This project reconstructs a previously unidentified trans-national and trans-colonial network of research on race mixing in the twentieth century - a global scientific debate on human segregation, assimilation, and absorption, involving human biologists, physical anthropologists, and sociologists. The historical study of the scientific investigations of "race-crossing" conducted between 1910 and 1940 is long overdue. During this period there were more than twenty major scientific investigations of the effects of miscegenation in the Pacific, North America, Southeast Asia, South Africa and the Maghreb. This study concentrates largely on the extensive and influential series of studies of race mixing organized through the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, one of the major pre-World War II sites for the training of physical anthropologists. That is, it is primarily an examination of the network of Harvard anthropologists conducting studies of frontier biology in the Pacific and elsewhere, tracing their "miscegenation map" of the new world. In the three years of the project the principal investigator will undertake data collection (including visits to the sites of investigation), analysis, and the writing of a monograph on the science of race mixing in the twentieth century, and associated articles.
Intellectual Merit. Most histories of race science are histories of ideas, but this project examines the actual practices of scientific investigation and reconstructs the interactions and engagements that occurred in fieldwork. This study is methodologically innovative in that it calls for the historian to follow scientists as they move between, or make comparisons between, multiple sites. During the past twenty years, historians have attempted to "situate" scientific practice in specific social circumstances. But having thus situated science, how then does one account for its travel and stabilization in diverse locations? How did the character of the interactions between investigators and local inhabitants vary from place to place? How do practices and observations become commensurate and comparable at different sites? Through trans-national studies such as this, we will begin to understand how scientists can make global claims on bodies and their environments.
Broader Impact. One of the project's goals is to find out what happens to our understanding of race in the twentieth century when the extensive inter-war scientific research on miscegenation is included in its history. Importantly, this study brings Australasia and the Pacific into focus in the history of twentieth-century race science. Doing so will shift our impressions of the contours of the scientific investigation of human diversity. It adds to our knowledge of the causes of the decline of race in science and adjusts the conventional periodization of this decline. This study will provide a critical history of the racialization and deracialization of children of mixed parentage in twentieth-century biological sciences. It will also explain how the Pacific Islanders of Hawaii and (increasingly) the west coast of the U.S. figured in twentieth-century race science. The results of this work will help to inform and expand the American Anthropological Association's "Race and Human Variation" project (which is supported by the National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation), contributing to the reshaping of the dialogue on race in the United States.
