State University, the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, and has been a guest at many institutions, including Stanford University. For her research in the history of earth, life, and human sciences, encompassing processes of narration, visualization, and exhibition, she has received the Swiss National Latsis Prize. Her monograph History Within (published with The University of Chicago Press in 2016) engages with the science, politics, and culture related to reconstructions of human evolutionary histories; it traces the generation and circulation of such knowledge from the late nineteenth century to the present, including through venues like the museum, the zoo, literature, or the web. Among her monographs are also Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland (published with Harvard University Press in 2007) and Evolutionäre Anthropologie (published with Junius in 2015). Bones and Ochre tells the scientific and cultural history of paleoanthropology and to a lesser degree archeology through the ‘biography’ of the most likely first fossil human skeleton discovered in 1823. Evolutionäre Anthropologie is an introduction to the history of evolutionary anthropology for scholars, students, and the interested public.