Hardback : $138.00
Constructing Race helps unravel the complicated and intertwined history of race and science in America. Tracy Teslow explores how physical anthropologists in the twentieth century struggled to understand the complexity of human physical and cultural variation, and how their theories were disseminated to the public through art, museum exhibitions, books, and pamphlets. In their attempts to explain the history and nature of human peoples, anthropologists persistently saw both race and culture as critical components. This is at odds with a broadly accepted account that suggests racial science was fully rejected by scientists and the public following World War II. This book offers a corrective, showing that both race and culture informed how anthropologists and the public understood human variation from 1900 through the decades following the war. The book offers new insights into the work of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu, as well as less well-known figures, including Harry Shapiro, Gene Weltfish, and Henry Field.
Constructing Race helps unravel the complicated and intertwined history of race and science in America. Tracy Teslow explores how physical anthropologists in the twentieth century struggled to understand the complexity of human physical and cultural variation, and how their theories were disseminated to the public through art, museum exhibitions, books, and pamphlets. In their attempts to explain the history and nature of human peoples, anthropologists persistently saw both race and culture as critical components. This is at odds with a broadly accepted account that suggests racial science was fully rejected by scientists and the public following World War II. This book offers a corrective, showing that both race and culture informed how anthropologists and the public understood human variation from 1900 through the decades following the war. The book offers new insights into the work of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montagu, as well as less well-known figures, including Harry Shapiro, Gene Weltfish, and Henry Field.
1. Introduction: race, anthropology, and the American public; 2. Franz Boas and race: history, environment, heredity; 3. Order for a disordered world: The Races of Mankind at the Field Museum of Natural History; 4. Mounting The Races of Mankind: anthropology and art, race and culture; 5. Harry Shapiro's Boasian racial science; 6. Rejecting race, embracing man? Ruth Benedict's race and culture; 7. Rejecting race, embracing man? Race in postwar America; 8. Conclusion: the persistence of race.
This book explores how physical anthropologists struggled to understand variation in bodies and cultures in the twentieth century.
Tracy Teslow is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. She has received prestigious fellowships from the Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology and Medicine at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Andrew Mellon Foundation; and the Getty Research Institute.
'Teslow's scholarship is first-rate, and this lucidly written and
persuasively argued book is a major contribution to the history of
anthropology in the United States. After reading Constructing Race,
historians will be less tempted to dismiss an earlier generation of
physical anthropologists as benighted racists whose 'bad science'
we think we have superseded and begin instead to investigate the
many contradictions, dead-ends, and blind spots of a protean and
malleable scientific discourse that, unfortunately, is still with
us.' Alice Conklin, Ohio State University
'We've assumed for a long time that credible science rejected race
after World War Two. Tracy Teslow's original and deeply researched
book makes that assumption look just plain foolish. Astonishingly,
she has rewritten the story of race and science in the twentieth
century and permanently troubled our belief in progress.' Matthew
Guterl, Brown University
'In this deeply researched and clearly written book, Tracy Teslow
challenges many accepted accounts of how race was conceptualized in
twentieth-century anthropology in the United States. She sheds new
light on historical figures, such as Franz Boas, that we all
thought we understood well and argues for the importance of
less-well-known figures such as Harry Shapiro. Teslow urges us to
look beyond the tired debates about the 'reality' of race and
forces us to think about how race was or was not constructed in the
United States in the last century. This is an important book.' John
P. Jackson, Jr, University of Colorado, Boulder
'The remarkable boldness of this sweeping study coexists with its
great care in formulating complex arguments and its close attention
to the contradictions within a rich base of primary sources.
Capturing how famous and forgotten anthropologists conversed with
each other and with the general public over most of the last
century, Teslow shows that talk of cultural differences did not
supplant biological views of race. Instead the two discourses long
developed as much in counterpoint as in competition.' David
Roediger, University of Illinois, and co-author of The Production
of Difference
'Constructing Race is a welcome addition to the field and an
excellent study of the resilience of race in the face of both the
cultural turn as well as newer interests in genetics and population
studies among anthropologists.' Malinda Lindquist, Journal of
American History
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