scholarly journals The alchemy of human variation: Race, ethnicity and Manoiloff's blood reaction

2007 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicollete Naidoo ◽  
Goran Štrkalj ◽  
Thomas Daly
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Positive Response ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Modern Equipment ◽  
Simple Chemical ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
History Of Sciences ◽  
Experimental History

The alchemy of human variation: Race, ethnicity and Manoiloff's blood reactionThis paper examines the research on race determination conducted by Russian biochemist E.O. Manoiloff in the 1920s. Manoiloff claimed to have discovered a method which detected racial identity of an individual by a simple chemical reaction performed on a subject's blood sample. The method was published in one of the leading anthropological journals and it was not questioned for some time. It is obvious today that Manoiloff's claims were nothing short of ridiculous. The present study, based on the experimental history of sciences, tries to elucidate Manoiloff's procedures and reasons for his ‘success’. His experiments were repeated using both original and modern equipment. It has been demonstrated that Manoiloff's procedures, although rigorous at first glance, were highly arbitrary and methodologically flawed. It would appear that the socio-political and scientific contexts of the early twentieth century which favoured belief in the existence of clearly distinguishable racial types played a crucial role in the initial positive response to Manoiloff's research.

scholarly journals The Bengali Pharaoh: Upper-Caste Aryanism, Pan-Egyptianism, and the Contested History of Biometric Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Bengal

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 446-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Projit Bihari Mukharji
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Genomic Research ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Colonial Science

AbstractExtant South Asian histories of race, and more specifically biometrics, focus almost exclusively upon the colonial era and especially the nineteenth century. Yet an increasing number of ethnographic accounts observe that Indian scientists have enthusiastically embraced the resurgent raciology engendered by genomic research into human variation. What is sorely lacking is a historical account of how raciology fared in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods, roughly the period between the decline of craniometry and the rise of genomics. It is this history that I explore in this article. I argue that anthropometry, far from being a purely colonial science, was adopted by Indian nationalists quite early on. Various distinctive shades of biometric nationalism publicly competed from the 1920s onward. To counter any sense that biometric nationalism was teleologically inevitable, I contrast it with a radical alternative called “craftology” that emerged on the margins of formal academia amongst scholars practicing what I call “vernacular anthropology.” Craftology and biometric nationalism continued to compete, contrast, and selectively entangle with each other until almost the end of the twentieth century.

Hitting two birds with one stone: An afterword on archeology and the history of science

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-391
Author(s):  
Mirjam Brusius
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Institutional Infrastructure ◽  
History Of

This afterword comments on the articles gathered together in this special section of History of Science (“Disassembling Archaeology, Reassembling the Modern World”). Criticizing the consistent lack of institutional infrastructure for histories of archaeology in the history of science, the piece argues that scholars should recognize the commonality of archaeology’s practices with those of the nineteenth and twentieth century field sciences that have received more historical attention. The piece also suggests avenues to help take this approach further, such as combining expertise from historians of the biological sciences and of antiquarianism and archaeology to look at the history of the understanding of human variation and race. Finally, the afterword suggests that scholars should reconsider the idea of archaeology’s reliance on institutionalised practices, thinking about the use and re-use of material culture in more diverse and pragmatic social contexts.

Ben Burns and the Boundaries of Black Print in Chicago, 1942–1954

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 703-724
Author(s):  
E. JAMES WEST
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Racial Identity ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
South Side ◽  
History Of ◽  
Magazine Articles ◽  
Chicago Defender

This article focusses on the career of Ben Burns, a white Jewish radical who came to play a central role in Chicago's black press during the mid-twentieth century. As an editor for periodicals such as theChicago Defender, Negro DigestandEbony, Burns helped to edit and develop some of the nation's most influential black publications. However, many of his readers remained oblivious to his racial identity – something which was both implicitly and explicitly obscured by his employers, and which was influenced by and manifested itself through the spatial politics of the workplace and the Chicago South Side. Drawing on a range of archival and biographical material, personal correspondence, and newspaper and magazine articles, this paper reconsiders Burns's literal movement through the terrain of Chicago's black press to assess his broader influence as a white editor in black journalism. Complicating depictions of Burns as a racial interloper, this article situates his contributions within a broader history of white participation in black print production. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the parameters of his role were heavily framed by the complex racial and spatial politics of the editorial room and Chicago's urban politics at mid-century.

What is an anthropology of gesture?

Gesture ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lempert
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Gesture Studies ◽  
History Of

Abstract For gesture research outside anthropology, the promise – and challenge – of anthropological method stems from one or more of its core commitments: its pursuit of human variation, both diachronic and synchronic; its insistence on naturalistic rather than experimental research design; and its integrative sensibility that situates human behavior in relation to an expansive sociocultural context. This essay reflects on this last sensibility. As we envision an anthropology of gesture and weigh its potential for gesture studies, we should pause and reflect on the fitful history of gesture in anthropology. As a parable for the present, I revisit a neglected anthropological voice from twentieth-century gesture research: Ray L. Birdwhistell, whose ambitious postwar science of kinesics teamed film-based microanalysis with American linguistic structuralism. At stake in Birdwhistell’s work was a problem that looms large here, that of how and at what cost a science of gesture can contextualize its object integratively.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Biographical Knowledge

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

“The History of Scottish Theology, Volume 3: The Long Twentieth Century” edited by David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-77
Author(s):  
Philip D. Foster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of

Review of David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliot, eds., The History of Scottish Theology, Volume 3: The Long Twentieth Century (Oxford: OUP, 2019), pp. xii+373, ISBN 978-0198759355. £95.00

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