Historicizing Anti-Racism: UNESCO’S Campaigns Against Race Prejudice in the 1950S

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Historicizing Anti-Racism: UNESCO’s Campaigns Against Race Prejudice in the 1950s

Sebastián Gil-Riaño

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto

Historicizing Anti-Racism: UNESCO’s campaigns against race

prejudice in the 1950s

Sebastián Gil-Riaño

Doctor of Philosophy

Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology University of Toronto

2014

Abstract

This dissertation offers a revised historical account of how scientific experts associated with the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the post-

WWII era sought to overcome the legacy of scientific racism. Situating UNESCO’s anti- racism initiatives within the geographic context of the South and North Atlantic and the intellectual context of Latin American, Francophone, and Anglo-American social science this study shows that mid-century discussions of ‘race’ were intertwined with the multiple narratives of modernization and societal change that emerged in tandem with decolonization and the Cold War. Thus, one of this dissertation’s key arguments is that anti-racist projects in the post-war era were often cast as projects of redemption that involved coming to terms with the painful and destructive legacy of scientific racism and the anticipation of an improved

and harmonious future where ‘race’ did not figure as a source of conflict and tension.

However, because mid-century anti-racist scientists hailed from a variety of cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds the question of redemption took on different meanings and involved different stakes. This study examines social science experts’ anti-racist narratives of redemption in the context of four different UNESCO initiatives from the 1950s: 1) in projects of ‘cultural change’ (which were predicated on the anti-racist notion of the inherent educability of all peoples) 2) in UNESCO’s study of race relations in various locations in

Brazil 3) in the elaboration of anti-racist approaches to ethnographic observation, and 4) in

UNESCO attempts to produce anti-racist handbooks for teachers. These projects reveal how anti-racist experts from the 1950s were very much haunted by ‘race’ and concerned with neutralizing and dampening the affective and political impact of racial conceptions in the geopolitics of post-war era. Thus, this dissertation argues that rather than indicating a definitive retreat from ‘race’ UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives in the 1950s speak to the persistence and plasticity of ‘race’ and of the fraught attempts to escape its legacy.

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Acknowledgments

To begin, I’d like to express deep gratitude to my dissertation committee who provided invaluable guidance through the many stages of this project. Many thanks to my wonderful supervisor Michelle Murphy who always challenged me to keep a broad interdisciplinary readership in mind as the project developed, and whose insightful feedback showed me how to amplify the analytical and political stakes of my writing. I often found myself swimming with new thoughts after my meetings with Michelle and for this I owe her many thanks. I am also very grateful to Mark Solovey and Marga Vicedo, who have been incredibly supportive of this project from its earliest beginnings during their graduate seminars. Thank you Mark for your close and attentive reading of my work and for encouraging me to articulate my arguments with precision and careful framing. Many thanks

Marga for all of your practical career advice over the years and also for your helpful editorial feedback.

I’m also very grateful to both of my external examiners for their perceptive reading of my dissertation and for opening up new horizons for future iterations of this work. Thank you

Eric Jennings for your suggestions on how to bring my work into closer conversation with the fascinating work being done by French colonial historians. I would like to express a special note of gratitude to Alejandra Bronfman for her careful reading of my dissertation

and her encouraging and highly thought-provoking commentary. Alejandra’s feedback will serve as an invaluable point of reference as I further develop this work.

In keeping with the transnational scope of this project, this dissertation was funded and supported by various institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. My graduate studies and the research for this dissertation would not have been possible without the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the

University of Toronto. I received additional support for travel and research from the

Consortium for the History and Philosophy of Biology, and the Max Planck Institute for the

History of Science in Berlin. While conducting my archival research in Paris, I benefitted greatly from the administrative support and resources of the Institut d’Histoire et de

Philosophie des Sciences et Techniques at the Université Paris 1.

During my archival research, I was incredibly fortunate to receive assistance from many archivists and scholars. At the UNESCO archives, Alexandre Coutelle, Jens Boel, and

Adèle Torrance were very helpful in navigating the holdings and Claudine Frank provided useful research advice. For assistance at the Archives des Ethnologues at the Bibliothèque

Claude-Lévi-Strauss, I owe many thanks to Marion Abélès, and also to Christine Laurière who provided many useful sources concerning the history of French anthropology. During my time in Paris, I also benefitted greatly from the support of people at the IHPST and in

particular the guidance of Jean Gayon and the administrative support of Alexandra Arapinis.

For their friendship and help navigating the city of Paris, I also thank Antonine Nicoglou and

Hilary Drummond.

When I began writing my dissertation I benefitted immensely from a two-month visit to the Historicizing Knowledge About Human Biological Diversity research group at the

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. During my visit, the conversations

I had with Veronika Lipphardt, Staffan Müller-Wille, Sandra Widmer were incredibly useful for giving my project momentum and their feedback on my writing was also very helpful in sharpening the focus of my study. Many thanks also to Birgitta Mallinckrodt and Ricky

Heintz for their assistance in getting settled at the MPI. For help with accommodations and with getting to know the city of Berlin thanks to Christian Reiss, Mike Laufenberg, Sophia

Davis, and Brigit Ramsingh.

