a transnational look at the scientific racialization of human diversity

by Thiago Pinto Barbosa

“Race” has travelled the world along with many anthropologists. Racial knowledge—as the set of thinking that apprehends human diversity through essentializing relatively fixed categorizations of people, and with a lot of explanatory weight on biology and heredity—has circulated to all corners of the world, on different routes, and through different connections. Especially in the 19^th and 20^th century tradition of German Anthropologie, a school of anthropology that focused on physical and biological approaches, scientists resorted to racial frameworks to explain and categorize human variation. Working with racial theories and typologies, these anthropologists measured and classified human bodies and remains of human bodies. As much as racial frameworks always sparked debate in science, for many racial anthropologists in Germany and elsewhere at that time “race” held the power to explain all things that they considered to be inheritable—from body shapes and colors to patterns of behavior, culture, and mental abilities. 

One of the centers of research in racial anthropology was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A), opened in Berlin in 1927 and closed at the end of World War II. The KWI-A was founded by Eugen Fischer, a German scientist who had travelled to Namibia to make a career out of applying Mendelian genetics to the research of “racial mixing” (what he also called “bastardization”), a topic that triggered a big debate in the German parliament in response to the anxiously reported “Mischehen” (“mixed marriages”) in the country’s settler colonies (El-Tayed 2001; see also Teicher 2020). The KWI-A was a central node in the production of knowledge whose practical application would culminate in the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany. On many different levels, KWI-A scientists were entangled with Nazi eugenicist policies, often in direct support of political measures with the goal of Rassenhygiene or racial cleansing (see Barbosa et al. 2018).

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Excerpt from Boas Blogs: Undoing Race and Racism, University of Bremen.