This article focuses on interwar Austrian physical anthropology, tracing its scientific aspirations, gradual institutionalization, and wider popularization during the interwar period. Largely concentrated in Vienna, Austrian physical anthropologists debated racial questions extensively and conducted racial evaluations based on detailed morphological studies and in-depth analysis of facial "racial" traits. This method was considered ideal for genealogical studies. A host of new societies and working groups collaborated to develop new methodologies and create influential links to universities and public institutions. Within this context, a certificate or "proof of paternity" was developed to resolve disputed court cases. Not only did issuing these certificates become a key source of work and income for anthropologists and their organizations, they also marked the discipline's crucial shift from a theoretical to an applied science.
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Race and physical anthropology in interwar Austria
Margit Berner
Physical anthropology and ethnogenesis in Bulgaria, 1878-1944
Christian Promitzer
This article engages with the commonly encountered claim that Bulgarian physical anthropology "features a long, fruitful, and honorable existence," by discussing Bulgarian anthropology's contribution to the controversial issue of ethnogenesis. With the Russian influence waning from the mid-1880s on, the pioneers of Bulgarian anthropology were largely influenced by the German example. But the first generation of Bulgarian anthropologists' tradition of "racial liberalism" (Benoit Massin) was lost after World War I. On the eve of World War II a debate on racism raged among Bulgarian intellectuals. By the time blood group analysis had joined anthropometrics, adherents of a closer collaboration with the Third Reich used it to argue for the Bulgarian nation's non-Slavic origins. In 1938 they even disrupted a lecture given by the biologist Metodiy Popov when he wanted to stress the Bulgarians' ethnic relationship with the other Slavic nations, and to repudiate the idea of a hierarchy of races. During the Socialist period a new generation of anthropologists went on to investigate the Bulgarian ethnogenesis using the term "race", although this clearly contravened the 1950 UNESCO statement on the race question.
Introduction
Whither race? Physical anthropology in post-1945 Central and Southeastern Europe
Marius Turda
Although research on the history of physical anthropology in Central and Southeastern Europe has increased significantly since the 1990s the impact race had on the discipline's conceptual maturity has yet to be fully addressed. Once physical anthropology is recognized as having preserved inter-war racial tropes within scientific discourses about national communities, new insights on how nationalism developed during the 1970s and 1980s will emerge, both in countries belonging to the communist East—Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, and in those belonging to the West—Austria and Greece. By looking at the relationship between race and physical anthropology in these countries after 1945 it becomes clear what enabled the recurrent themes of ethnic primordiality, racial continuity, and de-nationalizing of ethnic minorities not only to flourish during the 1980s but also to re-emerge overtly during political changes characterizing the last two decades.
Entangled traditions of race
Physical anthropology in Hungary and Romania, 1900–1940
Marius Turda
This article discusses the relationship between race and physical anthropology in Hungary and Romania between 1900 and 1940. It begins by looking at institutional developments in both countries and how these influenced the most important Hungarian and Romanian anthropologists' professional and research agendas. Drawing from a wide range of primary sources, the article reveals the significant role the concept of race played in articulating anthropological and ethnic narratives of national belonging. It is necessary to understand the appeal of the idea of race in this context. With idealized images of national communities and racial hierarchies creeping back into Eastern European popular culture and politics, one needs to understand the latent and often unrecognized legacies of race in shaping not only scientific disciplines like anthropology, but also the emergence and entrancement of modern Hungarian and Romanian nationalism.
The Past as a Foreign Country
Bioarchaeological Perspectives on Pinker’s “Prehistoric Anarchy”
Linda Fibiger
Anthropologist 79, no. 2 (1977): 343–363. 22 Nicholas Márquez-Grant, Hannah Webster, Janamarie Truesdell, and Linda Fibiger, “Physical Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology in Europe: History, Current Trends and Challenges,” International Journal of
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 6–16 (11 total)
Book Reviews
Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, Gabriela Dudeková, Philip Mann, Kristen Ghodsee, Susan Zimmermann, Barbara Alpern Engel, Rhonda Semple, Amelia Licheva, Christian Promitzer, and Oksana Kis
Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland by Małgorzata Fidelis Barbara Klich-Kluczewska
The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice by Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová (eds.) Gabriela Dudeková
Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema, and the Visual Arts in State-Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary by Beata Hock Philip Mann
Staging Socialist Femininity: Gender Politics and Folklore Performance in Serbia by Ana Hofman Kristen Ghodsee
Kohle für Stalin und Hitler: Arbeiten und Leben im Donbass 1929 bis 1953 (Coal for Stalin and Hitler. Working and living in the Donets basin 1929 to 1953) by Tanja Penter Susan Zimmermann
Bytovoe nasilie v istorii rossiiskoi povsednevnosti (XI–XXI vv.) (Domestic violence in the history of Russian everyday life [XI–XXI vv.]) by Marianna G. Muravyeva and Natalia L. Pushkareva, (eds.) Barbara Alpern Engel
Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East, 1831–1908 by Barbara Reeves-Ellington Rhoda Semple
Zhenite v modernostta (Women in modernity) by Reneta Roshkeva and Nikolai Nenov (eds.) Amelia Licheva
Physical Anthropology, Race and Eugenics in Greece (1880s–1970s) by Sevasti Trubeta Christian Promitzer
Nezvychaini doli zvychainykh zhinok: Usna istoria XX stolittia (The extraordinary lives of ordinary women: Oral history of the twentieth century) by Iroida Wynnytsky (ed.) Oksana Kis
Introduction: World Fairs, Exhibitions and Anthropology
Revisiting Contexts of Post-colonialism
Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, Hande Birkalan-Gedik, Andrés Barrera-González, and Pegi Vail
Exhibition in 1931 and in the Porto Colonial Exhibition in 1934. As unique occasions, exhibitions paved the ground for the development of physical anthropology, for instance by the performance of anthropometric measurements, sometimes seeking to ascribe the
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2022
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 1–14 (14 total)
A New Turn in Russian Ethnography
Science and Cultural Politics at Moscow's First Ethnographic Exhibition of 1867
Mariam M. Kerimova and Maria V. Zolotukhina
a few – A.P. Bogdanov, I. D. Belyaev, I. K. Babst, N. A. Popov, S. M. Soloviev, M. P. Pogodin and others. Some of the funds raised were used to support the chair (department) of physical anthropology at Moscow University and its craniological
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 112–132 (21 total)
Response to Issue 31(2) on World's Fairs
Simplified Authenticity: Anthropological Displays at World's Fairs and Exhibitions
Marta Filipová
became a curator of physical anthropology at the US National Museum (today's Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History) and a great influence on the formation of the discipline of anthropology in Bohemia before 1918 and Czechoslovakia after 1918
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2023
- Article Type:
- Editorial
- Pages:
- v–xi
A Visitor's Guide to Shamans and Shamanism
The Kunstkamera's Russian and Asian Ethnographic Collections in the Late Imperial Era
Marisa Karyl Franz
, though removed in the 1880s, on anthropological (physical anthropology) ones as well. During the museum's golden age, the ethnographic collections expanded and numerous expeditions were funded by the museum to facilitate this growth. The museum maintained