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Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 73–78

Language

  • English

Print Length

6 pages

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

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
At the time Charles Darwin wrote The Descent of Man (1871), the polygenist movement was far from over. Indeed, the book makes a strong argument against it. While suspicious of Samuel George Morton’s physical anthropology, Darwin was intrigued by a kind of diagram that would become dominant in the presentation of evolutionary understandings of human history and diversity: the tree structure. The use of trees to also depict intra-human relations predated evolutionary interpretations. In Part II, the first such diagram that I have found is used to discuss links to religious imagery like the mappa mundi, the tree of life, and the tree of Jesse, as well as to the hierarchical scale of nature and other diagrammatic techniques that were employed in natural history. Drawing on such techniques, Darwin widely experimented with tree-like shapes to capture his new, evolutionary approach. However, he did not thus visually subdivide humans. It was his ‘German ally’, Ernst Haeckel, who was prone to excessive and racist phylogenic treeing. Darwin’s skepticism towards this practice points to the fact that the use of the family tree in anthropology does not follow naturally from its application in either diverse cultural realms or in biology. Rather, this transfer requires careful investigation with regard to its epistemic and political consequences.

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.