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Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 11–16

Language

  • English

Print Length

6 pages

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

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
Part I shows how diagrams were an integral part of racial anthropology from the start. A wide range of diagrammatic imagery was introduced to produce human ‘races’ as physical entities in the first place, such as geometric renderings of skull outlines, in which the lines for comparative measurement might be shown, skull superimpositions, or tables presenting craniometric means for different ‘races’. Diagrams seem to have suggested themselves as tools for a science that aimed at categorizing and classifying human groups, because, following Charles Sanders Peirce, diagrams represent relations and proportions that characterize a phenomenon. However, diagrams are also constructive – they may bring relations newly into being – and they may be informed by and inform ideological conceptions. The diagrammatic approach, in its portrayal and perception of bodies, particularly skulls, in terms of proportions and relations laid the foundation for the new field of physical anthropology – a diagrammatic approach that was developed into a diagrammatics of ‘race’ through the introduction of instruments and measurements.

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.