Analyzing “race” as a scientific object: circulating "race" through time (1927-1970) and space (Berlin-Pune)

• In Event: Racial Mattering and Scientific (In)Sensibilities

Abstract

My research project explores how “race”, as a scientific object, has been scientifically produced and transformed through circulations in time and space. The analysis sheds light on one important transnational flow in the global network of racialized knowledge production, namely the one through the work of physical anthropologist and geneticist Irawati Karvé (1905-1970) between Berlin and different settings in India. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Karvé researched at the renowned Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin, where she developed a research on "racial difference" under supervision of leading Rassenhygiene expert and anthropologist Eugen Fischer. From 1931 to 1970, Karvé played a key role in the adaption of racialized knowledge to different settings in India, becoming notably known for her anthropometric studies of different social groups in India, such as certain “sub-castes”, “tribes” and other “populations”.

Backed by multi-archival research in the context of an ongoing larger ethnographic research, in this paper I analyze Karvé's racialized knowledge production praxis and situatedness. Through a postcolonial STS perspective, I focus on Karvé’s praxis in Berlin, and articulate it with an analysis of how, from such praxis on, she has articulated and transformed the object of “race” throughout her scientific work. I argue that Karvé has contributed to a racialized understanding of human difference also in a later context (1950-1970) when the category “race” itself had not been made explicit anymore in her work.

Hence, my paper contributes to a critical understanding of the transformation of “race” as a scientific object and to a critical historical understanding of racialized notions in physical anthropological and/or human genetic research. In this sense, I strive to contribute to STS scholarship with a differentiated gaze toward the history of the discipline of anthropology itself and with a reflection on the presence of “race” in the production of knowledge on human diversity.

Author

• Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient