The Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020

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dc.contributor.authorSommer, Marianne
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-07T04:44:11Z
dc.date.available2024-08-07T04:44:11Z
dc.date.issued2024-07-30
dc.date.updated2024-08-07T04:44:07Z
dc.descriptionPublication status: ACTIVE
dc.description.abstractThis is the first book that engages with the history of diagrams in physical, evolutionary, and genetic anthropology. Since their establishment as scientific tools for classification in the eighteenth century, diagrams have been used to determine but also to deny kinship between human groups. In nineteenth-century craniometry, they were omnipresent in attempts to standardize measurements on skulls for hierarchical categorization. In particular the ’human family tree’ was central for evolutionary understandings of human diversity, being used on both sides of debates about whether humans constitute different species well into the twentieth century. With recent advances in (ancient) DNA analyses, the tree diagram has become more contested than ever―does human relatedness take the shape of a network? Are human individual genomes mosaics made up of different ancestries? Sommer examines the epistemic and political role of these visual representations in the history of ‘race’ as an anthropological category. How do such diagrams relate to imperial and (post-)colonial practices and ideologies but also to liberal and humanist concerns? The Diagrammatics of 'Race' concentrates on Western projects from the late 1700s into the present to diagrammatically define humanity, subdividing and ordering it, including the concomitant endeavors to acquire representative samples―bones, blood, or DNA―from all over the world. Contributing to the ‘diagrammatic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, it reveals connections between diagrams in anthropology and other visual traditions, including in religion, linguistics, biology, genealogy, breeding, and eugenics.
dc.description.versionVoR
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0396
dc.identifier.isbn9781805112600
dc.identifier.isbn9781805112617
dc.identifier.isbn9781805112624
dc.identifier.isbn9781805112655
dc.identifier.isbn9781805112631
dc.identifier.otherf0b680d2-068b-4ada-b08e-b5fc1cb52237
dc.identifier.urihttps://thoth-arch.lib.cam.ac.uk/handle/1811/761
dc.languageENG
dc.publisherOpen Book Publishers
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subjectJ
dc.subjectJFSL1
dc.subjectJHM
dc.subjectJHMC
dc.subjectSOC002010
dc.subjectSOC008000
dc.subjectSOC070000
dc.subjectJBSL1
dc.subjectJBSL13
dc.subjectAnthropology, Archaeology and Religion
dc.subjectEconomics, Politics and Sociology
dc.subjectScience: History of Science
dc.subjectanthropology
dc.subjectdiagrams
dc.subjectfamily trees
dc.subjecthistory of science
dc.subjectrace and diversity
dc.subjectvisual representation
dc.titleThe Diagrammatics of ‘Race’: Visualizing Human Relatedness in the History of Physical, Evolutionary, and Genetic Anthropology, ca. 1770-2020
dc.typehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_2f33
dcterms.accessRightsEmbargo: none
organization.legalNameUniversity of Lucerne

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