Beyond the typology–population binary

From the perspective of the recent historiography of the United Nations, it is not surprising that UNESCO's anti-racism initiatives were shaped by colonial knowledge practices. In contrast to institutional histories or histories of the UN system as a lost internationalist utopia, recent treatments emphasize the continuities between the UN system, European colonialism and the rise of US global hegemony. These histories demonstrate how the philosophies espoused by the most influential intellectual architects of the UN and UNESCO, such as the South African philosopher Jan Smuts and the British biologist Julian Huxley, were part of a liberal imperial internationalism. These internationalist philosophies combined ecological proposals for cooperation between white settler nations, policies of racial segregation and arguments about the need for white experts to tutor non-white races.Footnote ¹² Similarly, as the career of Isaiah Bowman demonstrates (Bowman was a US geographer who was a key architect of the UN), the creation of the UN system was also important for the consolidation of an American empire that established global control not through territorial conquest per se but rather through economic conquest.Footnote ¹³ Instead of seeing the early years of the UN and its allied agencies as a straightforward triumph of liberal internationalism and human rights, recent histories emphasize the continuities between the rise of the UN system and colonial institutions such as the League of Nations that served the political and economic interests of Western Europe and the US.

The influence of this colonial perspective can be seen in the preparatory documents and meeting minutes for UNESCO's 1949 meeting of race experts. According to these documents, the UN called this meeting not because it was concerned with how to conceptualize human biological variation, but rather because it was concerned with how scientific knowledge could be used for the practical task of reducing racial prejudice in a rapidly changing world. In fact, as Edward Lawson – the UN representative at the 1949 meeting – explained at the outset of the meeting, the UN's Division of Human Rights and Department of Social Affairs had already concluded that ‘the concept of a definition of race was scientifically illegitimate and that there was no way to define race in any acceptable way’.Footnote ¹⁴ As such, Lawson reminded the participants in the 1949 meeting that the UN did not expect them to concern themselves ‘with theoretical questions’. Instead of attempting to define a scientifically illegitimate concept, Lawson suggested that it would be more useful for the committee to make a ‘clear scientific statement of facts which could not be challenged by anyone in the world’ and which ‘could be translated into hundreds of languages and sent out to people everywhere as guides to teaching about race’.Footnote ¹⁵ Lawson thus urged the committee to ‘take practical measures to solve the problem of racial prejudices’.

The preparatory documents also reveal how the issue of practical measures against racial prejudice was framed in the context of the changing social relations brought about by European imperialism. In one document, the Chicago-trained sociologist and pioneering urbanist Louis Wirth argued that many of the key concepts used in the UN's reports on race – such as discrimination, prejudice and minorities – were poorly defined and undertheorized. To clarify the use of these terms, Wirth stressed the need for more sociological rigour and for more ‘empirical descriptive study’ of the ‘factors accounting for racial, religious and related types of prejudice’.Footnote ¹⁶ As examples of such studies, Wirth proposed comparative research on ‘race relations and minority problems on a world-wide scale’ with an eye to shedding light on ‘the range of possibilities and hence alterability of minority status’. Wirth also suggested that racial and cultural problems were related to the historical processes of ‘migration, conquest, colonization, the rise of cities and the development of an industrial civilization’.Footnote ¹⁷ The effect of these historical processes, Wirth argued, is that ‘peoples of various characteristics have mingled and sometimes blended both biologically and culturally’, thus minimizing ‘isolation’. Given this framing, it is not surprising that the experts invited to the 1949 meeting were primarily social scientists as opposed to geneticists or physical anthropologists.

Despite this stated interest in practical measures against racial prejudice and the changing nature of race relations, the 1950 and 1951 UNESCO statements primarily address biological and anthropological aspects of race and reconceptualize race from the perspective of population genetics. Both statements emphasize that all humans are descended from a common evolutionary stock; that races are dynamic and not static entities; that the intraracial variability of biological traits is greater than the interracial variability; and that racial formation is the result of random evolutionary processes, including genetic drift, mutation, hybridization and geographic isolation. Further, both statements argue against the notion of pure races and the notion that races can be ranked hierarchically. Instead they characterize race as a nominal classificatory device that allows scientists to classify groups based on the frequency of specific physical or genetic traits within a population, yet denies the existence of racial essences. Similarly, both statements agree on the anti-typological argument that cultural traits do not coincide with racial traits, and on the view that the differences in ‘cultural achievements’ between cultural groups are the result of differing cultural histories as opposed to genetic endowments.Footnote ¹⁸

