Wandering anatomists and itinerant anthropologists: The antipodean sciences of race in Britain between the wars

British Journal for the History of Science

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 2015, Pages 1-16

  Jones, Ross L ^a   Anderson, Warwick ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ANATOMY; AUSTRALIA; COLONIALISM; CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY; PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY; RACISM;

ANATOMISTS; ANTHROPOLOGY, CULTURAL; ANTHROPOLOGY, PHYSICAL; AUSTRALIA; COLONIALISM; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; RACISM;

EID: 84922379383     PISSN: 00070874     EISSN: 1474001X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007087413000939     Document Type: Article

References (134)

1. Frederick Parsons to Frederic Wood Jones, 9 September 1922.
2. General Correspondence, Wood Jones Papers, Royal College of Surgeons Archives, London (subsequently Wood Jones Papers), MS0017/1/12.
3. For Elliot Smith's long-running dominance in the Anatomical Society see Edward Barclay-Smith, The First Fifty Years of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain& Ireland: A Retrospect, London: John Roberts, 1937, p. 22.
4. Robert Broom to Lady Elliot Smith, 12 January 1937, Letters and Papers Concerning the Life and Work of Professor Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (1871-1937)
5. Andrew Arthur Abbie Collection, Royal Anthropological Institute Archives, London (subsequently Abbie Collection), MS 423/2/8.
6. Ian Langham, The Building of British Social Anthropology: W.H.R. Rivers and His Cambridge Disciples in the Development of Kinship Studies, 1898-1931, Boston: Kluwer, 1981;
7. Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991;
8. and GeorgeW. Stocking Jr, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.
9. Kuklick, op. cit. (3), p. 129;
10. A.P. Elkin, 'Elliot Smith and the diffusion of culture', in A.P. Elkin and N.W.G. MacIntosh (eds.), Grafton Elliot Smith: The Man and His Work, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974, pp. 139-159;
11. Raymond A. Dart, 'Cultural diffusion from, in and to Africa', in Elkin and Macintosh, op. cit., pp. 160-174;
12. Warwick Anderson, 'Ambiguities of race: science on the reproductive frontiers of Australia and the Pacific between the wars', Australian Historical Studies (2009) 40, pp. 143-60;
13. and Paul Crook, Grafton Elliot Smith, Egypt and the Diffusion of Culture: A Biographical Perspective, Portland: University of Sussex Press, 2012.
14. In 1932 Elliot Smith suffered a stroke, which greatly diminished his ability to continue the battle.
15. Also, his most famous convert, W.H.R. Rivers, had died in 1922, and Rivers's students mostly became psychologists, not anthropologists.
16. Therefore diffusionism lacked a strong leader and a fresh batch of British social anthropologists willing to carry on the message in the 1930s.
17. See Kuklick, op. cit. (3), pp. 129-130.
18. Kuklick, op. cit. (3), p. 9.
19. Noel Annan, 'The intellectual aristocracy', in J.H. Plumb, Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G.M. Trevelyan, London, Longmans, 1955.
20. Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
21. Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960, London: Macmillan, 1982;
22. Kuklick, op. cit. (3);
23. and Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
24. George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative History of American and South African History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982;
25. and Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between theWorldWars, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
26. see Warwick Anderson and Vicanne Adams, 'Pramoedya's chickens: postcolonial studies of technoscience', in Edward Hackett et al. (eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, pp. 181-204;
27. and Warwick Anderson, 'From subjugated knowledge to conjugated subjects: science and globalisation, or postcolonial studies of science?', Postcolonial Studies (2009) 12, pp. 389-400.
28. Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, There Is a Transcendence from Science to Science, Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press for the Institute for the Study of Man in Africa, 1965, p. 2.
29. Le Gros Clark was professor of anatomy at the University of Oxford from 1934 to 1962;
