In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850−1950 by Alice L. Conklin (review)

In 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared that race was “less a biological fact than a social myth” (P. 1). To undergraduates in European and global history classes taking notes in lectures, the timing of the proposition that race is a historical-social construct and scientific racism equals bad science makes intuitive sense: the undeniable atrocities of the Holocaust; a decolonizing world attracted to a different science of human difference and progress (Marxism); the desegregation of the U.S. military in the Korean War; all came together in a postwar moment of accord on the perniciousness of a race-ranked world. The UNESCO declaration introduces students to the idea that “race” has a history, and that the line between scientific argument and social myth is drawn by groups of individuals in specific historical circumstances. Alice Conklin’s In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850−1950 introduces scholars to the hundred-year history of individuals, networks, and institutions in French intellectual life that culminated in French ethnologists’ active role in UNESCO’s 1950 statement.

In the Museum of Man is a massively researched example of an approach to history represented by this journal since its founding. The interrelated processes of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the rise of postcolonial studies and of novel approaches to the sociology of knowledge have together generated a new literature on expertise and its political stakes in the history of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.¹ Conklin’s work is firmly within a similar new revisionism of the history of sciences and their politics in an age of empires; refocusing questions of knowledge collecting and empire making from unveiling (mis)representations of subject peoples, or evaluation of the science of the past based on the scientific standards of the present, to asking how these colonial histories returned home, as it were, to reshape the metropole itself (Pp. 12, 190).² In the Museum of Man is an intellectual history of race thought in France, and a “multigenerational group portrait” set in “material and professional structures and the changing political and imperial contexts that conditioned [these people’s] intellectual output, their career options, their attempts to reach out to the public, and their wartime choices” (P. 16).

To uncover how these biographical paths crisscross those of science and empire over a century, Conklin has produced a deep milieu biography of the groups and networks through which a cluster of interests (including political ones) becomes a “science,” and that science in turn becomes a politics. In the process of moving through many nodes of knowledge consolidation, Conklin looks in on United Nations conference halls, nineteenth-century museum laboratories, professional journals, universities and their various institutes and “schools,” voluntary societies, museum display halls, and colonial administrations and other French “missions” beyond l’Héxagon. The book begins and ends with the 1950 UNESCO declaration on race, in the drafting of which several of Conklin’s peripheral historical actors were central figures. Between introduction and conclusion, Conklin shows how French human sciences were heirs to “an older constellation … of overlapping networks … in France and in the colonies” of institutions for studying human difference, while also part of a transnational European history of racial thought from 1900 to 1950 in which France has been wrongly marginalized (Pp. 16-17).

Most simply, In the Museum of Man gives the reader a narrative history of competing groups seeking to understand the origins and meaning of human difference through studying bodies and artifacts, and, once the consolidation of empire around 1900 made it logistically possible and politically relevant, also through ethnographic field observations. The book is organized thematically, roughly corresponding to chronology. In Chapter 1 (“Races, Bones, and Artifacts: A General Science of Man in the Nineteenth Century”, polygenist Paul Broca, a professor...