Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany (review)

Sometimes it takes a modest, carefully-focused book, rather than a sprawling or theoretically-ambitious one, to clarify the issues in a long-running debate. Andrew Evans's Anthropology at War is such a book. Although tightly focused on German anthropologists and ethnographers in the period between about 1900 and 1930 (of whom there were no great number), Anthropology at War offers a convincing answer to the question, when exactly did racial thinking become dominant in German scholarship? Evans also offers some insight into the related question, why did racial thinking catch on? But perhaps because Evans is as much an historian of Germany as an historian of anthropology, he also throws light on some larger dynamics in German history, most importantly the generational changes which contributed to the weakening of the liberal tradition. We can learn much from this modest book—though perhaps not everything we wanted to know.

To understand Evans's contribution, we have to sketch some of the debates that have been going on for some time about the history of anthropology and of racial thought in modern Germany. One of the key questions is, how related are these two things? Was German anthropological thinking always racist? Or, did racial thought always reach for anthropological scholarship? Another question involves the timing of racism's dominance in German culture. We all know that the German-speaking world has produced many liberal thinkers, but has also produced vicious anti-Semites (including Luther) and specialists in "racial hygiene." More recently, historians have begun to study German colonial exploits overseas, and to seek there the sources, structures, or practices that might have prefigured the Nazis' racialized imperialism (for example, Hull 2005). But when did racial thinking begin to inform "respectable" scholarship? Finally, there has long been a general recognition that by the mid-1910s, German anthropological and ethnographic work was moving in different directions from French and British schools of thought (though American anthropologists, under the leadership of German exile Franz Boas, actually remained closer to German schools of thought for a decade or so longer). When exactly did this divergence set in, and why?

These obvious related questions have been answered in different, and often opposing ways. George Stocking, who first interested me in the history of anthropology as a student at the University of Chicago in the 1980s, suggested that the divergence between German and Central Europe diffusionist cultural history on the one hand, and French and British "ethnographicized" anthropology on the other was the product of charismatic functionalists (which the Germans lacked), and traditions inclined to latch on to the social-scientific ideas of Darwin, Durkheim, and Freud. Moreover, France and Britain had larger and long-lasting empires, which afforded them greater opportunities for fieldwork (for example, Stocking 1992:212-275, 356-358). Stocking's critical attempts to demythologize British and French structural-functionalism, and his careful work on American anthropology suggested that the real divergence of the traditions was a post-WWI product—though he never forgot that Franz Boas left for the United States in 1887 in part because he realized that German liberalism was under siege, and that the German university system had little room for left-of-center professors. Stocking was not interested in delving more deeply into the German tradition. But, inspired by his work, some historians of the German sciences began to investigate the origins of German anthropological uniqueness. Just to cite a few, James Ryding's (1978) important essay on diffusionism, and essays and books by Robert Proctor (1988) and Woodruff Smith (1991) underlined the importance of the passing of leading members of the "liberal" generation around 1905: Rudolf Virchow died in 1902, Friedrich Ratzel in 1904, and Adolf Bastian in 1905. I, for one, was convinced that this marked the onset of the age of German racial anthropology—though subsequently I have come to think that the peculiarities of the German and...