30. see Lord Zuckerman, 'Wilfrid Edward Le Gros Clark. 1895-1971', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (1973) 19, pp. 217-233.
31. Clark, op. cit. (12), p. 2.
32. According to Keith, An Autobiography, London:Watts and Co., 1950, pp. 112-113.
33. Wood Jones wrote one the most important works on coral reefs during his stay as medical officer on the Cocos Keeling atoll in 1905.
34. Frederic Wood Jones, Coral and Atolls etc, London: Lovell Reeve, 1910.
35. See Wilfrid E. Le Gros Clark, 'Frederic Wood Jones. 1879-1954', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, (1955) 1, pp. 119-134, 120-121.
36. Grafton Elliot Smith, Human History, London: Jonathon Cape, 1930, p. 10.
37. Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, pp. 30, 26.
38. See also Arthur Keith, The Antiquity of Man, London: Williams and Norgate, 1915;
39. and Keith, New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man, New York: Norton, 1931.
40. Elliot Smith wrote to the ethnologist Charles Seligman in 1934, 'I am not surprised by Keith's confusion of Race and Nationality. He has always been confused on this'.
41. Grafton Elliot Smith to Charles G. Seligman, 15 August 1934, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/20.23.
42. Keith, op. cit. (13), pp. 201, 635.
43. Keith, op. cit. (13), pp. 238, 656.
44. Solly Zuckerman, 'Sir Grafton Elliot Smith 1871-1937', in Zuckerman (ed.), The Concepts of Human Evolution: Symposia of the Zoological Society of London, Number 33, London: Academic Press, 1973, pp. 3-21, 3.
45. Later Baron Zuckerman of Burnham Thorpe, an honour he earned after serving as chief scientific adviser to the Wilson Labour government.
46. Patricia Morison, J.T. Wilson and the Fraternity of Duckmaloi, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.
47. Grafton Elliot Smith and Frederic Wood Jones, The Archaeological Survey of Nubia: Report for 1907-1908, vol. 2: Report on the Human Remains, Survey Department, Cairo: National Printing Department, 1910.
48. Elliot Smith and Wood Jones see Arthur C. Aufderheide, The Scientific Study of Mummies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 12-14;
49. Tim Murray, Milestones in Archaeology: A Chronological Encyclopedia, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007, pp. 343-344;
50. and H.A. Waldron, 'The study of human remains from Nubia: the contribution of Grafton Elliot Smith and his colleagues to paleopathology', Medical History (2000) 44, pp. 363-388.
51. H.A. Harris, 'At University College London', in Warren R. Dawson (ed.), Sir Grafton Elliot Smith: A Biographical Record by His Colleagues, London: Jonathan Cape, 1938, pp. 169-182, 175-176.
52. Grafton Elliot Smith to Edwin Embree, 1 December 1926, p. 5, RF, 1.1, 410, 3, 29, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY.
53. See also Alfred Perkins, Edwin Rogers Embree: The Julius Rosenwald Fund, Foundation Philanthropy and American Race Relations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
54. Charles E. Rosenberg, 'Charles Benedict Davenport and the beginning of human genetics', Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1961) 35, pp. 266-276;
55. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 2nd edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 41-57;
56. and David Barker, 'The biology of stupidity: genetics, eugenics and mental deficiency in the inter-war years', BJHS (1989) 22, pp. 347-375.
57. Elliot Smith, in The Evolution of Man: Essays, London: Oxford University Press, 1924, p. 116.
58. Robert Broom, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/4.1-37.
59. Grafton Elliot Smith to Karl Pearson, 13 January 1920, Karl Pearson Papers, University College London Library Services, Special Collections and Pearson Papers, London, 856/9).
60. At the time of his death in 1937, twenty of his former demonstrators filled anatomy chairs throughout the empire and the USA.
61. Harris, op. cit. (22), p. 177;
62. Barclay-Smith, op. cit. (1), p. 22; and Elkin and Macintosh, op. cit. (4).
63. Elliot Smith came to the BAAS conference in Australia in 1914 and travelled on numerous occasions including to Java, China, Spain, and the USA. H.D. Macintosh, 'Welcome', in Black and Macintosh, op. cit. (4), pp. 3-7.
64. His trip to China was at the request of his Canadian protégé Davidson Black, who arranged for him to advertise the discovery of Peking Man. Davidson Black to Arthur Keith, 27 December 1930, Wood Jones Papers, MS0017/1/2/8.
