Biometrics and anthropometrics: the twins of Turkish modernity

ABSTRACT

In the first half of the twentieth century, eugenic debates and policies revolved around positive (encouraging the reproduction of ‘superior’ individuals) and negative (preventing the reproduction of ‘inferior’ individuals) applications for the purpose of improving hereditary characteristics and preventing social problems. However, their particular manifestations varied because eugenic agendas responded differently to putative social problems in different local contexts. Despite the wealth of scholarly studies on eugenics, particularly in Germany and the United States, eugenic debates in Turkey have so far not received any attention. The significance of eugenics in the Turkish context stems from its conflation with republican modernization efforts. While Turkish republican reformers were diligently searching for anthropometric proof of the whiteness, Europeanness and ancientness of Turks, they also supported biometric scholarship that proposed eugenic measures to protect and improve recently ‘discovered’ historical essences. At a time when western eugenicists were classifying non-western peoples as inferior, Turkish reformers creatively adopted the methods and vocabulary of race science to establish the Turks’ innate ability to modernize. In order to demonstrate the wide appeal of eugenics in the Turkish context, Ergin presents findings from a content analysis of educational conferences organized by the government between 1938 and 1941, and argues that the future-oriented project of biometrics was as important as the past-oriented project of anthropometrics for the formulation of Turkishness in negotiation with race and modernity.     

SOMATOTYPING,ANTIMODERNISM, AND THE PRODUCTION OF CRIMINOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE*

This study analyzes the work of William H. Sheldon, the psychologist, physician, and advocate of the study of body types. It investigates how he arrived at his much‐repeated finding that a correlation exists between mesomorphy (a stocky, muscular body build) and delinquency and how his ideas were validated and perpetuated. It reviews what Sheldon actually said about the causes of crime; identifies his goals in searching for a relationship between body shape and criminality; explains how he found audiences for his biological theory at a time when sociological approaches dominated criminology; and attempts to understand the current criminological ambivalence about the scientific status of Sheldon's work, despite its discreditation decades ago. I argue that the tripartite structure of Sheldon's thought attracted three different audiences–methodologists, social scientists, and supporters–and that it encouraged the supporters to fund his research without reference to the critiques of the social scientists. I also argue that somatotyping was part of a broader antimodernist reaction within international scientific communities against the dislocations of twentieth‐century life. To understand the origins, acceptance, and maintenance of criminological ideas, we need a historical perspective on figures of the past. Positivism may inform us about what is true and false, but we also need to know how truth and falsity have been constructed over time and how the ideas of earlier criminologists were shaped by their personal and social contexts.     

“Per la conservació de la raça catalana”: The Catalan Eugenics Society (1935–1937)

This article expands on existing work done on the Catalan Eugenics Society and its focus on Josep Vandellós, a demographer and organiser of the Society. It places the Catalan Eugenics Society within the growing volume of work on the international, particularly “Latin” eugenics movement. In doing so, it explores discourse on questions of “race,” immigration and “national” identity as refracted through the nascent eugenics movement and the political concerns of the time in Catalonia. In particular, the article assesses the question of “racial mixing” between Catalans and Spaniards from other regions and argues that, rather than rejecting miscegenation outright, Vandellós valued certain mixes as part of a eugenic project to fortify and maintain the Catalan “race” in the face of population loss and the dissolution of Catalan identity.     

Nazi race ideologues

ABSTRACT

Stone argues that we need to disaggregate Nazi race ideologues since they do not form one undifferentiated mass. Ultimately, all the Nazis were race ideologues and chief among them were Hitler, Himmler and the other leading figures. All of the leading Nazis, whether they dealt specifically with ‘racial policy’ or not, put forward a racialized ideology, but those who made a name for themselves specifically as race theorists did not therefore all share the same views, nor did they all contribute in equal measure to the regime's crimes. Nor did race science, however deeply it threw its lot in with Nazism, drive the regime as much as did a kind of racial mysticism, or ‘thinking with the blood’. Here Stone suggests how we might evaluate the relative contributions made to the development of the Third Reich and its crimes by race scientists of different stripes, on the one hand, and theorists of racial-political conspiracies on the other.