Introduction

This is the first book on the role of diagrams in the history of anthropology. It thus presents a new look at the history of this field, at the history of ‘race’, and signifies an important contribution to the diagrammatic turn in the humanities and social sciences. Diagrams are especially pertinent to anthropology – a field concerned with defining human groups and establishing the history and kinship of these groups – because diagrams are inherently about relations. From the rise of physical anthropology in the last decades of the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny family relations between humans. They have been tools in the debates between monogenists and polygenists. Especially in the shape of ‘trees’, diagrams have played an important role in arguments for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, but they have also been a means to carry over polygenist elements into evolutionary paradigms. However, with the ‘revolutions’ ushered in by the enhanced possibilities of DNA and especially ancient DNA analyses, the critique of the human family tree that goes back at least to Charles Darwin has taken on new force: does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Is the human genome a mosaic of different ancestries, not only of different ‘races’ but even of what are generally considered different species like the Neanderthals? This is a book about the epistemic and political role of diagrams in the history of physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology with their ties to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies, but also to liberal and humanist concerns.