The disconnect between the practical aims described in the preparatory documents and the final statements can be explained by the role played by the British American physical anthropologist Ashley Montagu. At the outset of the 1949 meeting, the participants elected Montagu the meeting rapporteur. After a few sessions of sterile debate, Montagu sought to speed up the deliberations and took it upon himself to draft large parts of what became the 1950 statement on his own. Montagu trained under Franz Boas at Columbia University during the 1930s and was also influenced by the population geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who signed the 1950 statement and was on the drafting committee for the 1951 statement. Critics of the 1950 statement took to calling it the ‘Ashley Montagu Statement’, and Montagu was the only participant from the 1949 meeting who was involved in drafting the 1951 statement, which was meant to be a response to criticism of the 1950 statement. Montagu's prominence in this episode has led scholars to identify Columbian cultural anthropology and the modern evolutionary synthesis as the most important intellectual influences on the statements. However, Dobzhanksy and Montagu were not alone in drafting these statements. In fact, the statements benefited from the input of hundreds of scientists worldwide. Many of these scientists, and particularly those who formed part of the 1949 committee, had little familiarity with population genetics and the neo-Darwinian conceptions of evolution advanced by the proponents of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Indeed, as the rest of this essay will demonstrate, the participants in the 1949 committee were situated within streams of racial thought from the global South, which also exerted a significant influence on the debates that took place when the 1950 statement was drafted. By moving beyond Columbia University and considering the broad range of actors whose voices figured in making the 1950 statement, this paper achieves a new perspective. The statement appears more like a tangled crossroads than a discrete signpost in the shifting scientific trajectory of racial conceptions.

Racial uplift during the interwar period

The social scientists who drafted the 1950 statement were influenced by diverse currents in the human sciences, of which Boasian cultural anthropology was but one among many others. These currents included purposive conceptions of human biology and social change that drew from Spencerian and Lamarckian conceptions of evolution and racial progress rather than the historical contingency of the evolutionary synthesis. Indeed, the participants in the 1949 meeting were located within traditions of human science that attached conceptions of race to discussions about the improvability of so-called backward peoples and sought to understand the relations between consciousness, the environment and social change. For the 1949 committee members, opposition to racial prejudice was also deeply intertwined with the issue of how to uplift the lives of populations deemed culturally and psychologically maladjusted to the economic strains of emerging urban industrial societies in the southern hemisphere. It was due to this concern with adjusting non-European bodies and minds to the rigours of modern, technological life that rigid racial typologies became an object of critique.

The South American participants in the 1949 meeting offer a prime example of the conceptual links between anti-racism and notions of racial uplift and modernization. For the South American participants, the extensive racial mixing of their populations defied easy classification systems. Instead of slotting their populations into rigid biological taxonomies, they conceptualized racial differences as rooted in psychology and social consciousness and as subject to improvement and reform. Arthur Ramos, the meeting's late organizer, illustrates how conceptions of race in Brazil were oriented towards issues concerning economic development and cultural improvement. Ramos trained as a psychiatrist during the 1920s in the illustrious Bahian school of tropical medicine, where he was deeply influenced by the racialist theories and writings of the criminal anthropologist Nina Rodrigues. Though Ramos saw himself as Rodrigues's disciple, he began to distance himself from Rodrigues's pessimistic outlook for Afro-Brazilians’ future during the 1930s, when the authoritarian administration of Getulio Vargas pushed for a rapid modernization of Brazil's economy.Footnote ¹⁹ Instead of seeing Afro-Brazilians as disposed to criminality through heredity, Ramos turned to Boasian cultural anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis and Lévy-Bruhl's theories about the primitive mind for insights into Afro-Brazilian culture. As part of this reorientation, Ramos began studying Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religious tradition, to gain insight into primitive thought and how it might be reassembled and elevated to a more advanced state of civilization. In his best-known work, O Negro Brasileiro, Ramos insisted that the terms ‘primitive’ and ‘archaic’ that he used to describe Brazil's black populations were strictly ‘psychological’ concepts and had nothing to do with the ‘question of racial inferiority’.Footnote ²⁰ Afro-Brazilian ‘backwardness’ was not due to a biological or hereditary deficiency, Ramos argued, but rather an inferior culture and primitive mentality that could be transformed and improved through modern education and mental hygiene.Footnote ²¹

During the Vargas era, Ramos celebrated the contributions of Afro-descendent populations to Brazilian society while conducting research on Afro-Brazilian improvement and mental hygiene through Brazil's public education system.Footnote ²² In 1933, Ramos was appointed head of the Orthophrenology and Mental Hygiene section of the Institute for Education Research in Rio de Janeiro. During his tenure, Ramos used the Rio school system as a social laboratory to test ideas about the cultural improvability of backward races and turned his attention to child psychology and preventive mental hygiene while conducting research on problem children and on the adaptation of Afro-Brazilians to modern society. Based on this research, Ramos identified pathological aspects of Afro-Brazilian culture that stood as obstacles to its members’ societal advancement and began advocating for reforms of the school system that would instil scientific values in children. The hopeful vision offered by Ramos's approach coincided with the modernizing and nationalist aspirations of the authoritarian Vargas regime, which lasted from 1930 to 1945. After seizing power through a coup d’état in 1930, the Vargas regime sought to rapidly transform Brazil from a traditional agricultural economy to a modern industrial one and thus forge a distinct national identity that emphasized Brazil's difference from its colonial European past.Footnote ²³ In seeking out this new identity or brasilidade, the Vargas regime celebrated the unique African and indigenous contributions to Brazilian culture yet envisioned that Brazil's progress towards modernity would be accelerated through neo-Lamarckian eugenic measures designed to whiten Brazil's population through mechanisms such as improved hygiene, physical education programmes and increased racial mixing.Footnote ²⁴ Through his work in the Rio school system, Ramos distinguished himself as a pioneering figure in a generation of educational reformers who sought to ‘imprint their white, elite vision of an ideal Brazil nation on those mostly poor and non-white children who were to be the substance of that ideal’.Footnote ²⁵

