The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks

We introduce a special issue of Current Anthropology developed from a Wenner-Gren symposium held in Teresópolis, Brazil, in 2010 that was about the past, present, and future of biological anthropology. Our goal was to understand from a comparative international perspective the contexts of genesis and development of physical/biological anthropology around the world. While biological anthropology today can encompass paleoanthropology, primatology, and skeletal biology, our symposium focused on the field's engagement with living human populations. Bringing together scholars in the history of science, science studies, and anthropology, the participants examined the discipline's past in different contexts but also reflected on its contemporary and future conditions. Our contributors explore national histories, collections, and scientific field practice with the goal of developing a broader understanding of the discipline's history. Our work tracks a global, uneven transition from a typological and essentialist physical anthropology, predominating until the first decades of the twentieth century, to a biological anthropology informed by postsynthesis evolutionism and the rise of molecular biology, a shift that was labeled "new physical anthropology." We place biological anthropology in a broad historical context and suggest how the histories we document can inform its future. Disciplines Anthropology | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/hss_papers/22 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Supplement 5, April 2012 S3 2012 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2012/53S5-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/663335 The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks An Introduction to Supplement 5 by Susan Lindee and Ricardo Ventura Santos We introduce a special issue of Current Anthropology developed from a Wenner-Gren symposium held in Teresópolis, Brazil, in 2010 that was about the past, present, and future of biological anthropology. Our goal was to understand from a comparative international perspective the contexts of genesis and development of physical/biological anthropology around the world. While biological anthropology today can encompass paleoanthropology, primatology, and skeletal biology, our symposium focused on the field’s engagement with living human populations. Bringing together scholars in the history of science, science studies, and anthropology, the participants examined the discipline’s past in different contexts but also reflected on its contemporary and future conditions. Our contributors explore national histories, collections, and scientific field practice with the goal of developing a broader understanding of the discipline’s history. Our work tracks a global, uneven transition from a typological and essentialist physical anthropology, predominating until the first decades of the twentieth century, to a biological anthropology informed by postsynthesis evolutionism and the rise of molecular biology, a shift that was labeled “new physical anthropology.” We place biological anthropology in a broad historical context and suggest how the histories we document can inform its future. We open with a consideration of being both embarrassed and pregnant. As any awkward speaker of a less-familiar language knows, some words that seem the same across languages are in fact amusingly (embarrassingly?) different. One example is the Spanish word embarazada, which means “pregnant.” Wikipedia calls the word “a false friend for English-speaking students of Spanish who may attempt to say ‘I’m embarrassed’ by saying ‘estoy embarazada.’” We began to think about embarrassment—its ironies and its productivity—after the biological-anthropologist-turned-historian Michael A. Little, one of the key participants in our symposium, observed candidly during one session that when he first started teaching, “I never talked about the history of my field, because I was Susan Lindee is Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania (Suite 303, Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, U.S.A. [[email protected]]). Ricardo Ventura Santos is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and Senior Researcher at the National School of Public Health, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública/FIOCRUZ, Rua Leopoldo Bulhões 1480, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 21041-210, Brazil). This paper was submitted 27 X 10, accepted 22 IX 11, and electronically published 28 II 12. embarrassed about it.” That history is a history, at least partly, of ideas about racial difference, which as his embarrassment suggested produced an emotional state that silenced or negated certain questions. Graduate students of social anthropology are generally expected to read the classics of anthropological thought—Tylor, Morgan, Malinowski, Durkheim, Boas, Rivers, and Radcliffe Brown—even if some of the ideas promoted by these thinkers have ceased to be seen as central to the field (Ingold 2002; Kuklick 2008; Stocking 1968). Social anthropologists are expected to know the history of their own discipline. But PhD students in biological anthropology today are unlikely to read 1. Embaras also has an evocative archaic meaning relating to a blocked river, a passage prevented by debris, or a point at which one is forced to slow down to navigate the water. It was an American term for places where the navigation of rivers is rendered difficult by the accumulation of driftwood. Like the nineteenth-century blocked river, the embaras that barred the passage of navigation of rivers, embarrassment is perhaps a point at which one is forced to slow down, navigate, and think carefully about how to move forward. 