Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany.

Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany. Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Scienceof Race in Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 312 pp. Sometimes it takes a modest, carefully-focused book, rather than asprawling or theoretically-ambitious one, to clarify the issues in along-running debate. Andrew Evans's Anthropology at War is such abook. Although tightly focused on German anthropologists andethnographers in the period between about 1900 and 1930 (of whom therewere no great number), Anthropology at War offers a convincing answer tothe question, when exactly did racial thinking become dominant in Germanscholarship? Evans also offers some insight into the related question,why did racial thinking catch on? But perhaps because Evans is as muchan historian of Germany as an historian of anthropology, he also throwslight on some larger dynamics in German history, most importantly thegenerational changes which contributed to the weakening of the liberaltradition. We can learn much from this modest book--though perhaps noteverything we wanted to know. To understand Evans's contribution, we have to sketch some ofthe debates that have been going on for some time about the history ofanthropology and of racial thought in modern Germany. One of the keyquestions is, how related are these two things? Was Germananthropological thinking always racist? Or, did racial thought alwaysreach for anthropological scholarship? Another question involves thetiming of racism's dominance in German culture. We all know thatthe German-speaking world has produced many liberal thinkers, but hasalso produced vicious anti-Semites (including Luther) and specialists in"racial hygiene." More recently, historians have begun tostudy German colonial exploits overseas, and to seek there the sources,structures, or practices that might have prefigured the Nazis'racialized imperialism (for example, Hull 2005). But when did racialthinking begin to inform "respectable" scholarship? Finally,there has long been a general recognition that by the mid-1910s, Germananthropological and ethnographic work was moving in different directionsfrom French and British schools of thought (though Americananthropologists, under the leadership of German exile Franz Boas,actually remained closer to German schools of thought for a decade or solonger). When exactly did this divergence set in, and why? These obvious related questions have been answered in different,and often opposing ways. George Stocking, who first interested me in thehistory of anthropology as a student at the University of Chicago in the1980s, suggested that the divergence between German and Central Europediffusionist cultural history on the one hand, and French and British"ethnographicized" anthropology on the other was the productof charismatic functionalists (which the Germans lacked), and traditionsinclined to latch on to the social-scientific ideas of Darwin, Durkheim,and Freud. Moreover, France and Britain had larger and long-lastingempires, which afforded them greater opportunities for fieldwork (forexample, Stocking 1992:212-275, 356-358). Stocking's criticalattempts to demythologize British and French structural-functionalism,and his careful work on American anthropology suggested that the realdivergence of the traditions was a post-WWI product--though he neverforgot that Franz Boas left for the United States in 1887 in partbecause he realized that German liberalism was under siege, and that theGerman university system had little room for left-of-center professors.Stocking was not interested in delving more deeply into the Germantradition. But, inspired by his work, some historians of the Germansciences began to investigate the origins of German anthropologicaluniqueness. Just to cite a few, James Ryding's (1978) importantessay on diffusionism, and essays and books by Robert Proctor (1988)andWoodruff Smith (1991) underlined the importance of the passing ofleading members of the "liberal" generation around 1905:Rudolf Virchow died in 1902, Friedrich Ratzel in 1904, and Adolf Bastianin 1905. I, for one, was convinced that this marked the onset of the ageof German racial anthropology--though subsequently I have come to thinkthat the peculiarities of the German and the Austrian traditions need awider-ranging explanation (Marchand 2003). In the last few years, two important books have offered more orless opposing interpretations of Wilhelmine ethnography. On the onehand, Glenn Penny's Objects of Culture (2002) emphasizes theliberal and local worlds in which ethnographic museums sprang up in thedecades just before the war. Similarly, the majority of the essays inWorldly Provincialism, co-edited by Penny and Matti Bunzl (2003), try tounderstand German anthropology before 1914 in its own terms, withoutpresuming it would all have to end in Nazism. Andrew Zimmerman, inAnthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (2001), on the otherhand, presumes German anthropology in some way "antihumanist"(something he confuses with anti-humanitarian) from the 1870s onward,and links it not only to colonial expansionism, but also to racialanti-Semitism. In the last decade or so, the study of German colonialismhas become a central part of German historical research, and many havesought to tie late Wilhelmine expansionism to the rise of more and moreracist notions about the rights of ethnic Germans to seize Lebensraum ineastern Europe, as well as in the wider world; these scholars tend topush the origins of illiberalism back into the 1880s, at least. We areleft with one line of interpretation that makes racism, andspecifically, racist anthropology, a product of the age of Bismarck, andanother that emphasizes the persistence of liberalism and liberalethnography down to 1914, at least. For both parties, the World War isassuredly given importance, but is largely left a black hole. So how do we understand when the liberal tradition ends, and theracist tradition begins? In many ways, Evans's book helps us tosquare this circle by way of a very simple solution: he has quietlygiven up on the quest to find master "discourses" or even"paradigms." This allows him to treat individuals asindividuals, people who work in traditions, schools andpolitically-defined contexts, but who, nonetheless, choose theirsubjects, their approaches, and their political opinions freely. If heuses any methodology, it is Lynn Nyhart's (1995) careful attempt tounderstand the "flesh and blood dynamics of change," that is,how it is that generationally-defined encounters, political experiences,and career opportunities incline individuals to gravitate toward certainideas and practices. In Evans's book, individuals' ideas areshown to lie along a spectrum rather than within paradigms, and thisallows the author to acknowledge, and openly discuss, the fact that itwas (and is) possible for people in the same time and place to holddifferent ideas. Thus in his first chapters, he argues quiteconvincingly that while a more racist and anti-liberal generation ofscholars emerged after the deaths of Virchow, Ratzel, and Bastian, by nomeans were they the only or the dominant voices. Down to 1914, therewere still liberals in top positions, and these men, though theyoccasionally talked about race in worrying ways, did not believe race tobe determinative of behavior, or of culture. Not only before the war, but even during it, individuals remainedindividuals, and reacted differently to the horrors and opportunitiesoffered by the cataclysm. But, as Evans shows, many anthropologists weremobilized in 1914--or, more accurately, offered themselves for service,hoping to demonstrate their patriotism and to obtain useful data. Somecontributed to propaganda efforts, others sought to maintain ties withinternational institutions. As the war went on, anger and grief--butalso a shift toward European concerns--expanded the numbers of thoseconvinced by volkisch ideas. There was still a spectrum, but thewar's multiple pressures and opportunities narrowed theliberal-universalist end of this spectrum. Here I think Evans could haveclone a bit more to evoke the subjective experience of those who, at thevery least, read about the deaths of thousands of their countrymen innewspapers every day for more than four years and, at worst, lost theirsons, brothers, students, and friends in the conflict. Those of us whoexperienced 9/11 in New York, or elsewhere in the US, should recall thesurge of patriotism, paranoia, and racism that accompanied those events,and recall too how hard it was to publicly defend universalistprinciples in the face of real events and supposed threats to one'snation. But patriotism, or liberal quietism, is not the same as activeracism or opportunist exploitation of other people's sufferings.Evans does a fine job here of describing the active racism invoked bysome--like Karl Felix Wolff or Ludwig Wilser--most of whom had alreadybeen volkisch hotheads before 1914. The longtime liberal Felix Luschandid not go this far, but did depart from his core principles by adoptingeugenicist views about the German racial fitness (126). But moreimportant was the reorientation effected during the war by opportunistswho sought to use prisoners of war as research subjects. In the camps,anthropologists had access to a wide variety of ethnicities (most ofthem European, but some of them colonized people), and used their powerover the inmates to measure and classify human beings who could notresist--as colonized peoples sometimes had. The massive new amounts ofdata helped scholars work out new racial typologies, into whichindividual subjects were forced. This certainly helped, as Evans argues,to give the enemy a face. But--and here Evans really adds somethingnew--working in these camps reoriented German anthropologists to thestudy of European races, something reinforced after the war when Germanywas stripped of its colonies, and German anthropologists, by extension,were deprived of a non-European "laboratory" in which theymight have developed their own structural-functionalist ideas. Unquestionably, the most original parts of Evans's book arethe two chapters on anthropology in the prison camps, which againindividualize the scholars who participated. Evans also details herephotography's increasingly important role in racialclassifications, in sections that will interest those who study thehistory of representations of "others." Some of theargumentation here, as elsewhere in the book, is a bit repetitive andplodding; the downside, one might say, of attempting to make the thesisclear and convincing. There are some questions that Evans does notanswer, most of them related to the "science" side of therelationships between race and the sciences. I would have liked to haveseen more discussion of the relationship between medicine (especiallytropical medicine) and anthropology both before and during the war.Proctor (1988) suggested long ago that this was a major launching padfor racist thinking, as much of it was devoted to figuring out whichraces were suited to which climates, or to curing white men and women ofdiseases endemic to non-white territories, and Pascal Grosse's(2003) essay makes clear how important this debate was to the evolutionof eugenic thinking. I would have liked also to see more discussion ofthe point that Rassenkunde was in part a reaction to frustration withcraniometrical data, which seemed never to actually explain ethnicvariation (200). Scholars like Eugen Fischer then reached for biologyand genetics, in the hopes these would deliver a fully-scientific (and,therefore, respectable) form of physical anthropology, one that couldexplain cultural phenomena as well. That suggests that there were"scientific" reasons (as well as political and institutionalreasons) for gravitating toward the racial sciences, something thathelps explain why liberals like Luschan were tempted at all. ButEvans's book does fill an important gap in the literature, andperhaps most importantly, if modestly, shows us how wrong we were tolook for grand discourses or paradigms, when in reality, individualviews always display variation. The question is not when did Germananthropology become racial science, but rather, when did the majority ofGerman anthropologists convince themselves that they could be bothracists and scientists at the same time? Having clarified that question,and filled in the black hole that was the Great War, Evans can now helpus launch new inquiries into this thorny thicket. REFERENCES Grosse, Pascal. 2003. "Turning Native? Anthropology, GermanColonialism, and the Paradoxes of the 'AcclimatizationQuestion,' 1885-1914." In H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, eds.Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire,179-197. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hull, Isabel V. 2005. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture andthe Practices of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress. Marchand, Suzanne. 2003. "Priests Among the Pygmies: WilhelmSchmidt and the Counter-Reformation in Austrian Ethnology." In H.Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, ads. Worldly Provincialism: GermanAnthropology in the Age of Empire, 283-316. Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press. Nyhart, Lynn. 1995. Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and theGerman Universities, 1800-1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Penny, H. Glenn, 2002. Objects of Culture: Ethnology andEthnographic Museums in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press. Penny, H. Glenn and Matti Bunzl, eds. 2003. Worldly Provincialism:German Anthropology in the Age of Empire. Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press. Proctor, Robert. 1988. "From Anthropology to Rassenkunde inthe German Anthropological Tradition." In George Stocking, ed.Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, 138-179.Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ryding, James N. 1978. "Alternatives in Nineteenth-CenturyEthnology: A Case Study in the Sociology of Science." Sociologus25:1-28. Smith, Woodruff. 1991. Politics and the Sciences of Culture inGermany, 1840-1920. New York: Oxford University Press. Stocking Jr., George W. 1992. The Ethnographer's Magic andOther Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison: University ofWisconsin Press. Zimmerman, Andrew. 2001. Anthropology and Antihumanism in ImperialGermany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Suzanne Marchand Louisiana State University