65. T.H. Pear, 'Some early relations between English ethnologists and psychologists', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1960) 90, pp. 227-237, 228.
66. Warren R. Dawson, 'A General Biography', in Dawson, op. cit. (22), pp. 17-110, 66;
67. and A.P. Elkin, 'Sir Grafton Elliot Smith: the man and his work: a personal testimony', in Elkin and Macintosh, op. cit. (4), pp. 8-15, 9.
68. Grafton Elliot Smith to William Perry, 27 June 1916, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/17.87.
69. Bronislaw Malinowski to Elsie Malinowski, 18 June 1920, Malinowski Papers, London School of Economics Archives, London, correspondence 34/12.
70. The social anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote in 1973 that what Elliot Smith 'taught us as regards ethnology was absolute rubbish', yet he 'nevertheless he had great enthusiasm which generated a great deal of research.
71. Edmund Leach, 'Discussion', in Solly Zuckerman, op. cit. (19), pp. 432-443, 436.
72. see Grafton Elliot Smith, Bronislaw Malinowski et al., Culture: The Diffusionist Controversy, New York: Norton, 1927;
73. Wilson D. Wallis, 'Anthropology in England early in the present century', American Anthropologist (1957) 59, pp. 781-790, 783;
74. and Kuklick, op. cit. (3), pp. 125-132.
75. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 252.
76. see Grafton Elliot Smith, The Diffusion of Culture, Washington: Kennikat Press, 1971 (first published 1933), pp. 116-183.
77. First propounded in Arthur Keith, 'Presidential address: On certain factors concerned in the evolution of human races', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1916) 46, pp. 10-34.
78. See also Keith, Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View, Being the Robert Boyle Lecture Delivered before the Oxford Junior Scientific Club on November 17, 1919, London: Oxford University Press, 1919; and Keith, op. cit. (13) pp. 389-408.
79. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 497.
80. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 171.
81. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (24), p. 50.
82. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 11.
83. John L. Myres, 'International Congress', Man (1934) 34, p. 81.
84. See Myres, 'An International Congress for Anthropology and Ethnology', Man (1932) 32, pp. 10-12;
85. Man (June 1934) 34, pp. 81-82;
86. and 'News', Nature (1932) 129, p. 646.
87. Grafton Elliot Smith, 'Chairman's address', Congrès international des sciences anthropologiques et ethnologiques, compte-rendu de la première session, Londres, 1934, London: Institut royal d'anthropologie, 1934, p. 65.
88. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (38), p. 67.
89. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (38), p. 65.
90. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (38), p. 67.
91. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (38), p. 67.
92. Barkan, op. cit. (10);
93. and Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
94. Grafton Elliot Smith to Robert Broom, 9 January 1913, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/4.29.
95. Frederic Wood Jones, 'In Egypt and Nubia', in Dawson, op. cit. (22), pp. 139-148.
96. Wood Jones spent 1927-1929 in Hawaii, but he never settled into US academic life.
97. After his Melbourne stint (1930-1937).
98. Clark, op. cit. (13), p. 128.
99. Frederic Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, 13 June 1921.
100. Wood Jones complained to Keith when marsupial material he had sent to Elliot Smith and J.P. Hill, the Australian physiologist at University College, was not acknowledged.
101. FredericWood Jones to Arthur Keith, 3 January 1929, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.
102. Grafton Elliot Smith to Frederic Wood Jones, 12 December 1923, Wood Jones Papers, General Correspondence, MS0017/1/14/4/1-6.
103. Frederic Wood Jones to Mrs Celia Keith, 28 May 1905, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905-1951, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.
104. Frederic Wood Jones, Habit and Heritage, London: Kegan Paul, 1943, p. 100.
105. Frederic Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, 24 August 1927, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905-1951, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.