During his short-lived spell as director of UNESCO's social-science department, Ramos sought to expand this elite conception of race beyond the national frame of Brazil. According to his protégé Luiz Aguiar Costa-Pinto, Ramos envisioned using his post at UNESCO to turn Brazil and Latin America more broadly into a laboratory for the study of race relations and to conduct a wide survey on the social and economic conditions of ‘relatively backwards peoples’ in Africa and Latin America. Although he did not live to see these projects, UNESCO did indeed organize a cycle of studies on race relations in Brazil after his death. This cycle of studies uncovered emerging racial tensions in Rio and São Paulo and questioned the ‘racial-democracy’ thesis of previous ethnographic studies, which were typically based on the less industrial region of Bahia.Footnote ²⁶ Luiz Aguiar Costa-Pinto's sociological study of urban blacks in Rio de Janeiro was exemplary of this new genre. In his UNESCO-sponsored study O Negro No Rio de Janeiro (1952), Luiz Aguiar Costa-Pinto insisted that the study of race relations needed to move beyond the ethnographic approach of his mentors (Ramos and Rodrigues), which he characterized as narrowly focused on documenting the bizarre and exotic aspects of Afro-Brazilian culture and attempting to trace African survivals. Costa-Pinto argued that this narrow ethnographic approach was ill-suited to the rapidly shifting economic structure of Brazilian society, and proposed that instead of the ethnographers’ concern with the ‘integration of the African into Brazil’, what was needed was ‘serious sociological study’ of the ‘integration of the black Brazilian into Brazilian society’.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, Costa-Pinto argued that a sociological approach that took the economic and political interests of Afro-Brazilians seriously was required by the rapid industrialization and urbanization taking place in Brazil's major cities, which was transforming the economic structure of Brazilian society and increasing racial tension. Thus, in contrast to his mentors, who viewed race through the prism of culture and folklore, Luiz Aguiar Costa-Pinto conceptualized race as something emergent from and embedded in the interplay between economic structures, interpersonal relations and political ideologies.Footnote ²⁸

The Brazilian representatives at the 1949 meeting were primarily concerned with race as it pertained to the future of Afro-descendent populations in the Americas. By contrast, Juan Comas, the Spanish Mexican anthropologist at the 1949 meeting, was primarily concerned with race insofar as it concerned the assimilation of indigenous populations in Mexico and the Americas. A Spanish exile from the Franco regime, Comas trained as a physical anthropologist with the Swiss anthropologist Eugène Pittard during the 1930s, then in 1940 fled to Mexico, where he taught physical anthropology and became an important figure in the indigenismo movement through his work for the Instituto Indigenista Interamericano in Mexico City. Indigenismo was a diverse political, economic and cultural movement that was defined and institutionalized by scientific and cultural elites with strong ties to Latin America's nationalist movements in the early twentieth century. Although it had distinct national variants, historians of indigenismo have noted that it was characterized by contradictory impulses in which eugenic conceptions of acculturation coexisted with a politics that called for the celebration of indigenous heritage as a nation-building strategy.Footnote ²⁹

Juan Comas's writings on race perfectly illustrate the ambivalent trajectory of indigenismo. In work published by UNESCO, Comas offered potent critiques of biological conceptions of race while calling for the rapid assimilation of indigenous groups in the Americas. For instance, in the UNESCO booklet Racial Myths (1951), Comas argued that the concept of race is one that implies the ‘existence of groups presenting certain similarities in somatic characteristics which are perpetuated according to the laws of biological inheritance’. Based on this hereditary conception of race, Comas argued that ‘racial prejudice’ did not exist before the Iberian conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth century. While there were certainly many examples of cultural antagonism towards other groups before European colonization, Comas insisted that these were not characterized by a ‘division of mankind into antagonistic races’ or by prejudice based on ‘implacable laws of heredity’. The origins of modern racism, Comas argued, could thus be found in ‘the beginning of African colonization and the discovery of America and of the trans-Pacific sea route to India’ when ‘there was a considerable increase in race and colour prejudice’ fuelled by ‘economic self-interest’ and a need to justify the practice of slavery.

