Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 145–150

Language

  • English

Print Length

6 pages

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

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
Chapter of: The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020(pp. 145–150)
As shown in Part II, there in fact existed theories of human classification and evolution in the history of anthropology that corresponded to the notions transported by the human family tree, such as the independent evolution of human populations. Sometimes explicitly drawing on Ernst Haeckel’s phylogenies, some anthropologists published polygenist diagrams to convey their understanding of intra-human specific or even generic differences well into the twentieth century. In these visualization practices, the tree shape was increasingly radicalized through prolongation of the independent lines leading to the modern groups that were thereby constructed in hierarchical order. At the same time, while there have been critical voices that opposed this kind of thinking with diagrams at least since Charles Darwin, it is especially from the interwar period that the ‘racial trees’ came under critique as relying on a faulty understanding of genetics and evolution, and as racist – a critique that became louder in the aftermath of World War II. The debates once again related to larger politics, and also up until this time, the anthropological family tree can be connected to the pedigrees developed and used in eugenics research, most of all in studies of ‘racial mixing’.

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.