Over the course of my graduate studies, the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto has provided a great intellectual home, and my debts to IHPST are numerous. My fellow graduate students were an incredible source of solidarity, debate, and friendship over the years. In particular, I’d like to thank

Nicolás Sanchez-Guerrero, Rebecca Moore, Agnes Bolinska, Alex Koo, John Christopolous,

Delia Gavrus-Clarke, Vivien Hamilton, Isaac Record, Boaz Miller, Mike Thicke, and

Michelle Hoffman. For useful help and feedback on my writing and grant applications I must also thank several faculty members including Denis Walsh, Anjan Chakravartty, Lucia

Dacome, Bert Hall, and Chen Pang Yeang. For their tireless administrative support and encouragement over the years I extend a special note of gratitude to Denise Horsley and

Muna Salloum.

The University of Toronto, in general, has been an excellent academic home that has provided many fruitful venues for presenting my research and honing my teaching skills.

During workshops held at U of T, I received valuable feedback from Matt Farish, Mariana

Prado, Nathan Cardon, and Jared Toney. For the past six years, I have been fortunate to be involved with numerous iterations of an undergraduate course examining the history of gender and race in science. While I was a TA for this course I picked up countless pedagogical tips from Brian Beaton and also from my fellow TAs, Sarah Tracy and Sheena

Sommers.

Over the years my family and dear friends have been an incredible source of love, patience, and moral support. For their friendship I thank Ed Crummey, Maggie Hutcheson,

Clare Crummey, Marjory Ditmars, Jordan White, and Matt Klass. Many thanks to my extended family in Toronto for all of their encouragement, and particularly to my tias Julia and Clara, and my cousin Cristina Sanchez. My aunt Yvonne Riaño and my uncle Larryn

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Diamond provided me with valuable academic advice over the years and have always been an excellent model for how to be a successful academic while keeping a sense of humour.

For the confidence they’ve shown in me and their nourishing hikes and trips, I must thank my two fathers: Daniel Gil and Barry Wright. My grandparents Cecilia and Jaime and my aunt Jeannette have always had the highest of expectations for me and been immensely supportive during every stage of my studies. I am so grateful for all their kindness. I am deeply grateful to my mom, Pilar Riaño, for all of her enthusiasm, unwavering support, and tenacity, and for providing me with such a wonderful model of how to blend scholarly and political commitments. Muchisimas gracias Mama. And, lastly, a loving note of gratitude to my partner Adriann Moss who stuck with me even when my writing seemed to take over, and patiently listened to my half-baked ideas and challenged me to make them more intelligible. Thank you for reminding me that there is life beyond the dissertation.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... iv Introduction ...... 1 1 Post-war anti-racism in the Atlantic world ...... 7 2 Narratives of redemption and anti-racist historiography ...... 10 3 How to study ‘race’ as a historical artifact: historical ontology ...... 22 4 UNESCO’s 1950 Meeting of Scientific Experts on Race ...... 34 5 Organization of this study ...... 41

Chapter 1 “A Challenge Of The First Order”: ‘Cultural Change’, Anti-Racism, and Anthropology in UNESCO’s Early Years ...... 46 1 Historicizing Culture ...... 56 2 Modernizing the Amazon: Evolutionary Narratives of ‘Cultural Change’ ...... 69 2.1 Modernizing the Amazon: Cultural Adaptations ...... 84 2.2 Modernizing the Amazon: ‘Community Studies’ and Cultural Change ...... 96 3 Failure of the IIHA and Accusations of Imperialism ...... 105 4 Technical Assistance and Cultural Change ...... 109 5 Conclusion ...... 131 Chapter 2 The Race-as-Caste Analogy in The U.S. and Brazil and Its Effect On Conceptualizations Of Racism ...... 135 1 ‘Race’ and ‘Caste’: intertwined genealogies ...... 144 2 From The US To Brazil: Comparative Race Relations Research in the 1930s and 40s ...... 161 3 UNESCO Turns to Brazil In Search of a Model Anti-Racist Polity ...... 172 4 UNESCO Studies of Bahia: Racial Democracy Threatened by Modernization ...... 186

5 Beyond the Race-As-Caste Analogy?: UNESCO’s Urban Studies ...... 198 6 Conclusion ...... 213 Chapter 3 Observation Beyond ‘Race’? ...... 218

