Experimental morphology

Davenport, Charles Benedict

doi:10.5962/bhl.title.32860

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Charles Davenport, in his study of mixed-race people in Jamaica, came to the conclusion that such people were biologically abnormal, and were more likely to be racially deficient than people who were wholly White or Black. (Kevles 1995:75;Davenport 1929). Davenport was a leader in the American eugenics movement and as such sought to limit reproduction to those he saw as good stock (generally, White Protestant members of the middle class) and limit reproduction of the bad (imbicile, epileptic, insane, criminalistic, alcoholic, and sexually immoral).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Caroline Bond Day (1889–1948): A Black Woman Outsider Within Physical Anthropology

Curwood

2012

Transforming Anthropology

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This article examines the significance of Caroline Bond Day's vindicationist anthropological work on mixed‐race families early in the 20th century. Day used the techniques of physical anthropology to demonstrate that mixed‐race African Americans were in no way inherently deformed or inferior. Using Day's published work and unpublished correspondence, I show that her study was noteworthy for two reasons. First, unlike most other anthropologists of her time, but presaging later scholars, she studied her own family and social world, a perspective that both gave her unique data unavailable to others and removed barriers between herself and her subjects. Second, as a mixed‐race African American woman, she found herself not only fighting preconceptions about the racial inferiority of African Americans but also serving as a liaison between her research subjects and mainstream, White‐dominated physical anthropology. This article argues that Day's importance as a scholar lies not only in her argument against racial inferiority but also in the outsider‐within status that allowed her to make her case within academic anthropology in the early 20th century.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%