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Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 197–210

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

15. Missing Links to the Eugenic Pedigrees

  • 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. 197–210)
The fact that some of the scientists treated in Part III were active eugenicists points to another source of inspiration for the genealogical tree in anthropology. From 1900 to the 1930s, eugenics and its core research and propaganda tool, the pedigree, peaked. Pedigrees were used to chart the supposedly hereditary transfer of talents, ‘defects’, diseases, and complex social behaviors. Scientists also constructed pedigrees of ‘racially mixed’ families. In contrast to the racist phylogenies, they established close relationships between living populations, but these relations were often seen as creating imbalances in body and mind. Pedigrees of ‘racial crossing’ supposedly protocolled the breakdown of what was perceived as the natural order of ‘racial distinctions’.

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.