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This is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the ’human family tree’ was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever―does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Are human individual genomes mosaics made up of different ancestries? Sommer examines the epistemic and political role of these visual representations in the history of ‘race’ as an anthropological category. How do such diagrams relate to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies but also to liberal and humanist concerns? The Diagrammatics of 'Race' concentrates on Western projects from the late 1700s into the present to diagrammatically define humanity, subdividing and ordering it, including the concomitant endeavors to acquire representative samples―bones, blood, or DNA―from all over the world. Contributing to the ‘diagrammatic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, it reveals connections between diagrams in anthropology and other visual traditions, including in religion, linguistics, biology, genealogy, breeding, and eugenics.
This is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the ’human family tree’ was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever―does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Are human individual genomes mosaics made up of different ancestries? Sommer examines the epistemic and political role of these visual representations in the history of ‘race’ as an anthropological category. How do such diagrams relate to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies but also to liberal and humanist concerns? The Diagrammatics of 'Race' concentrates on Western projects from the late 1700s into the present to diagrammatically define humanity, subdividing and ordering it, including the concomitant endeavors to acquire representative samples―bones, blood, or DNA―from all over the world. Contributing to the ‘diagrammatic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, it reveals connections between diagrams in anthropology and other visual traditions, including in religion, linguistics, biology, genealogy, breeding, and eugenics.
This is the first book on the role of diagrams in the history of anthropology. It thus presents a new look at the history of this field, at the history of ‘race’, and signifies an important contribution to the diagrammatic turn in the humanities and social sciences. Diagrams are especially pertinent to anthropology – a field concerned with defining human groups and establishing the history and kinship of these groups – because diagrams are inherently about relations. From the rise of physical anthropology in the last decades of the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny family relations between humans. They have been tools in the debates between monogenists and polygenists. Especially in the shape of ‘trees’, diagrams have played an important role in arguments for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, but they have also been a means to carry over polygenist elements into evolutionary paradigms. However, with the ‘revolutions’ ushered in by the enhanced possibilities of DNA and especially ancient DNA analyses, the critique of the human family tree that goes back at least to Charles Darwin has taken on new force: does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Is the human genome a mosaic of different ancestries, not only of different ‘races’ but even of what are generally considered different species like the Neanderthals? This is a book about the epistemic and political role of diagrams in the history of physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology with their ties to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies, but also to liberal and humanist concerns.
Part I shows how diagrams were an integral part of racial anthropology from the start. A wide range of diagrammatic imagery was introduced to produce human ‘races’ as physical entities in the first place, such as geometric renderings of skull outlines, in which the lines for comparative measurement might be shown, skull superimpositions, or tables presenting craniometric means for different ‘races’. Diagrams seem to have suggested themselves as tools for a science that aimed at categorizing and classifying human groups, because, following Charles Sanders Peirce, diagrams represent relations and proportions that characterize a phenomenon. However, diagrams are also constructive – they may bring relations newly into being – and they may be informed by and inform ideological conceptions. The diagrammatic approach, in its portrayal and perception of bodies, particularly skulls, in terms of proportions and relations laid the foundation for the new field of physical anthropology – a diagrammatic approach that was developed into a diagrammatics of ‘race’ through the introduction of instruments and measurements.
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