ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Global Evolutionary Theory, Local Nationalisms: The Reception of Franz Weidenreich in Taiwan’s Anthropological Community

• In Event: Contested Bodies: Science and Statecraft in 20th-Century China and Taiwan

English Abstract

The German-Jewish paleoanthropologist Franz Weidenreich (1873–1948) never visited Taiwan. Yet in the 1960s, his books were read by students of archaeology and anthropology at National Taiwan University (NTU) and the casts of “Peking Man” he had commissioned were shipped from the United States to Taipei and exhibited at the National Museum of History. Weidenreich’s legacy was promoted by Chinese physical anthropologists teaching at NTU, Li Ji (1896–1979) and Yang Hsi-mei (1916–1993), who had recently relocated to Taiwan with the Republic of China government. They rediscovered Weidenreich while studying human remains of China’s protohistoric period, collected during archaeological excavations at Anyang, Henan Province, in 1928–1937. Students involved in this research project, however, drew different inspirations from Weidenreich’s studies of hominid fossils and his theory of human evolution.

This paper argues that the brief reception of Franz Weidenreich in Cold War Taiwan showcases the co-constitution of scientific debate on the evolutionary history of the East Asian body with competing national imaginations in the process of decolonization. In a case-by-case manner, it discusses varied positions taken by Weidenreich’s readers in Taiwan according to their rank, generation, education, belief and gender. Through this micro-level analysis, the paper demonstrates how global ideas about human origin were appropriated to serve nationalist historiography and on the other hand, how colonial knowledge tradition and ethically questionable research infrastructure paradoxically informed scientific visions of a decolonized nation. Finally, this dialectics of ideas across the global-local and colonial-colonized divides also serves as a hypothesis for thinking nationalism in science.

Author

• Weicheng Huang