Mixed Race Studies

The analysis of these examples from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico reveals how crucial the nation is as a frame for understanding the way racialized concepts get reiterated and reworked in genomic science, in ways that make race both disappear and reappear. Public health, multiculturalism, and forensics are all political and policy domains that directly invoke the biopolitical nation and its people in terms of their well-being, their diversity and unity, and their biological relatedness in procreation, violence, and death. The governance of these domains is of central interest to the state. Genomics also intervenes in these domains, with the promise of better health for the nation’s people, representations of both diversity and unity, and techniques for connecting bodies in ways that, it is hoped, will lead to reconciliations and peace. The idea of race, in previous times, figured explicitly in the way all these domains were conceptualized in all three countries—los problemas de la raza, to recall the title of the 1920 Colombian book cited earlier on, concerned precisely health, progress, unity, diversity, and conflict in the nation. Race was of course not the only factor to be considered—violent conflict, for example, also followed cleavages of class, region, religion, or political faction—but it was an important way of thinking about difference and the problems it might cause within the nation. The demise of race as an explicit discourse for talking about these matters did not mean that racialized concepts disappeared. Geneticists and medics continued to be interested in the racial mixture of their national populations in relation to public health, cultural commentators continued to reflect on diversity in terms of black, indigenous, and mestizo cultural traits, and indeed forensic scientists continued to classify bodies in more or less explicitly racial terms. Genomics, characterized by its very detailed examination of the structure of DNA sequences, generally rejects a language of race, both biologically and, in Latin America, socially. Brazil, where color/race labels operate in some domains, is a partial exception, while also being the country where the most vocal rejection of race is to be found. Yet, as we have seen, racialized concepts continue to appear implicitly (and occasionally more explicitly) in genomic analysis and are frequently harnessed to the idea of the nation.

Peter Wade, Vivette García Deister, Michael Kent, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, and Adriana Díaz del Castillo Hernández, “Nation and the Absent Presence of Race in Latin American Genomics,” Current Anthropology, 55, no. 5 (October 2014): 506. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/677945

American Negroes were explicitly defined as hybrids of European, African, and in some cases Native American (then known as “Indian”) ancestry. As a result, among other things, skeletal and living Negro populations served as a historical record of social and sexual liaisons between blacks and whites in the United States. This particular biocultural interface was an integral part of framing studies that examined differences in skeletal morphology and phenotype between racial groups. At the same time, Negroes were also considered to be a biologically discrete racial group unto themselves. This “fact” justified the population being situated as an anatomical landmark of sorts for mapping and identifying distinct racial characters. This simultaneous construction of the American Negro as both a hybrid and racially distinct suggests that multiple definitions of race and understandings of racial difference were at work in constructing the American Negro as a research subject. This is not surprising when we consider that scholars involved in this work represented a variety of perspectives on human biological diversity. As such, this research can be considered a matter of “boundary work” in the midst of methodologies and subjects that cannot be easily or distinctly categorized (Lipphardt 2010). This also suggests that these studies must be considered within the larger context of bioanthropological interest in studying mixed-race populations to identify the source of biological change in humans. Scientists inside and outside of the United States engaged in research to determine whether or not this change occurred within populations by way of selection or solely by interbreeding with different groups.

Rachel J. Watkins, “Biohistorical Narratives of Racial Difference in the American Negro: Notes toward a Nuanced History of American Physical Anthropology,” Current Anthropology, Volume 53, Number S5, April 1, 2012. S197. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/662416.

Biohistorical Narratives of Racial Difference in the American Negro: Notes toward a Nuanced History of American Physical Anthropology

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5 (April 1, 2012) (Volume Supplement)
pages S196-S209
DOI: 10.1086/662416

Rachel J. Watkins, Associate Professor of Anthropology
American University, Washington, D.C.

This paper examines the scientific construction of racial differences through the lens of early twentieth-century bioanthropological studies of American Negro skeletal and living population samples. These studies, as well as the scientists who conducted them, are generally distinguished from one another based on their adherence to quantitative and/or qualitative measures of racial difference. However, these binary distinctions tend to obscure the rather complex processes of racial formation in which scientists and research subjects were engaged. Both racialist and nonracialist scholarship positioned American Negroes as products of white, African, and, sometimes, Indian admixture. As the singular label used in these studies connotes, “the American Negro” was also classified as a distinct racial type based on elements of skeletal and physical morphology. Studies reveal that multiple definitions and meanings of race were operating and being generated in the process of situating American Negroes in these seemingly opposed positions. Finally, I consider the implications of this discussion for developing critical histories of American physical anthropology and engaging contemporary public and academic discourse around race, health, and biological diversity.

