SEMINARI
The
Barbarian Skull: Nineteenth-Century Debates on French Ancestry
Bonnie
Effros (University
of Florida)
Divendres 26 de febrer de 2016 12.00h
Aula de
seminaris (1er pis) IMF-CSIC
c/
Egipcíaques, 15. 08001 Barcelona
Coordinen:
Oliver Hochadel (IMF-CSIC) i Margarita Díaz-Andreu (UB)
Actividad organizada por el Grupo de Historia
de la Ciencia, Institución Milà i
Fontanals (CSIC, Barcelona)
Bonnie Effros is a Professor of History and the Rothman
Chair and Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere at
the University of Florida, and currently a visiting scholar at the Centre des
études supérieures de la civilisation médiévale at the Université de Poitiers
(2015-2016). She is the author of four books, three on funerary ritual in early
medieval Gaul, and the most recent on the history of French archaeology: Uncovering
the Germanic Past: Merovingian Archaeology in France, 1830-1914 (Oxford
University Press, 2012). She is currently writing a monograph on French
colonial archaeology entitled Incidental Archaeologists: French Officers and
the (Re)discovery of Roman North Africa, 1830-1870 (Cornell University
Press).
Abstract: By the mid-nineteenth century, a new
generation of scientists adopted what they characterized as a more objective
scientific approach that harnessed empirical data gathered for this purpose.
Led in Paris by Paul Broca, a neurologist and polygenist, advocates of the
discipline of physical anthropology embraced a narrowly focused field that
excluded many of the contributions of better-established disciplines like
linguistics, phrenology, and ethnology. Armed with statistical methodologies
from the biological sciences, they moved from the tradition of measuring the
impact of environment on cultures and civilizations to identifying
physiological features as the determining factor in human difference. This
change represented a victory, at least temporarily, of quantifiable biological
measurements over more abstract hypotheses about the impact of environmental,
lifestyle, and migratory factors on human society. However, the broader
historical implication of the scientific “turn” in anthropology was that from
this point forward debate among archaeologists just as historians was grounded
upon race as an allegedly immutable characteristic of identity. Offering two
case studies from this period, that of early medieval gentes like the
Franks whose remains were thought to be found across France, and that of the
prehistoric peoples who inhabited the French colony of Algeria, I will
demonstrate the impact of national and colonial ideology on the methods and
conclusions drawn by physical anthropologists in Paris during the late
nineteenth century.
