‘I am spending a week here with the British Asses’, Frederick G. Parsons, the professor of anatomy at St Thomas's Hospital, London, wrote to his vagabond friend, Frederick Wood Jones, who for a time professed anatomy in Adelaide. As a physical anthropologist, Parsons was attending the anthropology section of the 1922 British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Hull, but he soon tired of Australian accents. Recent meetings of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain had been even worse:
It is purely Australian now and no one else has a chance of getting a word in edgeways. I have put down several papers but Messrs Dart and Shellshear always come first and occupy three quarters of the time, the last quarter being taken up by Elliot Smith who volunteers to tell us what they meant and makes things doubly incomprehensible.Footnote 1
As usual, Grafton Elliot Smith, the Sydney-trained professor of anatomy at University College London, dominated proceedings among the anthropologists and the anatomists, offering oracular statements about palaeontology (or human origins), comparative morphology, racial difference, and culture contact. Devoted Australian former students like Raymond Dart, professor of anatomy at Witwatersrand, and Joseph L. Shellshear, professor of anatomy at Hong Kong, often performed as a backing group. While Australians proved most harmonious, Elliot Smith's imperial anatomical connections were broadly encompassing, including even the itinerant Englishman Wood Jones, with whom he had dissected Nubian remains, and the Scots palaeontologist Robert Broom, who became, with Dart, one of South Africa's leading discoverers of early hominids, an avid seeker of australopithecines. ‘I need hardly tell you that your husband was a really great man’, Broom would write to Elliot Smith's widow in 1937, ‘the greatest anatomist of the last thirty years, the greatest anthropologist and also the greatest archaeologist’.Footnote 2 In the early twentieth century, Elliot Smith and his colonial acolytes determined the style and scope of British anatomy and physical anthropology. Moreover, during most of this period, the Australian's firm belief in the diffusion and adaptation of cultural forms and patterns also shaped British social anthropology, providing a distinctive break between evolutionary theories and functionalist pieties.Footnote 3
Having grown up in a settler society fretting about its ability to transmit, in a lasting fashion, European civilization to an alien continent, Elliot Smith was naturally a diffusionist. As a medical student he took to heart the University of Sydney's motto, Sidere mens eadem mutato, ‘The same spirit under a different sky’. Experience and reflection in Egypt, where he spent the early years of the century as professor of anatomy at the Government Medical School in Cairo, gave particular expressive form and specific historical lineage to his diffusionist tendencies. He became convinced that ancient Egypt was the source of civilization, the well from which the rest of the world eventually drew. Thus Elliot Smith differed from the older generation of social evolutionists in anthropology, a group convinced that culture, linked to biology, followed many separate Lamarckian trajectories. Instead, Elliot Smith perceived a global dynamic of cultural transfer and adaptation, a pattern predicated on common unconscious and irrational forces. The historical dimensions and interactive aspects of diffusionism distinguished it too from emerging functionalist anthropology, promoted by Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, who favoured more static, relativist and sociological approaches. In the 1930s, functionalists came to displace most diffusionists from social anthropology, substituting densely situated local studies of communities for the diffusionists' facile cosmopolitanism – except in settler societies such as Australia and South Africa where the analysis of culture contact remained politically pertinent.Footnote 4 Elliot Smith's diffusionism may have failed to gain many adherents among British social anthropologists in the 1930s, but it continued to exert a major influence on the nation's physical anthropologists, giving rise to a dynamic human biology, which largely discarded formal racial typologies and hierarchies.Footnote 5 The diffusionist ethos, with its emphasis on migration and culture contact in human development, permeated British physical anthropology between the wars.