A year after the publication of Racial Myths, Comas drew upon indigenista conceptions of acculturation in an article describing the importance of cultural anthropology for UNESCO's fundamental education projects in the Americas. Although he did not speak directly about race in this article, his assessment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas emphasized how they were held back by entrenched cultural differences and patterns of oppression stemming from colonial conquest. The Americas, Comas argued, were home to more than 30 million ‘Indians’ or ‘Natives’ with ‘specific cultural characteristics’ that differed from what was known as ‘white’ or ‘western’ civilization. Because of ‘three centuries of conquest and colonization’, this huge population now existed at an ‘exceedingly low social level, expressed in the poorest economic conditions and standards of living, which prevents its rapid assimilation as an active factor of national production and consumption’.Footnote ³⁰ Comas further argued that UNESCO could play a crucial role in lifting the indigenous populations out of this position of chronic backwardness through culturally sensitive fundamental education projects emphasizing basic literacy and hygiene, and cited the work of leading indigenistas such as the Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio as models for how this work could be done. Gamio argued that Mexico's indigenous populations were biologically and racially deficient due to centuries of socio-economic oppression, and vigorously promoted applied anthropological studies of the culture and material conditions of indigenous populations that would inform state-backed initiatives in the realms of education and public health.Footnote ³¹ From this developmentalist framework, Comas and Gamio thus conceptualized indigenous groups as racially and culturally inferior due to centuries of European oppression, while anticipating a prosperous future in which indigenous groups would be freed from their degraded status through absorption into the modern apparatus of the post-revolutionary Mexican state.

This interest in social evolution and racial improvement was shared by the other committee members who drafted the 1950 UNESCO statement. But whereas the South American participants often blurred distinctions between culture and biology in their work, the other participants tended to create sharp distinctions between these domains. For instance, Morris Ginsberg and Ernest Beaglehole were both products of a British sociological tradition that embraced comparative studies of the social institutions of different races as a means of studying evolution in a strictly social sense. This sociological approach was one that emerged out of the sociology department at the London School of Economics and was strongly shaped by the writings of the liberal philosopher Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse. Hobhouse was an admirer of Herbert Spencer and sought to reformulate Spencer's conception of evolution by further placing human psychology and human agency at the centre. In contrast to Malthusian and eugenic conceptions of race that saw little hope in social reform, Hobhouse articulated a purposive conception of evolution that recognized the formation of social institutions such as moral codes, cultural traditions and systems of mutual aid as a domain where evolutionary processes occurred that could not be explained in biological terms.Footnote ³²

This conception of social evolution was also shared by Morris Ginsberg, who was born into a Jewish family from Lithuania and later trained with Hobhouse and eventually succeeded him as chair of LSE's sociology department. Ginsberg's approach to sociology was also deeply indebted to the classic works of nineteenth-century liberalism and especially the work of Herbert Spencer. Indeed, Ginsberg argued that one of the central insights of Spencer's philosophy was the importance of ‘comparing rudimentary societies with one another and with societies in different stages of progress’.Footnote ³³ Through such comparison, Ginsberg suggested, sociologists could discover ‘common traits of structure and function as well as certain common traits of development’. Indeed, Ginsberg suggested, ‘to discover the conditions of social growth, arrest, and decay, is one of the principal tasks of sociology’.Footnote ³⁴

This Spencerian interest in discovering the conditions of social growth and decay permeates a landmark book by Hobhouse and Ginsberg titled The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples: An Essay in Correlation (1915). In this book, Hobhouse and Ginsberg sought to establish a ‘social morphology’ of the social and political institutions of ‘those less fortunate races which range from the lowest known Naturmenschen to the confines of the historic civilisation’.Footnote ³⁵ To craft this social morphology, Hobhouse and Ginsberg combed over a vast body of colonial ethnographic data on ‘simpler peoples’ from Australia and Oceania, Latin America, Asia, Africa and North America. They then used these data to test whether ‘the advance of human knowledge’ as it concerned the ‘understanding and control of natural forces’ carried ‘any distinct movement in morals, law, religion, the general organisation of society’,Footnote ³⁶ and to classify the social institutions of the ‘less fortunate races’ according to their varying stages of economic advancement.Footnote ³⁷ Their methods also involved crafting tables and charts that established statistical correlations between economic development and social institutions such as methods of justice, family and marriage practices, and property arrangements. In this classic treatise in imperial sociology, Hobhouse and Ginsberg thus sought to offer a non-biological account of racial progress and social evolution that was rigorously grounded in the thick data of a colonial ethnographic archive.Footnote ³⁸