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Nation and the Absent Presence of Race in Latin American Genomics

Current Anthropology
Volume 55, Number 5 (October 2014)
pages 497-522
DOI: 10.1086/677945

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Vivette García Deister, Associate Professor
Social Studies of Science Laboratory
National Autonomous University of Mexico

Michael Kent, Honorary Research Fellow in Social Anthropology
School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester

María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, Assistant Professor
Department of Design
University of the Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

Adriana Díaz del Castillo Hernández, Independent Researcher
Consultoría en Estudios Sociales Sobre Educación, Salud, Ciencia y Tecnología, Bogotá, Colombia

Recent work on genomics and race makes the argument that concepts and categories of race are subtly reproduced in the practice of genomic science, despite the explicit rejection of race as meaningful biological reality by many geneticists. Our argument in this paper is that racialized meanings in genomics, rather than standing alone, are very often wrapped up in ideas about nation. This seems to us a rather neglected aspect in the literature about genomics and race. More specifically, we characterize race as an absent presence in Latin America and argue that genomics in the region finds a particular expression of race through concepts of nation, because this vehicle suits the deep-rooted ambiguity of race in the region. To make this argument we use data from an ethnographic project with genetics labs in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.

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Race mixture or miscegenation excited considerable scholarly interest and public indignation in the continental United States during the early twentieth century. According to the 1910 census, the number of self-identifying “mulattoes” in the U.S. population had risen to two million, more than 20% of African Americans. This development prompted concern among some white social theorists. In 1918, Madison Grant (1918) predicted the passing of the great white race: “mongrelization” across the globe was leading to dilution and degeneration. A few years later, Lothrop Stoddard (1921) echoed Grant’s predictions. Through the 1920s and 1930s, marriage between African Americans and European Americans remained illegal in more than 40 states but not in the insular territories (Hollinger 2003; Kennedy 2003; Moran 2001; Pascoe 1996; Sollors 2000; Spickard 1989; Williamson 1980). In 1924, Virginia promulgated the “one-drop” rule to define more rigidly the boundaries of white identity. The following year, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander scandalized New York when he sued Alice Jones for passing as white and deceptively luring him into marriage. Black men accused of lustful behavior toward white women were still being lynched in the South. In 1935, the African American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois observed that fear of race mixing was “the crux of the so-called Negro problem in the United States” (DuBois 1980 [1935]:99). Nonetheless, in places such as Harlem, New York, a self-conscious and assertive “mulatto” culture emerged during this period (Huggins 1973; Watson 1995).

Warwick Anderson, “Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States,” Current Anthropology, Volume 53, Number S5 (April 2012): S95-S107. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/662330.

Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5 (April 2012)
DOI: 10.1086/662330
pages S95-S107

Warwick Anderson, Research Professor of History
University of Sydney

In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. physical anthropologists imagined Hawai‘i as a racial laboratory, a controllable site for the study of race mixing and the effects of migration on bodily form. Gradually a more dynamic and historical understanding of human populations came to substitute for older classificatory and typological approaches in the colonial laboratory, leading to the creation of the field of human biology and challenges to scientific racism. Elite U.S. institutions and philanthropic foundations competed for the authority to define Pacific bodies and mentalities during this period. The emergent scientific validation of liberal Hawaiian attitudes toward human difference and race amalgamation or formation exerted considerable influence on biological anthropology after World War II, but ultimately it would fail in Hawai‘i to resist the incoming tide of continental U.S. racial thought and practice.

