Constructing Race
The Science of Bodies and Cultures in American Anthropology

This book explores how physical anthropologists struggled to understand variation in bodies and cultures in the twentieth century.

Tracy Teslow (Author)

9781316603383, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 March 2016

414 pages, 39 b/w illus. 1 map
15 x 23 x 2.5 cm, 0.6 kg

'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

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.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]