This concern with the growth and decay of the social institutions of simpler peoples was also central to the work of the New Zealander Ernest Beaglehole, who conducted his doctoral studies in LSE's sociology department with Ginsberg. In his first book, Property: A Study in Social Psychology (1932), Beaglehole conceptualized the psychological basis of property as stemming from a ‘sentiment of possession’ or ‘grouping of various emotional tendencies about the property object itself’, as opposed to an innate biological instinct.Footnote ³⁹ This affective conception of property, Beaglehole reasoned, required taking into account both ‘psychological fact’ and ‘social data’, and investigating the manner in which ‘aggregated sentiment’ is ‘moulded by, and in turn moulds, the economic culture patterns of a group’.Footnote ⁴⁰ To understand property sentiments in their most basic form, and observe how they are moulded by culture and built up into social institutions, Beaglehole assumed the unity ‘of all animal life’ and compared the behaviours and practices of animals (insects, birds and mammals), ‘simpler peoples’ and children in civilized societies. Amongst animals, Beaglehole identified a ‘primitive property value’ that was the result of an ‘organic striving which appropriates from the environment material for self-provision, self-development and racial perpetuation’.Footnote ⁴¹ Among simpler peoples, Beaglehole described a ‘cultural patterning of property values’ where a set of cultural mores ‘moulds the raw stuff of human nature into conformity with its own demands and practices’.Footnote ⁴² And in his discussion of groups with ‘higher levels of intelligence’ Beaglehole argued that this cultural patterning of property values moulded the individual personality and adapted ‘one child to a communist organization of society and another to a Western capitalist society’.Footnote ⁴³ Reflecting the Spencerian leanings of his mentors, Beaglehole thus crafted a social-psychological taxonomy of property sentiments and probed the ways in which social institutions emerge and develop out of the raw biological material of human nature.

After his doctoral work, Beaglehole's interest in cross-cultural comparison led him to the anthropology department at Yale, which was then the leading centre for the culture and personality movement led by the linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir. During his time at Yale, Beaglehole conducted extensive fieldwork in Hawaii, New Zealand and Polynesia with the support of Yale's field station – the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. In Honolulu, Beaglehole collaborated closely with the Māori physician-turned-anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck) and the physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro, both of whom studied race mixing enthusiastically and conducted extensive anthropometric studies of Polynesians.Footnote ⁴⁴ Hiroa and Shapiro's influence is particularly evident in a 1943 article where Beaglehole argued that the concept of race is a valuable tool for ‘the physical anthropologist and the human biologist’, but has no value for the social scientist trying to understand ‘contact between peoples’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Though tainted by such popularizers of the doctrine of ‘race superiority’ as Hitler and Gobineau, the race concept was, at Beaglehole's insistence, nevertheless necessary for studying human biological variation. Careful to avoid conceptualizing human variation as static, Beaglehole described how the human species was characterized by a terrific ‘variability increased by an incredible amount of inter-mixing, blending, and hybridization’ and by ‘an occasional stabilization of physical type in the past due to the isolation of peoples behind impenetrable geographical barriers’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Given this continual process of racial formation, Beaglehole argued that the concept of race had some value for human biology. Yet for the social sciences, Beaglehole argued that race generally implies the notion that social and psychological phenomena are ‘determined by heredity and therefore fixed and unalterable’, and thus had no value for ‘understanding the contact between peoples, whether this contact is cooperative or competitive’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus a common thread in Beaglehole's work before the 1949 meeting is the contention that social institutions and processes must be understood separately from the biological basis of human nature and human variation. However, his work also insisted that society, culture and biology are interrelated and that cultural patterns and choices thus play an important role in shaping human biological variation.

Although he shared a similar trajectory to Beaglehole, Ashley Montagu arrived at the conclusion that race has no legitimacy or value in the study of human variation. Before commencing his PhD work at Columbia with Boas, Montagu studied social anthropology with Bronislaw Malinowski at LSE and wrote a paper on a debate that was central to settler-colonial anthropology: whether Australian Aboriginals were ‘nescient’ of the link between the act of coitus and biological reproduction.Footnote ⁴⁸ Montagu developed this work into his first book, Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines (1937), which sought to dispel the idea that aboriginal ‘nescience’ about the link between coitus and pregnancy stemmed from a primitive mentality.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet instead of conducting fieldwork, Montagu reviewed settler-colonial ethnographies and concluded that Aboriginals' beliefs about pregnancy were in fact consistent with their ‘particular conceptual system’. In other words, Montagu reasoned, the ‘mind of the native functions in exactly the same way as our own’ but is differentiated by the ‘premises upon which that functioning is based’ and by ‘categories and forms of judgement’ which are ‘different though quite as rigorously organized as our own’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus, Montagu explained, Australian aboriginals could not be said to be ignorant of the physiological relationships between mother, father and child, but rather operated within a conceptual framework wherein ‘the concept of blood relationship or consanguinity is impossible to them’.Footnote ⁵¹ By adopting this relativist perspective, Montagu sought to redeem Aboriginals by rendering their beliefs the product of culture rather than a sign of innate biological primitivism. His analysis, in other words, left an opening for improvement and reform.

