National Races

Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840–1945

Richard McMahon

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781496205827
• eBook ISBN: 9781496215826
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Social Sciences

National Races explores how politics interacted with transnational science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This interaction produced powerful, racialized national identity discourses whose influence continues to resonate in today's culture and politics. Ethnologists, anthropologists, and raciologists compared modern physical types with ancient skeletal finds to unearth the deep prehistoric past and true nature of nations. These scientists understood certain physical types to be what Richard McMahon calls "national races, " or the ageless biological essences of nations. Contributors to this volume address a central tension in anthropological race classification. On one hand, classifiers were nationalists who explicitly or implicitly used race narratives to promote political agendas. Their accounts of prehistoric geopolitics treated "national races" as the proxies of nations in order to legitimize present-day geopolitical positions. On the other hand, the transnational community of race scholars resisted the centrifugal forces of nationalism. Their interdisciplinary project was a vital episode in the development of the social sciences, using biological race classification to explain the history, geography, relationships, and psychologies of nations. National Races goes to the heart of tensions between nationalism and transnationalism, politics and science, by examining transnational science from the perspective of its peripheries. Contributors to the book supplement the traditional focus of historians on France, Britain, and Germany, with myriad case studies and examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial and national identities in countries such as Russia, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia, and among Jewish anthropologists.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Introduction
• 1. Transnational Network, Transnational Narratives
• 2. The Destiny of Races “Not Yet Called to Civilization”
• 3. A Matter of Place, Space, and People
• 4. Yet Another Greek Tragedy?
• 5. Jews between Volk and Rasse
• 6. Classifying Hybridity in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Russian Imperial Anthropology
• 7. Physical Anthropology in Colonial Korea
• 8. Racial Anthropology on the Eastern Front, 1912 to the mid-1920s
• 9. Racial Politics as a Multiethnic Pavilion
• Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index
• About Richard McMahon
• Series List