ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Reconstructing Dante’s Race: Fabio Frassetto and the International Committee for Anthropological Standardization

• In Event: “Facing” the Past: Race, Craniometry, and the Afterlives of Human Skulls

English Abstract

This talk is part of a research project on the anthropological measurement of Dante Alighieri’s remains between 1865 and 2021. Here, I will focus on the interwar period, showing the connection between, on the one hand, the Fascist project to define and reconstruct “Dante’s race,” and, on the other, international efforts to universalize measurement practices in physical anthropology. I will examine, in particular, the scientific collaboration between Fabio Frassetto, head of the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Bologna, and Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin-Dahlem, which resulted in the establishment of an international committee on anthropological standardization, named SAS (Standardizzazione Antropologica e Sintesi, in English: Anthropological Standardization and Synthesis). Conceived from its inception (in 1933-1934), as an anti-British initiative in the field of eugenics and physical anthropology, the SAS Committee soon turned into a scientific expression of the Axis powers. The SAS network was also instrumental in advancing the research agendas of both Frassetto and Fischer, respectively on “Dante’s race” and on the “Etruscan race.” This connection had a significant impact, I will argue, on the scientific negotiation between the racial policies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Aim of the presentation is to shed light on two key issues. First, Dante’s skull and skeleton – with the connected processes of measurement, visualization, racialization, and travel – open a fascinating window into the materiality of fascist ideology as well as the circulation of racial artifacts. Second, the interaction between national racial projects, such as the reconstruction of “Dante’s race,” and the international attempts to standardize anthropological measurements, reveals how both nationalism and international politics shaped the practices of racial science in the interwar period.

Author

• Francesco Cassata, University of Genoa, Italy