According to historian Henrika Kuklick, ‘by the interwar period, a fair percentage of leading anthropologists were emigrants to Britain from the Empire Dominions or other countries, who encouraged their colleagues to attend to intellectual developments outside Britain’.Footnote 6 British anthropologists therefore came to constitute less an ‘intellectual aristocracy’ than an antipodean ascendancy.Footnote 7 The coterie of medical graduates from southern settler societies – Kuklick's ‘emigrants’ – produced a dominion style of anthropology, which diffused throughout the empire, including Britain. Yet historians have scarcely noticed antipodean hegemony in British anatomy and anthropology between the wars. Conventionally, ‘empire’ figures in historical narratives as the site of fieldwork, the place where European anthropologists came into contact with natives, sometimes sympathetically, sometimes with rancour – or else it represents a policy arena on which anthropological expertise readily might be projected. Even those, like Kuklick, who note the Australian invasion, move quickly from the scene, assuming that these immigrants were simply imperial Britons, generally refusing to recognize that growing up or living for long periods in a southern settler society had given them a distinct sense of themselves and a peculiarly non-British set of experiences and influences. In contrast, we argue that the imperial circulation and interchange of anatomists – exemplified here by Elliot Smith and Wood Jones – helped to rechannel British anthropology during the early decades of the twentieth century.
In this essay we are especially interested in the roots of comparability in the anthropological imagination. Trained as comparative anatomists, deft at discerning structural homologies between vertebrates, dedicated to bringing marsupials into anatomical reasoning, physical anthropologists between the wars found attractive the prevailing diffusionist speculations, which sought to detect deep cultural resemblances and relations around the globe. Australians, in particular, had emerged from a colonial settler society whose intellectual elite was anxiously committed to comparison and self-critical inquiry.Footnote 8 They were pre-adapted to wide-ranging comparative methods, whether in anatomy or anthropology. As strangers, or marginal men, they often felt alienated from the insular, self-regarding British academy, apprehensive they might suffer in comparison – unless they took charge of the comparing, asserting their cosmopolitan ties. Colonials thus proved adroit in making comparisons, assessing similarities and evaluating adaptation.
As historians, we also want to express our own commitment to comparative methods. National boundaries circumscribe most accounts of the development of anthropology and racial thought in the twentieth century. These narratives describe separately the contending British, American, French and German schools of anthropology, anatomy and racial science, revealing a North Atlantic patchwork of competing claims about human nature and society, and their variations.Footnote 9 The few international studies tend to compare in static, sociological style two different national traditions of inquiry.Footnote 10 In contrast, we seek here to trace transnational and imperial transfers of practices, inclinations and ideas, following our exemplary historical actors, Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, as they traverse the globe, putting together a network of students and admirers. This essay, then, is part of a larger project in which we hope to reveal the cosmopolitan character of twentieth-century anthropological and anatomical thinking. Evidently, this involves crediting the colonial origins and biases of many of the investigators – their personal colonial entanglements – thereby moving beyond a simple inventory of their imperial sources.Footnote 11 It means, in this case, observing Elliot Smith and Wood Jones, colonials by birth or adoption, as they go about the British world making comparisons.
Anatomical hegemony
Medically trained anatomists dominated physical anthropology in Britain during the early twentieth century. There was no avoiding the holy trinity: Arthur Keith, Elliot Smith and Wood Jones. Presenting the 1965 Raymond Dart Lecture, the Oxford anatomist and anthropologist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark recalled the personal attraction, at the end of the First World War, of the ‘three great anatomists of the time, a sort of triumvirate of the anatomical world: Arthur Keith, Elliot Smith and Wood Jones’. Together, though in different ways, they ‘contributed much of great importance to the sum of factual knowledge in varied fields of descriptive anatomy, they made exciting a subject at the time regarded by many students as dull and static’.Footnote 12 Le Gros Clark admired their exotic connections: Keith spent time in Siam (Thailand) dissecting monkeys, and maintained close ties with Australian relatives; Elliot Smith unearthed Nubian remains, opened up mummies, and contributed to the Egyptology craze; and Wood Jones lingered on Indian Ocean islands, wandered in outback Australia, and combed Pacific beaches. Moreover, ‘they all excelled in the brilliance of their exposition whether in lecture halls or their writing’, and ‘they all spread their interests far afield from orthodox anatomy’ – even into anthropology.Footnote 13 For Elliot Smith, as for the others, ‘the principal device for the Study of Mankind is the process of dissection, which may seem remote from the interpretation of the behaviour of living men and women. There is, however, an intimate relationship between Anatomy and Human History’.Footnote 14
