Project title

A Race without Geslacht? Blood(lines) in physical-anthropological research in Dutch New-Guinea (1920 -1962)

Research question

When race became increasing defined as heriditary from the 1920s onwards, how did Dutch physical-anthropologists in New-Guinea negotiate in practice the measuring of bodies and blood and the geneaological or ancestral notions of the Papuans themselves?

Project description

Until the 1920s, German and Dutch physical anthropology was built on a deeply racialised division between so-called Naturvölker and Kulturvölker — between peoples deemed to have no history (“primitives”) and those who did. Research focused on morphology: differences in skulls and outer appearance, ideally studied in populations considered “pure” and isolated.

Under the growing influence of the eugenicist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, however, hereditary notions of race began to displace morphology as the core element of racial thinking. This shift created a fundamental problem: how could race be understood as hereditary without reference to geslacht — genealogy, ancestry, and sexual mixing? And how did physical anthropologists deal with this problem in practice?

Selected publications

  • Geertje Mak, Doubting Sex. Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in nineteenth-century Hermaphrodite Case Histories (Manchester University Press 2012)
  • Geertje Mak ‘The Sex of Self and its Ambiguities’, In: D. McCallum ed., The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences,
    https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_75-2
  • Geertje Mak, Marit Monteiro, Elizabeth Wesseling, (2020). Child Separation: (Post)Colonial Policies and Practices in the Netherlands and Belgium. BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 135(3-4), 4-28. https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10871