Existing comment:
"They had used me for what they wanted; they had stolen my father's body for their science. They did not want me anymore, and it was too much trouble to take me back."
-- Minik Wallace, quoted in the Evening Mail, April 13,1909
1897: Living collections:
Famed polar explorer Robert Peary brings seven-year-old Minik, his father, Qisuk, and four other Greenland Inuit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to be studied. Peary has promised to return them to Greenland, but once they are in New York, four of them, including Qisuk, become ill and die. Minik is adopted by a museum superintendent, and his father's bones are "de-fleshed" and added to the museum's collections. Almost a century later, Kenn Harper, author of a biography of Minik, successfully fights for the return of the father's skeleton to Greenland.
1899: The Races of Europe:
This popular book by the economist William Z. Ripley classifies Europeans as compromising three distinct races: "Teutonic," "Alpine," and "Mediterranean." Ripley relies on Anders Retzius's long- accepted cephalic index head-measurement standard as a basis for his work. He wins a prestigious award from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain for his work, and his ideas pave the way for later efforts by scientists and writers such as Charles Davenport, Madison Grant, and Carleton Coon.
1911: Undermining the cephalic index:
Studying the skull shape of immigrants and their American-born children, Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas finds that this feature can vary from one generation to the next. His work undermines the wide use of the cephalic index as a stable marker of race. Boas shows that the human form is more susceptible to environmental factors than most people at the time believe.
"The old idea of absolute stability of human types must... evidently be given up, and with it the belief of the hereditary superiority of certain types over others."
-- Franz Boas, "The Instability of Human Types" (1911) |