In 1920, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the forceful president of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote to a young physical anthropologist on his staff telling him how to conduct research into pure Polynesians and mixed-race people in Hawai‘i. Osborn had recently returned to New York from the islands—the territory of the United States—having found their exotic beauty enthralling and their inhabitants amenable to racial study. Like many other visitors, Osborn took surfing lessons on Waikiki with Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimmer, whom he regarded as a “model chieftain type.” “Do not fail to make the acquaintance of Duke,” the keen eugenicist Osborn urged Louis R. Sullivan, “and secure his measurements, ascertaining if you can, without giving offence, whether he is full blooded.” In particular, Osborn wanted the diffident, frail anthropologist, a student of Franz Boas at Columbia University, to “obtain any data regarding swimming adaptations in the limbs and feet.” He hoped, too, that bathing and surfing in the refreshing climate would improve Sullivan’s consumptive tendencies. Additionally, Osborn demanded measurements of other types, including “fishermen,” “poi makers,” “tapa makers,” and “hula dancers.” He heard that the “Hawaiian and Chinese blend is an excellent one; in the schools, intelligent, upright, persistent.” Collecting “primitive” types was compelling because Osborn planned a Polynesian hall at the American Museum; the United States boasted a “historic connection” with Hawai‘i, and the evaluation of racially mixed peoples might offer insight into contemporary social problems on the mainland, including New York.

During the 1920s, physical anthropologists from the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard University treated Hawai‘i as a racial “laboratory,” a controlled site where they might assess an experiment in human biology (MacLeod and Rehbock 1994). They came to the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu to study the origins of Polynesians and the process of contemporary race formation in the islands, presumably the result of environmental adaptation of newcomers and hybridization between different groups. In this sense, anthropologists such as Sullivan and his successor Harry L. Shapiro pursued a Boasian program in physical anthropology, elaborating on their mentor’s earlier work on race mixing and the modification of the bodies of immigrants, and producing dynamic and historical accounts of human difference (Boas 1910; Herskovits 1953; Kroeber 1942). Even though conservative eugenicists such as Osborn and his friend Charles B. Davenport initially had promoted research in the islands, the Pacific soon became a Boasian laboratory—to their consternation—a workshop for investigators skeptical of racial typologies and fixities. Most of these rising anthropologists arrived in Hawai‘i already discontented with the complicated and contradictory typological enterprise, and experiences there propelled their drift toward racial recusancy. The vast sea of islands, with Hawai‘i in the middle, proved an exemplary site where physical anthropology could be refashioned and a new human biology might emerge…

…Race Crossing in America

Louis Sullivan, Osborn’s young emissary, was not the first mainland expert to evaluate racial diversity and mixture in Hawai‘i. After studying the decline of the northern “Negro,” the punctilious statistician Frederick L. Hoffman traveled to the islands to investigate the effects of Pacific “miscegenation.” Not surprisingly, his analysis of vital statistics revealed the supposedly baleful results of “Hawaiian mongrelization,” thereby confirming his prejudices (Hoffman 1916, 1917, 1923). Alfred M. Tozzer, the Harvard anthropologist, was rather more sympathetic. From 1916, he visited his wife’s (haole) family on Oahu each summer and measured the bodies of Chinese-Hawaiian and white-Hawaiian neighbors. After struggling with the statistics of race crossing, Tozzer, a close friend of Boas, handed over his data on 508 subjects to Leslie C. Dunn, a progressive young geneticist. While lamenting the unreliable “pedigrees,” Dunn could find no signs of “degeneracy” among the mixed offspring—by which he meant no obvious physical disharmony or mental deficiency. He noted that the first generation of European-Polynesian crosses showed native pigmentation and lacked hybrid vigor, but supposedly Hawaiian corpulence disappeared and finer European features emerged. Dunn complained of the difficulties calculating white hybrids: whites seemed too heterogeneous to fit one type or even to sort neatly into conventional Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean divisions (Dunn 1923). After further analysis, Dunn (1928:2) decided that Hawaiian-Chinese crosses generally reverted toward their Asian ancestry in what he called “this great experiment in race mixture.”

Race mixture or miscegenation excited considerable scholarly interest and public indignation in the continental United States during the early twentieth century. According to the 1910 census, the number of self-identifying “mulattoes” in the U.S. population had risen to two million, more than 20% of African Americans. This development prompted concern among some white social theorists. In 1918, Madison Grant (1918) predicted the passing of the great white race: “mongrelization” across the globe was leading to dilution and degeneration. A few years later, Lothrop Stoddard (1921) echoed Grant’s predictions. Through the 1920s and 1930s, marriage between African Americans and European Americans remained illegal in more than 40 states but not in the insular territories (Hollinger 2003; Kennedy 2003; Moran 2001; Pascoe 1996; Sollors 2000; Spickard 1989; Williamson 1980). In 1924, Virginia promulgated the “one-drop” rule to define more rigidly the boundaries of white identity. The following year, Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander scandalized New York when he sued Alice Jones for passing as white and deceptively luring him into marriage. Black men accused of lustful behavior toward white women were still being lynched in the South. In 1935, the African American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois observed that fear of race mixing was “the crux of the so-called Negro problem in the United States” (DuBois 1980 [1935]:99). Nonetheless, in places such as Harlem, New York, a self-conscious and assertive “mulatto” culture emerged during this period (Huggins 1973; Watson 1995).