Though Coming into Being sought to position so-called primitive peoples within the same cognitive and biological plane as ‘civilized’ Westerners, Montagu's later anti-racist texts mobilized Malinowski's concept of ‘cultural contacts’ to describe Aboriginals as occupying a culturally and temporally distant space. For instance, in his acclaimed anti-racist book Man's Most Dangerous Myth (1942), which argued that the concept of race was so ridden with fallacies that it should no longer be used, Montagu described Australian aboriginals as peoples stuck in an anterior time, existing anachronistically within the modern world.Footnote ⁵² What truly separated Aboriginals from ‘modern civilization’, Montagu argued, was not racial type or genetic endowment but rather a difference in ‘experience’ and ‘variety of cultural contacts’. Indeed, Montagu mused, ‘we of the Western world have packed more experience into the past two thousand years than have the Australian aborigines, during their 60,000 years of continuous settlement of Australia’.Footnote ⁵³ Thus, although he is best known for his critiques of racial typologies, Montagu's interpretations of Aboriginal primitivism reveal the latent influence of settler-colonial anthropology and racialized development.

While Montagu's work explained civilizational differences by evoking anachronistic tropes, E. Franklin Frazier – a black US sociologist and elected chairman for UNESCO's 1949 meeting – sought to understand the ‘adjustment’ and assimilation of African Americans to ‘modern civilization’ in the historical context of slavery and the transition to freedom.Footnote ⁵⁴ When the 1949 meeting took place, Frazier's career was on the rise. He was head of Howard University's sociology department and had just finished serving a term as the first black president of the American Sociological Association. From 1951 to 1953 he acted as chief of the Division of Applied Social Sciences at UNESCO and used the opportunity to conduct research in the West Indies on race and culture contacts. Frazier trained with the Chicago sociologist Robert Park in the 1920s and retained much of his ecological approach to studying the assimilation of racial minorities into the modern industrial culture of US cities. During the 1930s, Frazier published two influential books on the sociology of black families – The Negro Family in Chicago (1932) and The Negro Family in the US (1939) – which established him as a leading expert on the effects of slavery on black families in the US. In these studies, Frazier sought to understand the ‘Negro Family’ both as a ‘natural human association and as a social institution subjected to the severest stress and strains of social change’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Unlike the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, whose work sought to document the survival of African cultural practices in the Americas, Frazier argued that Afro-descendents in the Americas lost their cultural heritage during slavery and were forced to develop new cultural patterns and family structures dictated by the desires of their masters.Footnote ⁵⁶ His research thus sought to understand the ongoing social adaptations of black families and how they were shaped by processes of acculturation and assimilation. In tracing the social history of black families, Frazier's work also sought to understand how they could be more effectively assimilated in the future. For instance, The Negro Family concluded that although African American assimilation had been near impossible in the past, the shift to a highly mobile and urbanized society where ‘caste prescriptions lose their force’ was creating the conditions for ever-closer association between ‘Negroes and whites in the same occupational classes’. These emerging associations held the potential for a more comprehensive social change. ‘Intermarriage in the future’, Frazier augured, ‘will bring about a fundamental type of assimilation’, and ‘the gains in civilization which result from participation in the white world will in the future be transmitted to future generations through the family’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Like many of the participants in the 1949 meeting, Frazier thus placed great faith in racial mixing, cultural exchange and intermarriage as practical measures for integrating African Americans – and other racial minorities – into US society, thus improving their standing in the civilizational hierarchy presumed by social science in this period.

This practical concern for understanding the mechanisms of social change was also shared by perhaps the meeting's best-known participant – the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss's participation in the 1949 meeting was his first of several contributions to UNESCO's anti-racist efforts and marks the beginning of a long and at times strained relationship with the organization.Footnote ⁵⁸ In his bestselling UNESCO booklet Race et histoire (1952), Lévi-Strauss sought to refute ‘the original sin of anthropology’, which he described as the confusion between the idea of race ‘in a biological sense’ and the psychological and sociological ‘productions of human civilizations’. More narrowly, Lévi-Strauss sought to explain the seeming historical advance of the ‘white man's civilization’ relative to the ‘civilisations of the coloured peoples’, without positing the existence of ‘innate racial aptitudes’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Instead of innate racial aptitudes, Lévi-Strauss posited that the differences in scientific and technological achievement between ‘civilizations’ were shaped by ‘geographical, historical, and sociological circumstances’, and especially by the degree to which a society establishes and maintains mutual exchanges with other societies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Societies that prioritize mutual exchange and remain open to others, Lévi-Strauss argued, become what he called ‘cumulative cultures’ and stand a better chance of pooling knowledge and techniques that allow for cultural progress. By contrast, societies that remain isolated and hostile towards others – which he called ‘stationary cultures’ – diminish their chances of accumulating innovations and thus doom themselves to stagnation.Footnote ⁶¹ In offering this non-racial interpretation of the mechanisms that underpin societal development, Lévi-Strauss presented a redemptive narrative that glossed over European colonialism and positioned ‘the West’ as an unquestioned pinnacle of civilizational achievement. Similarly, by rejecting explanations appealing to biological difference, Lévi-Strauss offered hope to those ‘stationary cultures’ trapped by their self-imposed isolation, and suggested that they might join the fold of modernity through greater exchange with advanced cumulative cultures. By emphasizing the capacity of all civilizations to advance and the importance of exchange and cooperation, Lévi-Strauss's message was tailor-made to the liberal ideals of UNESCO and the UN system.Footnote ⁶²