Committed to understanding man's place in nature, the three leading physical anthropologists swore fealty to Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley. Keith, in particular, dedicated himself to explaining the consequences of the Darwinian revolution for human history. His pioneering and relentless study of old bones, his investigation of palaeontology, was credited with ‘providing the chronological scaffolding on which history arranges itself’.Footnote 15 Both Elliot Smith and Wood Jones enjoyed close relations with Keith, though they frequently disputed anatomical and racial matters.Footnote 16 On arriving in England, Elliot Smith had bestowed valuable marsupial carcasses on the elder Keith, and he later became a respectful interlocutor, even if the stern Scot often found the Australian's company ‘heavy’. Keith believed Elliot Smith was ‘the ablest brain which appeared among British anatomists of my time’ – and Keith had examined a lot of brains.Footnote 17 Wood Jones was Keith's student and friend, though holding contrasting views on evolutionary processes, the valence of racial typology, and the need for eugenics – Wood Jones being rather too Lamarckian for the old Scot. ‘His brain was always at work, his eye ever observing’, Keith wrote of ‘Freddy’. ‘He had wit and a multitude of interests’. ‘Often he wrote books which angered me’, Keith continued, ‘but always with a clarity and fluency of style which I envied’.Footnote 18
Writing of his teacher Elliot Smith, the South African primatologist Solly Zuckerman observed that ‘at a time when the experimental method in biology had been all but taken over by physiologists and biochemists, he dominated the world of anatomy, in the same way that [Ernest] Rutherford, his close friend, dominated the world of physics’.Footnote 19 After studying in Sydney with the Edinburgh-trained anatomist J.T. Wilson, Elliot Smith built his reputation in Britain through a series of astute investigations of comparative anatomy, which involved mapping monotreme brains, and compiling an exhaustive critical catalogue of the multitude of brains resident in the Royal College of Surgeons, London.Footnote 20 Based in Cairo from 1900 until 1909, Elliot Smith nurtured a passion for archaeology while consultant anatomist on various expeditions. Appointed to investigate the mummified human remains excavated on the plain soon flooded by the Aswan Dam, he recruited, on Keith's advice, Wood Jones to assist in examining more than ten thousand Nubian burials – thereby establishing the scientific study of palaeopathology and the beginnings of his imperial anatomical network.Footnote 21 Back in England, Elliot Smith went on to devise a new human biology, organized around patterns of migration and contact, and encompassing comparative anatomy, embryology, physiology, social anthropology and the history of science. As director of the Institute of Anatomy at University College London, the expatriate Australian vigorously courted the Rockefeller Foundation, carefully linking his anthropological ambitions to the Foundation's interest in new approaches to understanding humanity, in constructing methods that superseded older typological and hierarchical models.Footnote 22 In 1926, Elliot Smith explained to influential Foundation officer Edwin Embree,
We have been endeavouring to rescue Physical Anthropology from becoming mere anthropometry, and bring back the subject more definitely to the domain of biology where it properly belongs. Mankind must be studied as a problem of General Biology and in close connection with Embryology, Physiology and Psychology.Footnote 23
The old racial thought of physical anthropologists like Charles B. Davenport at Cold Spring Harbor, New York came to appear biologically facile and socially dangerous in the modern world. In human biology Elliot Smith believed he had found the antidote to the Mendelian afflictions of anthropology.Footnote 24
Connection and comparison were fundamental to Elliot Smith's mode of operating. To conduct comparative studies of neuro-anatomy, he assembled an imperial network of specimen collectors and scientific collaborators, most of them fellow Australians.Footnote 25 He managed to move these allies and assistants around the British world, positioning them in colonial and metropolitan universities, selectively allocating resources and funding as he distributed patronage.Footnote 26 An anatomical entrepreneur, he adroitly managed far-flung alliances and collaborations. Frequently he surveyed his anatomical domain, travelling to Australasia, East Asia and wherever else he might exercise his special skills in scientific politics and disciplinary extension.Footnote 27 To outsiders, Elliot Smith could sound irascible and dismissive. The psychologist T. H. Pear, an admirer, regarded his mentor as ‘a bonhomous good mixer who loved a fight’. Elliot Smith would sidle up to a friend and say, ‘Let's stir up old So-and-So’, which meant, according to Pear, ‘to criticise actively’ some hapless victim.Footnote 28 Elliot Smith was a smart operator in the small worlds of British anatomy and anthropology, but as a scientific Pharaoh he was more often feared and resented than well liked.
