NEW IN PAPERBACK ANTHROPOLOGY / SOCIAL SCIENCE / POLITICAL SCIENCE
National Races
Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840–1945 EDIT ED BY RICHARD MC M AHON National Races explores how politics interacted with transnational science in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce powerful, racialized national identity discourses. These essays demonstrate that the “national races” constructed by physical anthropologists had a vital historical role in racism, race science, and nationalism. Contributors address a central tension in anthropological race classification. On one hand, classifiers were nationalists who explicitly or implicitly used race narratives to promote political agendas. On the other hand, the transnational community of race scholars resisted the centrifugal forces of nationalism. Their interdisciplinary project was a vital episode in the development of the social sciences, using biological race classification to explain the history, geography, relationships, and psychologies of nations. National Races delves to the heart of tensions between nationalism and transnationalism, politics and science, by examining transnational science from the perspective of its peripheries. Contributors to the book supplement the traditional focus of historians on France, Britain, and Germany, with myriad case studies and examples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial and national identities in countries such as Russia, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Yugoslavia, and among Jewish anthropologists.
Richard McMahon teaches European Union politics at University College London. He is the author of The Races of Europe: Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences, 1839–1939. JUNE 400 pp. • 6 x 9 • 2 illustrations, 4 maps, index $35.00X • paperback • 978-1-4962-2584-9 $46.50 Canadian / £27.99 UK
“This major scholarly collection explores the history of physical anthropology from intentionally unusual angles that challenge intuitive assumptions. It also charts engagements and altercations with humanistic ethnological scholarship, including folklore, amid a host of revealingly varied nationalist aspirations.”—Michael Herzfeld, Journal of Folklore Research
Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology Regna Darnell and Robert Oppenheim, series editors
“A rich collection. . . . [This] volume recovers a rich set of liberal, transnational, and local ideas in their development, thus challenging teleological narratives of a straight road from turn-of-the-century craniometry and serology to the eugenic practices and exclusionary biological racism of interwar fascist regimes.”—A. Vari, Choice “McMahon provides an extensive overview and impeccable research to describe the transnational science of racial classification during a pivotal century in the modern era.”—Lee Baker, Mrs. Alexander Hehmeyer Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University “Innovative and promising—and fills a significant gap in the international literature.”—Han F. Vermeulen, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
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