Abstract Summary
Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania) - Shortly after the publication of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, UNESCO appointed Alfred Métraux, a Swiss-American anthropologist, to become director of its "race division" and lead its international anti-racism campaign. Among anthropologists, Métraux has been lauded for his rigorous empiricism and extensive knowledge of the history, language, and culture of Amerindian groups in remote regions of South America. For instance, Sidney Mintz lauded Métraux as a "fieldworker’s fieldworker" with little interest in "grand theory." Soon after his UNESCO appointment, Métraux was thrust into an international controversy which raised fundamental questions concerning the categorization of human diversity into cultural and biological groupings. The controversy was provoked by scientists who criticized the 1950 Statement for its attempt to disqualify the scientific credentials of the "race concept" and it left Métraux scrambling to assemble a committee of geneticists and physical anthropologists to draft a second statement. Given his predilection for fieldwork and strict empiricism, Métraux’s appointment as director of UNESCO’s race division seems incongruous. What was it that qualified him to speak on questions of race, let alone lead an international campaign against racism in which the biological basis of race was supposedly at stake? This paper proposes an answer to this question by recovering the overlooked regimes of racial science that shaped Métraux’s career. Indeed, this paper argues that Métraux’s unheralded work in Polynesian anthropology reveals a close engagement with race science. Métraux spent the first five years of his career in Argentina where he frantically sought to document the culture, history, and language of the isolated indigenous groups of the Gran Chaco before they "disappeared." After this period of salvage research in Argentina, Métraux joined a Franco-Belgian scientific expedition to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in 1934 and spent six months on the island conducting ethnographic research. In contrast to his Gran Chaco research, where he relied on oral histories and colonial records to reconstruct the history of indigenous groups who had kept apart from encroaching settler states, in Rapa Nui Métraux encountered a population that had mixed extensively with European visitors and was almost entirely disconnected from its enigmatic past. Unable to reconstruct the culture and history of Rapa Nui through ethnographic research alone, Métraux turned to demographic, anthropometric, and blood group data to trace the history of the island. In doing so, he relied on research conducted by the Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa and the American anthropologist Harry Shapiro, which sought to chart the physical differences between the populations in Polynesian and Melanesian islands and to carve out their distinctive racial types. By recovering these regimes of race science in Métraux’s work, this paper sheds light on the panel’s broader theme, exploring how scientists have construed the relation between biological and biocultural diversity in human populations. In characterizing Métraux as a race scientist and demonstrating his links to Te Rangi Hiroa—a prominent indigenous intellectual and activist—it also seeks to complicate received accounts about the retreat of scientific racism by putting these into conversation with indigenous histories.
