Racia and anthropometric cartography produced and reinforced biological, intellectual, and moral hierarchies and was situated within wider scientific racial discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The practice of mapping “race” based on the widespread collection of anthropometric measurements occupied both European and New World anthropologists and geographers. My discussion centers on the work of American economist and anthropogeographer, W. Z. Ripley, who in 1899 published a widely acclaimed text on The Races of Europe. This work is contextualized and informed both by Victorian obsessions with categorizing racial hierarchies and by specifically American racial discourses that included concerns over increasing immigration from southern and eastern Europe and the threat immigration posed to the Anglo‐Saxon ruling elite. Using the conceptual framework developed by J. B. Harley and other recent contributions to critical cartography, this article focuses on Ripley's use of cartographic images to support his tripartite racial scheme for Europe, and explores his projection of a “moral geography” onto European and, in turn, American landscapes and populations. Central to this analysis are the links between anthropogeography, environmentalism, heredity, and American immigration, all key elements in Ripley's racial science.
This article explores the ways in which cartography served as a tool to reinforce racial divisions in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century race science. Racial and anthropometric mapping was an endeavour in which both European and new world anthropologists and geographers were involved. The focus here is on the work of Thomas Griffith Taylor -regarded as one of the founders of modern geography in Australia -who deployed a number of cartographic techniques to reinforce his racial theorisations. This article explores Taylor's 'zones and strata' portrayal of racial evolution, and other geologicalstyle maps of racial difference. These representations are investigated from two standpoints. Firstly, Taylor's theories are situated within the wider context of the Victorian tradition of classifying race, a tradition where physical race type was often correlated with moral and intellectual traits, and which was supported by the acceptance of environmental determinism within geographical circles. Secondly, his maps are considered from the perspective that, as J.B. Harley has argued, maps are social texts that contain power and, as such, can be deconstructed. Taylor's cartographic representations resulted from the manipulation of the internal elements of the map text, such as shading and projection, and were supported by the widely held belief that human racial groups could be delineated through physical anthropometry.
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