Bones and Bodies (eBook)

How South African Scientists Studied Race

Alan G Morris (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | Main
Wits University Press (Verlag)
978-1-77614-726-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Alan G Morris critically examines the history of evolutionary anthropology in South Africa, uncovering the stories and implicit racial biases of physical anthropology scientists and researchers, and how they influenced perceptions of the peoples of southern Africa, both ancient and modern.

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Bones and Bodies is a highly accessible account of the establishment of the scientific discipline of biological anthropology. Alan G Morris takes us back over the past century of anthropological discovery in South Africa and uncovers the stories of individual scientists and researchers who played a significant role in shaping perceptions of how peoples of southern Africa, both ancient and modern, came to be viewed and categorised both in the public imagination and the scientific literature. Morris reveals how much of the earlier anthropological studies were tainted with the tarred brush of race science. He evaluates the works of famous anthropologists and archaeologists such as Raymond Dart, Thomas Dreyer, Matthew Drennan and Robert Broom, and demonstrates through a wide array of sources how they described their fossil discoveries through the prism of racist interpretation. Morris also shows how modern anthropology tried to rid itself of the stigma of these early racist accounts. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ronald Singer and Phillip Tobias introduced modern methods into the discipline that disputed much of what the public believed about race and human evolution. In an age in which the authority of experts and empirical science is increasingly being questioned, this book shows the battle facing modern anthropology to acknowledge its racial past but also how its study of human variation remains an important field of enquiry at institutions of higher learning.

Inhalt

List of Illustrations A Note on the Use of Historical Terminology Acknowledgements List of Characters with Dates of Birth, Death and Affiliation Schema of Types Introduction Chapter 1 Dr Louis Péringuey’s Well-Travelled Skeletons Chapter 2 Boskop: The First South African Fossil Human Celebrity Chapter 3 Matthew Drennan and the Scottish Influence in Cape Town Chapter 4 The Age of Racial Typology in South Africa Chapter 5 Raymond Dart’s Complicated Legacy Chapter 6 Ronald Singer, Phillip Tobias and the ‘New Physical Anthropology’ Chapter 7 Physical Anthropology and the Administration of Apartheid Chapter 8 The Politics of Racial Classification in Modern South Africa Select Bibliography Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.2.2022
• Verlagsort: Johannesburg
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Humanbiologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
• ISBN-10: 1-77614-726-X / 177614726X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-77614-726-7 / 9781776147267