Synopses & Reviews
Race and Photography studies the changing function of photography from the 1870s to the 1940s within the field of the andldquo;science of race,andrdquo; what many today consider the paradigm of pseudo-science. Amos Morris-Reich looks at the ways photography enabled not just new forms of documentation but new forms of perception. Foregoing the political lens through which we usually look back at race science, he holds it up instead within the light of the history of science, using it to explore how science is defined; how evidence is produced, used, and interpreted; and how science shapes the imagination and vice versa.
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Exploring the development of racial photography wherever it took place, including countries like France and England, Morris-Reich pays special attention to the German and Jewish contexts of scientific racism. Through careful reconstruction of individual cases, conceptual genealogies, and patterns of practice, he compares the intended roles of photography with its actual use in scientific argumentation. He examines the diverse ways it was used to establish racial ideologiesandmdash;as illustrations of types, statistical data, or as self-evident record of racial signs. Altogether, Morris-Reich visits this troubling history to outline important truths about the roles of visual argumentation, imagination, perception, aesthetics, epistemology, and ideology within scientific study. and#160;
Synopsis
Between 1914 and 1918, German anthropologists conducted their work in the midst of full-scale war. The discipline was relatively new in German academia when World War I broke out, and, as Andrew D. Evans reveals in this illuminating book, its development was profoundly altered by the conflict. As the war shaped the institutional, ideological, and physical environment for anthropological work, the discipline turned its back on its liberal roots and became a nationalist endeavor primarily concerned with scientific studies of race.
Combining intellectual and cultural history with the history of science, Anthropology at War examines both the origins and consequences of this shift. Evans locates its roots in the decision to allow scientists access to prisoner-of-war camps, which prompted them to focus their research on racial studies of the captives. Caught up in wartime nationalism, a new generation of anthropologists began to portray the countryand#8217;s political enemies as racially different. After the war ended, the importance placed on racial conceptions and categories persisted, paving the way for the politicization of scientific inquiry in the years of the ascendancy of National Socialism.
Synopsis
Historian Amos Morris-Reich here tracks the trajectory of racial photography from 1876 through the Weimar and Nazi periods in Germany and, briefly, after WWII. With a particular focus on German and Jewish contexts, Race and Photography reveals the important role of racial photography within academic discourse on race. Photography was not simply a medium of illustration but rather it was a conduit for new forms of visual perception. Approaching the history of racial photography from an epistemic point of view raises questions concerning the similarity and specific difference of photography compared with other scientific media, and makes explicit the scientific and cultural assumptions in which different uses of photography were embedded. Paying particular attention to the effect of photography on concepts of visual perception and also to the intricate relationship between racial photography and the imagination, Morris-Reich examines numerous scientists and scholars, both prominent and obscure, who developed photographic methods for the study of race or made methodical use of photography for its study. His careful reconstruction of individual cases, conceptual genealogies, and emergent patterns points to transformations in the scientific status of photography throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and uncovers the agency of photographic media in the history of scientific racism. This work makes a distinctive contribution to the fields of history of science, history of photography, intellectual history, European and Jewish history, and the history of race.
About the Author
Amos Morris-Reich is a professor in the Department of Jewish History and the director of the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science and the editor of collected essays by Georg Simmel and Sander Gilman. and#160; and#160;
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
INTRODUCTIONONE / Institutionalizing the and#8220;Most Recent Scienceand#8221;: Anthropology in the World of German Learning at the Fin de Siand#232;cle
TWO / The Meaning of Race: The Liberal Paradigm in Prewar German Anthropology
THREE / Nationalism and Mobilization in Wartime Anthropology, 1914and#8211;18
FOUR / and#8220;Among Foreign Peoplesand#8221;: Racial Studies of POWs during World War I
FIVE / Capturing Race: Anthropology and Photography in POW Camps during World War I
SIX / Anthropology in the Aftermath: Rassenkunde, Racial Hygiene, and the End of the Liberal Tradition
CONCLUSION
Notes
Bibliography
Index