Diffusionism regnant
Travelling to Brisbane in connection with the 1914 Australian meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Elliot Smith examined mummified remains from the Torres Strait, just north of the continent, an investigation that, according to his biographer, provided ‘the corner-stone in the edifice he afterwards erected’.Footnote 29 The anatomist had grown up observing the southern diffusion of British culture; here was evidence of an earlier diffusion of Egyptian cultural practices too. Now everything seemed to fit, he could see the worldwide historical relations of it all. ‘I have now reached the stage where I have got a bird's eye view of the whole business’, he wrote a few years later to his acolyte, the social anthropologist W.J. Perry. ‘It is hard to stick to one's job and not give way to the temptation of chucking over everything else and writing a history of human thought and aspiration.’Footnote 30 Wherever they looked, Elliot Smith and devoted followers found a profusion of signs of the diffusion of civilization from ancient Egypt. From the banks of the Nile spread agriculture, pottery, basketry, burial rites, domestic animals, houses and civic arrangements. Even some anthropological sceptics wondered if Elliot Smith might have detected a profound pattern of cultural influence. Writing to his Melburnian wife in 1920 about her fellow Australian's diffusionist theory, Malinowski observed, ‘he does produce a good deal of prima facie evidence in its favour and … it is an extraordinarily unifying conception, and must not be neglected as a working hypothesis’.Footnote 31
Elliot Smith expressed global intellectual ambitions. His diffusionist convictions led him to discount impermeable racial boundaries and fixed hierarchies of racial capacity. For him, racial difference seemed an implausible, or at best trivial, explanation of human civic and cultural accomplishments. In writing grandly of human history, then, Elliot Smith gave free reign to the global diffusion of culture, reproving any claims that race determined its delimitation. In 1930, in his popular tract Human History, the comparative anatomist argued that the earliest humans had existed in a state of Arcadian simplicity and grace, a poetical golden age.Footnote 32 His prelapsarian views contrasted sharply with Keith's assertion of the innate belligerence of humans, an inherent tribal or clan aggression that drove evolutionary change.Footnote 33 Elliot Smith believed that civilization had developed in Egypt in the fourth millennium BC in association with an oppressive state ruled by a god-king; as this model diffused throughout the world, to varying degrees, it destroyed the peace and harmony of primitive societies. Only with the rise of the Greek states in the eighth century BC did democracy and science begin to dismantle the bellicose regimes that enslaved humans. Thus the ‘history of the world has been a conflict between the rationalism of Hellas and the superstition of Egypt. It depends upon the human population of the world themselves which will win. For thought and courage can decide the issue’.Footnote 34 No single race held a monopoly on thought or courage. Therefore Elliot Smith found deplorable the contemporary assertion of Nordic superiority. Race could not mint out civilization; rather, cultural attainment followed contours of history and geography, which shaped patterns of diffusion.
As a comparative anatomist, Elliot Smith still gestured toward the racial clustering of human morphological variation, even as he discounted the significance of physical difference for cultural attainment. In Human History, he retained the categories of Mediterranean, Alpine, Nordic, Mongoloid, Negroid and Australoid, yet denied the existence of any pure types. Race mingling had occurred throughout human history, rendering summary terms like ‘Caucasian’ facile and confusing. The contact of peoples with one another, and their subsequent mixing, made it ‘impossible to find a pure type or to give a definite racial name to an individual’.Footnote 35 Elliot Smith emphasized instead human variation and plasticity, conveying the impression of dynamic and adapting bodily forms. ‘The structure of the human body’, he wrote, ‘only becomes really intelligible when one investigates not merely the functional significance of the various structural arrangements, but also the history of the processes whereby they attained their present structure and proportions. The study of biology is in this sense essentially a discipline of history’.Footnote 36 Just as human achievement traced a diffusionist history, human bodies revealed a complex evolutionary history, repudiating rigid racial typologies. Yet in the early 1930s, Elliot Smith could observe, with disgust, the harnessing of specious physical anthropology and its fixed hierarchies to the politics of racial supremacy in parts of Western Europe.
