This book offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high-water mark of French imperialism and European racism. This book serves as a reminder that if scientific expertise once authorized racism, anthropologists also learned to rethink their paradigms and mobilize against racial prejudice—a lesson well worth remembering today.

Author takes us into the formative years of French anthropology and social theory between 1850 and 1900; then deep into the practice of anthropology, under the name of ethnology, both in Paris and in the empire before and especially after World War I; and finally, into the fate of the discipline and its practitioners under the German Occupation and its immediate aftermath.

Conklin addresses the influence exerted by academic networks, museum collections, and imperial connections in defining human diversity socioculturally rather than biologically, especially in the wake of resurgent anti-Semitism at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and in the 1930s and 1940s.


Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Races, Bones, and Artifacts: A General Science of Man in the Nineteenth Century
2. Toward a New Synthesis: Th e Birth of Academic Ethnology
3. Ethnology for the Masses: Th e Making of the Musée de l’Homme
4. Skulls on Display: Antiracism, Racism, and Racial Science
5. Ethnology: A Colonial Form of Knowledge?
6. From the Study to the Field: Ethnologists in the Empire
7. Ethnologists at War: Vichy and the Race Question
Epilogue
Selected Bibliography
Index

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