American physical anthropologists and scientists tried to elucidate the biological principles of this controversial social issue. Even in the 1890s, Franz Boas, a liberal Jewish-German émigré inspired by the environmentalism of his mentor Rudolf Virchow, was scouring American Indian reservations and boarding schools looking for “half bloods” to measure. He noticed that rather than blending their ancestry, mixed children manifested features favoring one or the other parent, but he thought this segregation of heredity scarcely constituted “degeneration,” however defined. Indeed, mixing seemed to have a “favorable effect upon the race” (Boas 1902, 1940 [1894]; Stocking 1982). Miscegenation also intrigued less sympathetic physical anthropologists. “I am seeking information concerning the offspring of mulattoes,” Charles B. Davenport wrote in 1906 to Aleš Hrdlička at the Smithsonian Institution. “That is, I wish to learn if white skin color and black are produced as well as mulattoes. Are such pairs of mulattoes perfectly fertile and are their children vigorous?” The anatomist Hrdlička was stumped. He suspected three-quarters of the people of color in Washington, DC, were part white, but the “question of the mixed bloods of white and Negroes and of their progeny still awaits scientific investigation.” Over the following years, Hrdlička frequently urged the aging eugenicist to use the resources of the research station at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, to look into this question. But not until the late 1920s did Davenport enlist Morris Steggerda to measure and assess sociologically mixed-race people—and then in Jamaica. By this time their condemnation of disharmonious race crossing would appear exceptionally vehement and absurd. The scientists worried that Jamaican “hybrids,” inheriting the short arms of whites and the long legs of blacks, had trouble stooping and picking things off the ground; browns became “muddled and wuzzle-headed” (Davenport and Steggerda 1929:469)…

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The Birth of Physical Anthropology in Late Imperial Portugal

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5, April 2012
13 pages

Gonçalo Santos, Senior Research Fellow
Max-Planck-Institut für Ethnologische Forschung

In this article I analyze the emergence of the field of physical anthropology in the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that Portugal’s relatively peripheral position combined with a complex internal conjuncture of political instability and economic impotence gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. I describe the various national and international exchanges leading to the birth of this naturalist anthropological tradition at the University of Coimbra, drawing particular attention to the foundational role played by the technological assemblage of large osteological collections aimed at the study of the somatic characteristics of the metropolitan “white” population. I situate these technical developments in the context of wider sociocultural and politico-economic processes of both “nation building” and “empire building.” These processes had a strong effect on the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of answers that seemed compelling and acceptable to early physical anthropologists.

This article is about a long-standing tradition of scientific imagination concerned with “the systematic study of human unity-in-diversity” (Stocking 1983:5): the anthropological tradition. I focus on the emergence of a particular field of inquiry within this very broad scholarly tradition, but I analyze this process from the perspective of a peripheral arena of scientific production within the Western European core: the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that this relatively peripheral condition combined with a complex historical conjuncture of internal political and economic crises gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. This started to change in the 1930s with the rise of a powerful dictatorial regime—Salazar’s Estado Novo—that supported the emergence of a “colonial anthropology” strongly oriented, at least until the 1950s, toward the field of physical anthropology.

The development of the discipline of physical anthropology started in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and spread to other parts of the world during the second half of the nineteenth century. This process of discipline building produced a remarkable degree of international consistency, but it also engendered considerable variations, especially before the second half of the twentieth century (Blanckaert 2009; Dias 2005; Stocking 1988; Zimmerman 2001). As the editors of this supplemental issue of Current Anthropology note, these disciplinary variations remain poorly studied outside core Western European and North American areas, and this article joins recent calls to rethink the history of anthropology more inclusively (Handler 2000; Kuklick 2008) and to focus on diversity in world anthropological production (Cardoso de Oliveira 2000; Krotz 1997; L’Estoile, Neiburg, and Sigaud 2005; Ribeiro and Escobar 2006).