In 1934, the new International Congress for Anthropology and Ethnology met in London, with Elliot Smith chairing the section on anatomy and physical anthropology. According to one of the organizers, Oxford archaeologist John L. Myres, the conference was ‘designed to include all those departments of research which contribute to the study of Man, in their applications to races, peoples and modes of life’, and to discuss the ‘numerous questions as to Race and Culture which are continually arising and giving occasion for serious trouble’.Footnote 37 Nazi Germany, in particular, was causing consternation among liberal anthropologists. Elliot Smith urged delegates to assist in finding solutions to the ‘many difficult problems in the study of Man’, especially those derived from racism.
At the present time it is of the greatest importance that anthropologists should reach some consensus of opinion on such problems as may be used to justify or excuse political action [and] … impress upon politicians some respect for anthropological truth and the generally admitted knowledge of the facts of race and culture.Footnote 38
Pointedly, the comparative anatomist warned of ‘the fallacy of attributing cultural achievements and inherent mental aptitudes to different races [as well as] the neglect of the ever-significant influence of the contacts of different peoples providing the stimulus to progress’.Footnote 39 The human place in nature must encompass the ‘broad biological setting’.Footnote 40 Anthropologists were meeting in London ‘at a time when distinctive qualities of minds and character are being attributed to the Nordic race and the so-called “Aryan people”’.Footnote 41 Elliot Smith lamented the hardening of racial thought in Europe, condemning especially Nazi declarations of Nordic superiority. Indeed, if any people could claim superiority, surely they were the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean littoral and the Nile valley, where civilization had begun. Even so, he could discern
no adequate reason for regarding this as in any sense due to any innate qualities of initiative or skill on the part of this race, but rather to the historical circumstances which impelled the people on the banks of the Nile to embark upon those agricultural pursuits which led inevitably to the building up of civilisation.Footnote 42
Awareness of cultural diffusion, which the Australian so keenly perceived, thus might mitigate prevailing scientific racism.Footnote 43
Antipodean visions
In 1913, Elliot Smith described Wood Jones as ‘one of the best vertebrate morphologists in the country, though still a mere youngster’.Footnote 44 A few years earlier in Egypt, the pair had passionately discussed anatomical and anthropological matters while dissecting mummified remains. After the First World War, Elliot Smith encouraged the young Englishman to take up the chair of anatomy at the University of Adelaide, which began a lengthy Australian sojourn, continued as professor of anatomy at Melbourne through the 1930s.Footnote 45 As a comparative anatomist, Wood Jones became obsessed with the local fauna and Aboriginal Australians, and he participated eagerly in arduous expeditions through the outback and to islands off the southern coast in order to collect and examine them. In Australia he became a major public intellectual, achieving renown as an orator and gifted writer. ‘There is no doubt that Wood Jones's wide reputation as an anatomist gained from his skill as a writer’, recalled Le Gros Clark, ‘as also from his astuteness in controversy. Indeed, there can have been few anatomists whose writings were more widely read.’Footnote 46 An inveterate wanderer, the physical anthropologist maintained close relations with Keith and Elliot Smith, his London-based mentors, often supplying them with valuable marsupials and other specimens. But these long-distance exchanges could be testy. ‘How are things anatomical at home?’, Wood Jones wrote to Keith in 1921. ‘Is Elliot Smith still a god, or are the clay feet being detected?’Footnote 47 On other occasions their correspondence was more genial and supportive. ‘London badly wants you’, Elliot Smith wrote encouragingly to the Adelaide anatomist in 1923. ‘The dull weight of the other London schools of anatomy is a heavy incubus on the back of progress.’Footnote 48 This imperial anatomical network could be fractious and disputatious; then again, it was often mutually beneficial and sustaining.