The research programmes of the 1949 ‘race experts’ thus reveal common themes and modes of analysis drawn from social-science traditions that emerged in tandem with or in response to European colonialism and US expansionism. Though the participants shared an aversion to fixed racial typologies, this did not mean that they abandoned racial conceptions altogether. In fact, their research relied upon conceptions of race that theorized human biological variation as subject to continual change through cultural and environmental forces and focused on immaterial objects such as social institutions, cultural patterns, family structures and personality types as crucial sites for studying the historical formation and evolution of racial consciousness. Within this anti-racist racial regime, the apparent alterability of social institutions, cultural patterns and the physical body was upheld as evidence that ‘simpler peoples’ could and should escape their hapless state of cultural and even biological inferiority. For these anti-racist scientists, typological conceptions of race thus opposed the purposive conceptions of social change in which they were so invested, and denied backward ‘races’ their rightful incorporation into an imagined industrial and urban modernity. In this regard, the outlook of the 1949 committee was well aligned with Louis Wirth's proposal for comparative studies of race relations and racial prejudice on a worldwide scale. And it was precisely this grand comparative outlook and concern for understanding the socio-economic dimensions of race development and decay that reveal the committee's indebtedness to imperial social science.Footnote ⁶³ In short, for the 1949 committee, critiques of racial typologies paved the way for an increased investment in studying processes of social, cultural and historical change, and for developing frameworks to guide projects of racialized development.

Drafting the UNESCO statement and looking to the future

The final statement was both a collective artefact and a document that reflected the influence of Montagu and his ambition to undermine the scientific credibility of ‘the race concept’. Due to Montagu's influence, the 1950 statement rehearsed a series of well-known arguments in North Atlantic debates concerning the differences between typological and population approaches to human biology. Yet a close look at the discussions that took place during the 1949 meetings in Paris reveals the influence of the southern streams of racial thought described in the previous section. For instance, when the committee attempted to define race, E. Franklin Frazier reminded the committee that definitions of ‘race’ varied significantly across countries. Frazier drew attention to the fact ‘that his own “race” would vary widely according to the country where he found himself: it would be defined very differently in the United States, Brazil, Porto Rico [sic], or Jamaica’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Accordingly, Frazier suggested that the committee should consider a statement ‘outlining the development of the concept of race’. But instead of looking to genetics, Frazier proposed a statement including physical anthropologists’ criteria for the ‘separation of groups’, consideration of ‘the confusion of race and culture’, and a review of ‘acculturation and changes in the culture of the so-called backward peoples of the world’. Frazier's envisioned statement also gestured towards social psychology and sociology and proposed data on ‘racial psychology’ and its relation to ‘racial and cultural differences such as emotional, temperamental and intellectual ones’, and a discussion of how ‘race prejudice was influenced by physical and cultural differences between groups’. In addition, Frazier proposed sociological discussions of how children acquire ‘racial consciousness’, as well as discussions of ‘the types of interaction and contacts which led to a development of race consciousness or “feeling”’. Keeping with this sociological emphasis, Frazier also proposed a discussion of ‘how different types of social organization (caste and “class” relationships)’ influence ‘“race” relations’, and of how ‘the various definitions of race involved valuations of physical and cultural differences’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Unlike Montagu's statement, Frazier's proposal thus foregrounded a sociological and psychological framework not concerned with the formation of genetically distinct populations but with the formation of racial consciousness amidst social change.

Frazier's emphasis on racial consciousness, geographic difference and social change carried over into discussion of the second item on the meeting's agenda: ‘imagining future studies of race’. Montagu played a marginal role in these discussions, which had little to do with biology or physical anthropology and instead focused on the sociological and psychological underpinnings of ‘race prejudice’ and the geographical distribution of racial attitudes. This round of discussions began with a provocation from the Brazilian sociologist Costa-Pinto, who pointed out that all scientific disciplines could agree ‘that no pure races existed’ and that relations between groups were ‘based on ideology and not on any scientifically definable differences’. Proposals for future studies of race should therefore ‘begin by recognizing that race prejudice had its roots in social and political differences not in physiological or mental ones’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Like his critique of Afro-Brazilian ethnography, Costa-Pinto's comments thus reflect his ambition to shift studies of race not only from biology but also from narrowly construed conceptions of culture.

