Sombre faces: Race and nation-building in the institutionalization of Czech physical anthropology (1890s-1920s)
2020
Abstract
This paper examines the complex relationship between nation building and science of race by tracing the development of Czech physical anthropology before and after WWI. I am particularly interested in the shifting epistemologies of race as part of the political economy of knowledge and its transformations in the changing historical circumstances marked by nationalism.
My argument pinpoints the ambivalence of racial theory, employed by Czech physical anthropologists, as both the precondition and product of the complex interplay between science, politics and popular culture in the early twentieth-century post-/Habsburg territories.