Exposure to the harsh Australian bush compelled Wood Jones to recognize the impact of environment on human bodies and cultures, turning him into a sort of ecologist, with anatomizing tendencies. Writing from Singapore to Keith's wife, he noted, ‘really medicine is cramped and small when compared to ecology – pity one couldn't make a living of it’.Footnote 49 Further, he disparaged the limited vision of the laboratory scientist: ‘It is useless to speak about the sea to a frog that lives in a well.’Footnote 50 For Wood Jones, adaptation to the environment explained body form and function as well as cultural achievement. In comparing and appraising peoples, one therefore had to compare their environments too – that is, make an ecological comparison. Moreover, he became convinced that Lamarckian mechanisms, involving the inheritance of characteristics acquired through custom and habit in an influential milieu, contributed to human evolution. After eight years in Adelaide, he wrote to Keith, ‘Do you still fight? I ask this because I get … more and more convinced of the certainty of the reality of the inheritance of (even trivial) “acquired” characters.’Footnote 51 Australian experiences, we would argue, led Wood Jones to discard rigid racial typologies and fixed racial hierarchies in favour of more dynamic, adaptive models of human nature. His theoretical gloss, or rationalization, may have differed from Elliot Smith's speculations, but both became racial recusants all the same.
Soon after arriving in Adelaide in 1919, Wood Jones observed the miserable plight of Aboriginal Australians, their subjugation by the white settler society, and committed himself to campaigning on their behalf. ‘I believe that few people, even city dwellers in Australia, realise the deplorable condition, and the disgraceful treatment of the Australian native’, he wrote a few years later. ‘I, for one, have learned to like, and to admire, the aptitudes of the native; and he is by no means the lowest of the low as he is depicted in almost every published account of him.’Footnote 52 In part, Wood Jones's case depended on indigenous anatomical valorization. As a comparative anatomist he sought to prove that Aboriginal Australians were not physically inferior; indeed, the idea of a racial hierarchy seemed to him fundamentally flawed. Aboriginal bodies, like traditional Aboriginal cultures, were perfectly adapted to life in the harsh environment. ‘It is safe to say that no more beautiful balanced human figures than those of the native in the prime of his life could be found among any race.’Footnote 53 Wood Jones dedicated his time and energy to popular writings and broadcasts that praised Aboriginal bodies and cultures. At the same time, in the interests of science, he was assiduously collecting their skulls and preserving their bodies, sending many of these human remains to the Royal College of Surgeons, London, as offerings to Keith.Footnote 54
Although some other anatomists claimed the average head size of Aboriginal Australians was smaller than that of most Europeans, Wood Jones doubted the accuracy of their figures and, in any case, did not believe that such indices correlated with mental capacity. After years of measuring skulls, he noted, ‘It is the constant despair of the physical anthropologist that neither absolute measurements nor even indices, no matter how cunningly contrived, can give a satisfactory concrete picture of the form of the cranium or any part of it.’Footnote 55 Instead, one should attend to the adaptability of the human intellect to its varied environments. He told a radio audience in 1934,
Intelligence is an attribute that permits an individual to adjust itself correctly to the changing demands of its environment, and it is useless to attempt to establish a simple criterion by which the intelligence of a nomadic stone-age hunter and of a white politician may be measured and contrasted.Footnote 56
The development of modern civilization required efficient agriculture and the leisure that follows from the production of excess food. Therefore it had been impossible for nomadic Aboriginal Australians to settle and build cities, as they possessed no species of fauna or flora capable of domestication. ‘Indeed the white colonist’, he wrote,
has made no more conservative use of the native animals and plants of Australia than did the aborigine, for in no single instance has he adapted to his needs any animal or plant indigenous to Australia. All that can be said for the white colonist (in this regard) is that by a thoroughly vandalistic policy he has made a profit out of the destruction of native fauna and flora.Footnote 57
‘Anatomy is not for the dissecting-room only’, Wood Jones declared; ‘the anatomist is not only for the dead-house’.Footnote 58 While in Australia, Wood Jones affixed his knowledge of physical anthropology to progressive causes, hoping to advance marginal Aboriginal Australians and to disarm white racists, who abounded in the settler society. Like his irritating interlocutor Elliot Smith, Wood Jones came to abhor the scientific pretensions of racism, particularly the spurious biological legitimation of Nazi extermination policies. ‘I have many times called attention to the part that appears to have been played by the wide and unthinking acceptance of all the worst connotations of Charles Darwin's phrase “the struggle for existence” and Herbert Spencer's “survival of the fittest”’, he wrote in 1943. That ‘the Darwinian survival thesis has gone far towards producing the sinister theories that have let loose the present demons of bloodshed and destruction is not to be doubted’.Footnote 59
