Part III. Radicalizing versus Deconstructing the Family Tree of the Human ‘Races’

Abstract

As shown in Part II, there in fact existed theories of human classification and evolution in the history of anthropology that corresponded to the notions transported by the human family tree, such as the independent evolution of human populations. Sometimes explicitly drawing on Ernst Haeckel’s phylogenies, some anthropologists published polygenist diagrams to convey their understanding of intra-human specific or even generic differences well into the twentieth century. In these visualization practices, the tree shape was increasingly radicalized through prolongation of the independent lines leading to the modern groups that were thereby constructed in hierarchical order. At the same time, while there have been critical voices that opposed this kind of thinking with diagrams at least since Charles Darwin, it is especially from the interwar period that the ‘racial trees’ came under critique as relying on a faulty understanding of genetics and evolution, and as racist – a critique that became louder in the aftermath of World War II. The debates once again related to larger politics, and also up until this time, the anthropological family tree can be connected to the pedigrees developed and used in eugenics research, most of all in studies of ‘racial mixing’.