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Introduction

  • Marianne Sommer (author)
Chapter of: The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020(pp. 1–10)

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Metadata
TitleIntroduction
ContributorMarianne Sommer (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0396.00
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0396/chapters/10.11647/obp.0396.00
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
CopyrightMarianne Sommer
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Published on2024-07-30
Long abstractThis 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.
Page rangepp. 1–10
Print length10 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Marianne Sommer

(author)
Chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at University of Lucerne

Marianne Sommer holds the chair of Kulturwissenschaften at the Department for Cultural and Science Studies at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. Prior to that, she has held postdoctoral positions and professorships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Pennsylvania State University, the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, and has been a guest at many institutions, including Stanford University. For her research in the history of earth, life, and human sciences, encompassing processes of narration, visualization, and exhibition, she has received the Swiss National Latsis Prize. Her monograph History Within (published with The University of Chicago Press in 2016) engages with the science, politics, and culture related to reconstructions of human evolutionary histories; it traces the generation and circulation of such knowledge from the late nineteenth century to the present, including through venues like the museum, the zoo, literature, or the web. Among her monographs are also Bones and Ochre: The Curious Afterlife of the Red Lady of Paviland (published with Harvard University Press in 2007) and Evolutionäre Anthropologie (published with Junius in 2015). Bones and Ochre tells the scientific and cultural history of paleoanthropology and to a lesser degree archeology through the ‘biography’ of the most likely first fossil human skeleton discovered in 1823. Evolutionäre Anthropologie is an introduction to the history of evolutionary anthropology for scholars, students, and the interested public.