Conclusion
Elliot Smith was fond of hectoring audiences on ‘how fundamental a part the study of human anatomy’ should play in the ‘fuller understanding of human thought and behaviour … the most vital consideration for all men and women’.Footnote 60 He became the public face of anatomy and physical anthropology in Britain between the wars. He wrote copiously and opportunistically for the Daily Telegraph and other newspapers on Egyptology, associating himself with the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun's tomb and the dissection of the pharaoh's mummified corpse.Footnote 61 With Keith, he bickered publicly over the significance of Piltdown Man, after both savants had fallen for the hoax – revealed as such only in 1953 by Le Gros Clark.Footnote 62 But Elliot Smith did more than make anatomy exciting. He was equally dedicated to convincing the public throughout the empire that migration and human contact accounted for the spread of civilization and patterns of cultural achievement. He wanted people to realize that cultural forms and styles had diffused around the globe rather than emerged from racial genius; that intellectual and material accomplishment was connected to history and geography, not human physical type. Human History, his popular treatment of diffusionism, immediately hit the best-sellers' list.Footnote 63 His cultural theories spawned a multitude of popular imitations.Footnote 64 Similarly, Wood Jones became a controversial public figure wherever he wandered, writing for the common reader and broadcasting over the radio. He, too, made comparative anatomy broadly appealing, though his main goals were the removal of anthropological stigma from Aboriginal Australians and the nurturing of environmental sensitivities in the British world.Footnote 65 Led by such showy entrepreneurs, imperial anatomists did not require a publicist.
If we are to understand the scope and character of anatomical investigation and physical anthropology – even social anthropology – in Britain between the wars, we need to recognize the colonial identities and imperial mobility of the leading figures in these fields. The history of anthropology, in particular, has tended to abridge or compress the settler-colonial experiences and entanglements of many practitioners, tracing instead the institutional trajectory, within Britain, of the advocates of structuralist and functionalist methods. This Whig interpretation of anthropology makes incomprehensible the intellectual and popular appeal of diffusionism and more dynamic and historical explanations of human difference, whether physical or cultural.Footnote 66 Conventional histories of British anthropology and anatomy excise the worldly colonialism of the intellectual helmsmen of these disciplines, marginalizing the amour propre of the diffusionists, and ignoring the Lamarckian anti-racism of itinerant scholars. To be sure, anthropology at least is widely recognized as dependent on the empire for its research subjects and for its aspirations to inform the management of colonized peoples. In this essay, however, we have drawn attention particularly to the influence of colonial identification and residence on many leading anatomists and anthropologists, to their position in a network that was only marginally British, and sometimes perversely athwart the imperial centre.
The settler-colonial consciousness of these scholars, their moderate worldliness and indifference to nationalism, may help us to understand the divergence of British and German physical anthropology between the wars. Until the First World War, most physical anthropologists in Germany leaned toward liberalism in politics and avoided explicit racism in their studies of human morphology. This was the anatomical tradition Franz Boas brought to the United States.Footnote 67 In the 1920s, however, an obsession with Rassenkunde, or Mendelian racial science, came to dominate German anatomy and physical anthropology. Felix von Luschan, Eugen Fischer and colleagues vigorously promoted hardline eugenics, racial hygiene and anti-Semitism; they extolled Nordic racial achievement.Footnote 68 During the Great War, anthropology had been mobilized to serve the national interest, and with the loss of the empire after the Versailles peace conference the anthropological gaze remained fixed on the German people. Anatomical societies and anthropological associations became nationalist avatars, then Nazi front organizations. The contrast with Britain is striking – although a few English anthropologists did express sympathetic interest in German developments. Some historians have attributed the exceptional racism of post-war German anthropology to the influence of the country's earlier imperialism, which gave rise to anti-humanist world views.Footnote 69 Yet, paradoxically, it might have been the absence of a critical settler-colonial mentality, and its liberal comparative imagination, in interwar German anthropology that allowed it to be guided onto a special path, toward extreme nationalism and Nordic introspection.