2. Perhaps embarrassment is a common experience in anthropology: Clyde Kluckhohn confessed to a “feeling of embarrassment” when he read the field notes of his student David Schneider, who was working on the islands of Yap in the 1940s, because they were so personal and confessional (and because Schneider was a remarkably reflexive fieldworker; see Bashkow 1991). S4 Current Anthropology Volume 53, Supplement 5, April 2012 the works of nineteenth-century leaders in the field—such as Samuel George Morton, Paul Broca, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, or Rudolph Virchow—or even to read twentieth-century physical anthropologists who were influential—such as Aleš Hrdlička, E. A. Hooton, Eugen Fischer, Arthur Keith, Leonce Manouvrier, or Rudolf Martin. Indeed, a new graduate student today in biological anthropology is more likely to start with technical training in skeletal biology, molecular genetics, or forensic science—the laboratory specialties grounded in experimental technique that have become so central. In the United States in recent years, several departments of biological anthropology (including Harvard’s) have been reconstructed as freestanding departments of human evolutionary biology not tied to social anthropology, linguistics, or archaeology—that is, to any forms of humanistic analysis (although many others continue to maintain the four-field approach with varying levels of success and with mixed consequences for hiring and training; Borofsky 2005; Calcagno 2003; Segal and Yanagisako 2005). The training of biological anthropologists seems to often involve historical forgetting and little contact with past ideas of the discipline they are entering. It has been a discipline with a history that is often purposively disappeared, forgotten for a reason. As one of us, Ricardo Ventura Santos, has recalled, at some point seeing a photo of himself taking head measurements in the early 1990s with the technologies so long associated with racial narratives of difference and pathology became for him, again, “embarrassing.” Even in the arc of his own career, that of a biological anthropologist who went to work in a natural history museum centrally concerned with history and who has become deeply interested in the history of the field over the past decades, these simple technologies of human measurement came to carry a conflicted and charged meaning. Of course, just as the same bones and bloods can move through different contexts, their meaning varying, their power changing, so too the same actions can mean different things: Noel Cameron’s uses of human measurement in a birth cohort study in postapartheid South Africa (explored in the oral history that closes this volume) demonstrate the point. Sequencers and calipers coexist as tools of the discipline today, and even questions about group differences work differently 3. This conclusion is based on a somewhat informal survey of Englishlanguage graduate syllabi in physical/biological anthropology posted on the Web since about 2000. One thing is clear: what counts as physical anthropology varies a good deal, with some programs built entirely around archaeology, others focused on forensic training, and many on human evolution. It is not unusual for George Stocking or Stephen Jay Gould to be included as assigned reading in graduate training, but reading the primary sources in their original form, with the exception of Charles Darwin, is less common. 4. The measurements were part of a restudy of the Xavante Indians from Central Brazil (see Coimbra et al. 2002). The investigation attempted to collect some of the same bioanthropological variables collected by James Neel and Francisco Salzano in 1962 in the same population (Neel et al. 1964), aiming at studying long-term changes in human biology and health. in an age of Internal Review Boards (IRBs), the recalibration of scientific race, repatriation rights, and massive global biobanking systems. Thinking about disciplinary embarrassment, we propose here, can lead to a productive awareness of complexity, timescales, and the legacies of social and political order: Little, once embarrassed by the history of his field, is now a skilled historian of biological anthropology (Little and Kennedy 2010). And the mistranslation at the English-Spanish intersection, of embarrassment in one language and pregnancy in the other, calls to mind a state of both confusion and incipient birth. We suggest here that the seed of something new is growing, in this case new ways of seeing a history that has vexed both historians and practitioners. We hope in this volume to begin to reconfigure the history of biological anthropology as a resource for moving the field forward. The papers collected in this special issue of Current Anthropology were developed for a Wenner-Gren symposium that was about the past, present, and future of biological anthropology—“The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles, and International Networks”—held in Teresópolis, Brazil, in March 2010. Our goal was to understand from a comparative international perspective the contexts of genesis and development of physical/biological anthropology around the world. While biological anthropology today can encompass paleoanthropology, primatology, and skeletal biology, our symposium focused on the field’s engagement with living human populations. Bringing together scholars in history of science, science studies, and anthropology, we structured our discussions not only to examine the discipline’s past in different contexts but also to reflect on its contemporary and future conditions. Our contributors have been guided throughout by a nexus of key questions about national histories, collections, and scientific field practice. Particularly relevant to us was the development of a broader understanding of the discipline’s global, uneven transition from a typological and essentialist physical anthropology, predominating until the first decades of the twentieth century, to a biological anthropology informed by postsynthesis evolutionism and the rise of molecular biology, a shift that was labeled “new physical anthropology” in a famous 1951 manifesto by Sherwood Washburn (Washburn 1951). Washburn proposed that physical anthropology could now link the evolutionary synthesis to comparative functional anatomy. He presented the changes as revolutionary, a break with an unfortunate past tainted by typological racism. Physical anthropology, he said, had to become evolutionary, and adaptation, selection, and population biology should become its central problematic (Haraway 1989). If this transition to a new physical anthropology has been relatively well described in the cases of North America and of certain European contexts, the same could not be said for other regions of the world. In some countries, such as the United States, this “new physical anthropology” continued to be practiced in anthropology departments, while in other Lindee and Santos Biological Anthropology S5 countries, such as Brazil, it moved into biology departments (and genetics departments in particular) and in some cases into museums. In natural history museums, the transitions to the new physical anthropology were generally slower and more incomplete, with typological perspectives on human biological variability persisting far longer (Maio and Santos