My contribution to this “world anthropologies” agenda is to bring to the surface a little-known Western European perspective on the origins of modern anthropology and the discipline of physical anthropology. In clear contrast to the American anthropological tradition and its four-field approach, the Portuguese anthropological tradition—as I show elsewhere (Santos 2005)—was built on two different but closely intertwined variants of anthropological research. One was more culturalist—focusing on “people,” “language,” and “customs”—and the other was more naturalist—focusing on “race,” “body,” and “fossils.” It was from within this naturalist camp that emerged in the late nineteenth century the first studies of “physical anthropology.” As in the French context (Jamin 1991; see also Blanckaert 1988, 1995, 2009), this early tradition of physical anthropology was so prominent that it was often labeled with the unmodified term “anthropology” (antropologia) and contrasted to its other half, “ethnology” (etnologia)—the ancestor of modern social-cultural anthropology and modern archaeology…

…Before plunging into an analysis of such disciplinary transformations in late nineteenth-century Portugal, I would like to give a brief account of what happened to the entire field of anthropological production from the early twentieth century onward so as to make more explicit the linkages between my “archaeological exploration” and the contemporary anthropological scene.

After a very short-lived First Republic (1910–1926), the dictatorial regime established in 1933 proved very stable and long-lasting but had a very negative effect in the academic sphere. This authoritarian regime repressed freedom of speech, rejected liberal economic reforms, and set out to build a Third Empire in Africa. Anthropologists did not oppose this enterprise and were called on to produce useful “colonial knowledge.” Physical anthropologists—most of whom still espoused a holistic conception of the discipline—played a salient role in this process. By and large, their work offered “scientific” support to the regime’s colonial rhetoric, which emphasized the civilizing mission of the Portuguese imperial expansion and opposed racial miscegenation (Pereira 2005; Santos 2005; Thomaz 2005).

This rhetoric started to change in the post–World War II period, and the major intellectual figure behind the new official ideology was the great Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, whose work on the formation of Brazilian society praised the allegedly humanistic nature of the Portuguese colonial endeavor and civilizing engagement with miscegenation (Castelo 1999; Vale de Almeida 2002). This new official rhetoric again constrained the work of anthropologists, but it was more in tune with the liberal antiracialist and cultural relativist anthropology that became internationally dominant in the post–World War II period (Vale de Almeida 2002, 2008). Starting in the 1960s, there emerged increasing epistemological and institutional divides between physical-biological and social-cultural anthropologists, and the latter gained the upper hand in colonial affairs (Pereira 2005)…

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Color, Race, and Genomic Ancestry in Brazil: Dialogues between Anthropology and Genetics

Current Anthropology
Volume 50, Number 6 (2009)
pages 787-819
DOI: 10.1086/644532

Ricardo Ventura Santos, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Public Health
Oswaldo Cruz Foundation
also Associate professor of Anthropology
National Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Peter H. Fry, Professor
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Departamento de Antropologia
Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Sociais/UFRJ, Largo de São Francisco de Paula 1

Simone Monteiro, Senior Researcher
Oswaldo Cruz Institute

Marcos Chor Maio, Senior Researcher
House of Oswaldo Cruz
Oswaldo Cruz Foundation

José Carlos Rodrigues, Professor
Fluminense Federal University
also Associate Professor
Catholic University

Luciana Bastos-Rodrigues
Department of Biochemistry and Immunology at the Institute of Biological Sciences
Federal University of Minas Gerais

Sérgio D. J. Pena, Professor of Biochemistry and Immunology
Institute of Biological Sciences
Federal University of Minas Gerais

In the contemporary world, “race” narratives are so multifaceted that at times, different views of the concept appear mutually incompatible. In recent decades biologists, especially geneticists, have repeatedly stated that the notion of race does not apply to the human species. On the other hand, social scientists claim that race is highly significant in cultural, historical, and socioeconomic terms because it molds everyday social relations and because it is a powerful motivator for social and political movements based on race differences. In this paper we present the results of an interdisciplinary research project incorporating approaches from genetics and anthropology. Our objective is to explore the interface between information about biology/genetics and perceptions about color/race in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We argue that the data and interpretation of our research resonate far beyond the local level, stimulating discussion about methodological, theoretical, and political issues of wider national and international relevance. Topics addressed include the complex terminology of color/race classification in Brazil, perceptions about ancestry in the context of ideologies of Brazilian national identity, and the relationship between genetic information about the Brazilian population and a sociopolitical agenda that turns on questions of race and racism.

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