Costa-Pinto's comments sparked a quick response from Ginsberg, who proposed that UNESCO initiate a series of studies with the aim of determining the extent to which prejudice was really ‘racial’. Keeping with the comparative emphasis of his sociological training, Ginsberg proposed the following series of research questions:

In addition to these questions, Ginsberg also observed that there were important differences in the colonial policies of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Latin peoples’ in relation to ‘the assimilation of indigenous peoples’. While assimilation was encouraged in French colonies, argued Ginsberg, it was discouraged in British ones.Footnote ⁶⁸

By pointing towards this expansive imperial terrain, Ginsberg's comments dramatically shifted debate away from genetics and instead brought questions concerning the administration of racial groups within colonial bureaucracies and the formation of racial attitudes to the fore. Ernest Beaglehole echoed Ginsberg's comments by pointing out that these contrasting imperial attitudes towards assimilation could be observed in colonial census practices in the South Pacific. Whereas ‘census forms in the French possessions in the South Sea Islands made no mention of half-breeds’, Beaglehole explained, ‘they were specifically referred to in censuses in the British and New Zealand possessions’. According to Beaglehole, this provided compelling evidence that assimilation was officially encouraged in the French territories and opposed in others. Beaglehole also noted that ‘racial prejudice was particularly strong in areas previously under German control and, exceptionally, in the Islands of Samoa, where the New Zealand authorities had followed the same policy’.Footnote ⁶⁹

E. Franklin Frazier responded to Beaglehole's comments with enthusiasm and noted that ‘the position of half-breeds in various parts of the world’ could be a fruitful area of future study. During his own research on the ‘attitude of Europeans and North Americans towards indigenous people in Brazil’, Frazier explained, he had realized that differences in attitude ‘were due not only to psychological but also to political, economic, religious and even demographic factors’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Lévi-Strauss also endorsed this emphasis on comparative studies of racial attitudes and suggested that there was real promise in ‘studying the different attitudes adopted by any particular civilization towards various cultural minorities’. For example, though the French displayed a ‘liberal attitude’ towards ‘negroes’ the same could not be said of their attitudes towards ‘other minorities’. Further, Lévi-Strauss suggested that ‘in France, as in Mexico’, racial prejudice against blacks was being introduced from the US, which meant that there ‘could be no question of an unvarying attitude on the part of any particular group towards any other group’.Footnote ⁷¹

Juan Comas was similarly enthused by comparative studies of racial consciousness and pointed out that there were important differences between the attitudes of Anglo-Saxon and Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. In particular, Comas suggested that Portuguese colonialism was comparatively benign, as evidenced by the fact that Portuguese settlers ‘behaved towards the native peoples in North Africa in the same way as they did towards the Indians in South America’. Comas also agreed with Lévi-Strauss that racial prejudice against ‘negroes in Mexico’ was on the rise and attributed this ‘to Mexico's financial dependence on the United States of America’.Footnote ⁷² Expanding on the question of racial discrimination in Latin America, Juan Comas explained that the most recent research showed that it stemmed from two main psychological factors: ‘a superiority complex in the white people and an inferiority complex in the coloured people’. In Mexico, Comas explained, ‘the superiority complex of the whites no longer existed but – what was more serious – the inferiority complex of the coloured people had survived’.Footnote ⁷³ As he speculated on the future, Comas suggested that identifying the ‘root causes’ of these complexes was a crucial task, and argued that ‘the inferiority complex of the coloured people’ would be harder to ‘eradicate’ because of the ‘survival of a language difference’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Ironically, as the committee members looked to the future and sought to imagine what race would look like after the demise of racial typologies, they continued to operate within a framework of thought that was settler-colonial and imperial in its outlook. Rather than study human genetic variation, the future studies of race envisioned by the committee comprised comparative studies of differing imperial approaches to racial difference and indigeneity. At stake in these prospectuses were imperial and biopolitical anxieties provoked by the shifting relations between settler, indigenous and mixed populations in colonial territories. The psychological emphasis of the discussions also bears a striking resemblance to UNESCO's International Tensions Project, which promoted studies of the stereotypes people hold about other nations, modern methods for changing mental attitudes from the behavioural sciences, the effect of ‘cultural assimilation of immigrants’ upon international understanding, and the ‘influence of modern technology upon the attitudes and mutual relationships of peoples’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The committee's proposals for future studies also bear some resemblance to the cycle of studies on race relations that UNESCO sponsored in Brazil and the French Caribbean.Footnote ⁷⁶

The imagined studies of the 1949 committee and UNESCO's other social-science projects from this period thus share a common thread of inquiry concerned not with human biological variation but rather with race as a category of social analysis, whose reality rests in the attitudes, perceptions and beliefs held by individuals about themselves and others at a given moment in time. In this research programme, conceptions of race were embedded in discussions of social change in various dimensions, including the processes of urbanization, modernization and industrialization. From this frame, international harmony entailed recalibrating the attitudes and psychological dispositions of white elites and ‘backward’ coloured peoples to attain equilibrium between feelings of inferiority and superiority. In the speculations of these scientists, the anti-racist project of disseminating scientific facts to remove racial prejudice had to be complimented by the project of improving and uplifting the ways of life of indigenous and non-white groups through assimilation and acculturation.