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Copyright

Marianne Sommer

Published On

2024-07-30

Page Range

pp. 283–294

Language

  • English

Print Length

12 pages

Postscript

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
The long history of relating diagrams revealed in the book does not crystallize into a linear development, such as from chain to tree to net. There were different kinds in competition at all times and compounds of elements from various types. Net structures were early diagrams to capture natural orders, trees may still transport the meaning of a progressive and serial arrangement or evolution, while chains in natural history multiplied to form ‘trees’, nets, or other three-dimensional structures. Trees and maps were often combined, and tree-like shapes incorporated network aspects. Anthropological diagrams might have been inspired by religious and secular genealogies and maps, breeding pedigrees, even arbores consanguinitates, and by forms used in natural history more generally as well as in other sciences like linguistics and embryology. Although particular diagrams are strongly associated with specific conceptions, and even while they are always part of political practices, there was no universal alignment of, for instance, a tree diagram with, for example, a belief in the existence of clearly demarcated ‘races’. At the same time, the diagrams that relate humans in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology have been connected to programs to collect human substances such as bones and blood. In the postscript I look at current issues and controversies surrounding such collections and once again think about the nature of relating diagrams. I conclude by examining some intriguing artworks that shed further light on these themes.

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.