106. FredericWood Jones to Arthur Keith, 10 December 1926, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905-1951, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.
107. Frederic Wood Jones, Australia's Vanishing Race, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934, p. 21.
108. For example, Frederic Wood Jones to Arthur Keith, 9 November 1936, Correspondence between Sir Arthur Keith and Frederic Wood Jones, 1905-1951, Wood Jones Papers, MS0018/1/37.
109. Frederic Wood Jones, 'The non-metrical morphological characters of the skull as criteria for racial diagnosis. Part 1: General discussion of the morphological characters employed in racial diagnosis', Journal of Anatomy (1931) 65, pp. 179-195, 179.
110. Wood Jones, op. cit. (53), p. 22.
111. Wood Jones, op. cit. (53), pp. 16-17.
112. Frederic Wood Jones, 'Anatomy and a life principle', Commemoration Address, Adelaide University, 1923, in Life and Living, London: Kegan Paul, 1939, pp. 111-136, 121.
113. Frederic Wood Jones, Habit and Heritage, London: Kegan Paul, 1943, pp. 10-11.
114. see D.P. Crook, Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology ofWar from the 'Origin of Species' to the First World War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
115. Elliot Smith, op. cit. (14), p. 11, p. 10.
116. These became Grafton Elliot Smith, Tutankhamen and the Discovery of His Tomb, London: Routledge, 1923.
117. see Keith, op. cit. (13), pp. 326-327.
118. Grafton Elliot Smith, the University of Manchester, the John Rylands Library, Manchester, GB 133 GES/1/1.
119. see Phillip V. Tobias, Peter J. Bowler, Andrew T. Cunningham, Christopher Chippendale, Robyn W. Dennell, F.G. Fedele, Paul Graves, Caroline Grigson, G. Ainsworth Harrison, Francis B. Harrold, Kenneth A.R. Kennedy, Martin K. Nickels, Nicholas Rolland, Curtis Runnels, Frank Spencer, C.B. Stringer, N.C. Tappen, Bruce G. Trigger, Sherwood Washburn and R.V.S. Wright, 'Piltdown: an appraisal of the case against Sir Arthur Keith [and Comments and Reply]', Current Anthropology (1992) 33, pp. 243-293.
120. Grafton Elliot Smith to Donald Alexander McKenzie (1873-1936, Scottish journalist and prolific writer on anthropology), 16 February 1930, Abbie Collection, MS 423/1/15.11.
121. He published a pen portrait of Smith in the popular journal of the cooperative movement, The Millgate, in June 1932.
122. Alongside Smith was John Maynard Keynes and, in the same series later in the year, Joseph Stalin. See James Leslie Mitchell, 'Grafton Elliot Smith: anthropologist, historian, humanist', The Millgate (1931) 26, pp. 579-582;
123. and Alice Burley, 'A note on the publication of James Leslie Mitchell's "Grafton Elliot Smith: A Student of Mankind"', Notes and Queries (March 2008), pp. 46-48.
124. Barry E. Christophers, 'Frederic Wood Jones: his major books and how they were reviewed', Australian and New Zealand Journal of Surgery (1997) 67, pp. 645-659, 646.
125. see Clark, op. cit. (13), p. 122.
126. An early criticism of the historiography of British social anthropology by one of its distinguished players can be found in Edmund Leach, 'Glimpses of the unmentionable in the history of British social anthropology', Annual Review of Anthropology (1984) 13, pp. 1-23.
127. George W. Stocking Jr, 'The critique of racial formalism', in Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 161-194;
128. Frank Spencer, 'The rise of academic physical anthropology in the United States (1880-1980): a historical overview', American Journal of Physical Anthropology (1981) 56, pp. 353-364;
129. GeorgeW. Stocking Jr (ed.), Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Anthropology and the German Anthropological Tradition, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996;
130. and Robert Oppenheim, 'Revisiting Hrdlicka and Boas: asymmetries of race and anti-imperialism in interwar anthropology', American Anthropologist (2010) 112, pp. 92-103.
131. Robert Proctor, 'From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German anthropological tradition', in George W. Stocking Jr (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, pp. 138-179;
132. H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in an Age of Empire, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003;
133. H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007;
134. and Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.