[Paleopsych] CHE: 2 Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present

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2 Books Explore the Sins of Anthropologists Past and Present
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.5.13
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i36/36a01701.htm
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    By DAVID GLENN

    INHUMAN ANTHROPOLOGY: One day in 1997, Gretchen E. Schafft, an applied
    anthropologist in residence at George Washington University, paid a
    visit to the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological
    Archives. Her goal that day was relatively prosaic. She wanted to read
    some World War II-era correspondence among American anthropologists.
    She wondered how much they had known at that time about the crimes
    committed by some of their German counterparts who had lent their
    services to the Nazi regime.

    What Ms. Schafft found instead were 75 boxes full of material produced
    in Poland by the Nazi anthropologists themselves. The material had
    been seized by U.S. soldiers in 1945 and given to the Smithsonian by
    the Pentagon two years later. No Smithsonian staff member had ever
    cataloged the boxes, which had apparently gone unnoticed for 50 years.

    The collection was difficult to stomach. It included human hair
    samples, fingerprints, photographs, drawings of head circumferences,
    and other artifacts of the Nazi regime's mania for categorizing human
    bodies. The Nazis were obsessed with salvaging, as they saw it, the
    German and other allegedly Nordic elements of the Polish population.
    If, in 1940, a Polish child's hair was sufficiently blond, and the
    shape of the head sufficiently "Aryan," he or she was likely to be
    forcibly sent west for "Germanization." Young people deemed purely
    Polish by the Nazis were shipped to work camps. Jews and Roma, of
    course, faced worse.

    In her new book, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third
    Reich (University of Illinois Press), Ms. Schafft explores how the
    principles of early-20th-century physical anthropology, both
    scientific and pseudoscientific, were put to work by the Nazis.
    Several months after the invasion of Poland, Hitler's aides
    established the Institute for German Work in the East, which employed
    scholarly anthropologists to complete such tasks as "racial-biological
    investigation of groups whose value cannot immediately be determined"
    and "racial-biological investigation of Polish resistance members."

    Why were these anthropologists -- many of whom had received serious
    training at Germany's best universities -- willing to enlist in such
    projects? "I think, first of all, that they really were ideologically
    in tune with the government," Ms. Schafft says. "And, secondly, I
    think they believed that measurement data was somehow sacrosanct. To
    some extent, I think we still believe that. I think that's a very
    dangerous belief. Measurement data without context has to be viewed
    very suspiciously."

    A few years after her discovery at the Smithsonian, Ms. Schafft was
    contacted by a physical anthropologist who wanted to use the Nazis'
    data to shed light on "patterns of migration and population
    settlement." She resisted, arguing that the information had been
    collected through cruel means and for evil purposes, and is in any
    case highly suspect. The Nazi anthropologists often seem to have been
    absurdly insensitive to context. For example, they drew sweeping
    conclusions about alleged Russian physical and social traits on the
    basis of studies of half-starved Soviet soldiers in prisoner-of-war
    camps.

    "The data in and of themselves were useless," she says. "We shouldn't
    give the Nazis a second opportunity by rehashing these old data."

    The data will, however, be preserved for other purposes. The Nazi
    materials will soon be returned to Jagiellonian University, in Poland.
    (The Smithsonian will retain a digitized copy.) "What will be of most
    use to the people of Poland," Ms. Schafft says, "are, first, the
    records of Jews and others interviewed at the Tarnów ghetto. Those
    will give some families the last indication of where their relatives
    were. And, second, the amazing photographs of people in villages
    throughout Poland. There are portraits of hundreds, if not more than a
    thousand, identifiable individuals."

    In a small way, she hopes, maintaining the collection in Poland will
    preserve the memory of a few of the victims of science -- and politics
    -- gone mad.

    ***

    Some related moral dilemmas are chewed over in Biological Anthropology
    and Ethics: From Repatriation to Genetic Identity (State University of
    New York Press), a collection edited by Trudy R. Turner, a professor
    of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

    The book's 20 essays span a range of topics from the treatment of
    primates in the field (when is it acceptable to use anesthesia and
    radio collars?) to the sharing of data with colleagues (how quickly
    should scholars give their results to the major international DNA
    databases?).

    Some of the most contentious debates, however, concern the ground
    rules for working with human remains. Ever since 1990, when Congress
    passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or
    Nagpra, anthropologists have argued about how the law's provisions
    should be understood and enforced. Frederika A. Kaestle, an assistant
    professor of anthropology at Indiana University at Bloomington and a
    contributor to the book, says the most difficult debates concern the
    study of human remains that are more than 7,000 years old. In such
    cases, it is often impossible to determine any direct ancestry or
    cultural affiliation with modern American Indian groups.

    In her own scholarship, Ms. Kaestle interprets the law's provisions
    very strictly, she says. "I won't work with remains that were found on
    private land. Because that material isn't covered under Nagpra it's a
    little too iffy for me ethically."

    She is optimistic that even if the law is tightened, as some American
    Indian advocates have proposed, it will still be feasible for scholars
    to do DNA studies of ancient remains. "The climate is changing a bit,"
    she says. "Some Native American groups are not only accepting but
    promoting this work as something that they're interested in."