1 ‘Ethnologie’: Between Empire and Surrealism ...... 224 2 The Colonial Politics of Observation and Michel Leiris ...... 244 3 Self-Effacement and Observation: Alfred Métraux ...... 256 3.1 Self-Effacement and Observation: Claude Lévi-Strauss ...... 259 4 Conclusion ...... 267 Chapter 4 Moral Economies And Anti-Racism ...... 272 1 Building A Transnational Moral Economy ...... 284 2 Race Relations: a Challenge to UNESCO’s Internationalist Moral Economy ...... 296 3 Attacking Racism at its Root: Child Education and Anti-Racism ...... 323

3.1 UNESCO’s 1955 Meeting of Experts on Race Prejudice and Education ...... 334 4 UNESCO’s Antiracist Moral Economy Meets the Cold War ...... 338 5 The Moral Burden of Anti-Racist Education ...... 357 6 Conclusion ...... 368 Conclusion: Anti-Racism Historicized ...... 372 1 The UNESCO Statements Re-Visited ...... 375 2 The Persistence Of ‘Race’ ...... 381 3 The 1960s And Decolonization: A Shift In Discourse? ...... 384 Bibliography ...... 388 Archival Sources ...... 388 Published Sources ...... 392

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Introduction

Just months before his sudden and unexpected death in Paris in late 1949, the

Brazilian anthropologist Arthur Ramos published an article titled "the Question of Race and the Democratic World" that set out a vision for how anthropological knowledge could play a crucial role in restoring social order and equilibrium in the wake of the Second World War.

Ramos described anthropology as having attained such a level of intellectual maturity that it could now be called a proper science of “human relations” and suggested that from a human relations perspective “war” represents “the most serious example of a lack of balance in communities.”1 Indeed, Ramos suggested that one of the most pervasive sources of social

“disequilibrium” and “war” since the European conquest of the new world was the deployment of what Ramos called the “racial technique.”2 The racial technique, Ramos suggested, was part of a broader historical process of “Europeanization” that began with

European colonial expansion in the sixteenth century and which sought to re-make the world

1 Arthur Ramos, “The Question of Races and the Democratic World,” International Social Science Bulletin 1, no. 3–4 (1949): 9. Ramos based his characterization of anthropology as a science of “human relations” on the introductory anthropological textbook published by Harvard anthropologists Carleton Coon and Eliot Chapple. See E.D. Chapple and C.S. Coon, Principles of Anthropology (H. Holt and Company, 1942). For an extended discussion of the epistemological practices of the human sciences at Harvard during the mid-twentieth century see: Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge : Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 2 Ramos, “The Question of Races and the Democratic World,” 9.

2 in the image of Europe through “methods of domination, economic and spiritual corruption, and occasionally the subjugation of non-European peoples.”3 As part of this process,

Europeans adopted a set of ideas that characterized non-European peoples as barbarous and savage and these ideas came to act as a “device of power” that served to “justify all these brutalities of Europeanization.”4 During most of this process, these “racial techniques” were applied in the colonies, but in the twentieth century, argued Ramos, European nations began applying these racial techniques and “methods of domination” on Jewish and Black populations within their own borders and inadvertently exposed the brutality of “racial techniques” to European publics through the atrocities of the Second World War.5

In Ramos’ vision for post-war restoration, the discipline of anthropology — despite the fact that it had been previously used to justify theories of racial and ethnic superiority — was primed to play a major role in re-establishing equilibrium and balance in international relations and in efforts to restore global order. Indeed, Ramos was confident that “restored to its proper place and stripped of the myths in which it had been veiled,” anthropology would now “deliver its scientific message to the world.”6 For Ramos, an integral part of this

3 Ibid., 10. 4 Ibid., 9. 5 Ibid., 10. 6 Ibid., 9.

3 message involved respecting and harmoniously integrating so-called primitive peoples into modern society. As examples of the kind of integration he envisioned, Ramos lauded the interwar shift towards colonial policies of “indirect rule” in Britain, the “work done by the

Danes as regards their Eskimoes [sic],” and the creation of indigenous reserves in the US and

Brazil as examples of more balanced approaches to managing “traditional civilizations.”7 In order to continue building on the progress made during the interwar period, Ramos suggested that it would be of utmost importance to scientifically correct the “odious frame of mind” that gave rise to the “philosophy of racial supremacy.”8 Further, Ramos argued that the

“ideological battle” against racial supremacy would be just as important as the military battles recently fought by armies and that a “disarmament of the mind can only be achieved through a reasonable, humane, and scientific policy, designed to bring about harmonious contact between the races of the world.”9

Ramos' ambitious and optimistic aspirations for the post-war world represent the culmination of a unique intellectual and professional itinerary, which began in the postcolonial context of interwar Brazil and came to a sudden end in metropolitan Paris in

1949. Over the course of his professional career, Ramos assimilated intellectual trends from

7 Ibid., 11–12. 8 Ibid., 13. 9 Ibid.

4 the social sciences of the North Atlantic in order to fashion a unique perspective on the social relations of Brazil -- a society that he considered a “laboratory of civilization” because of the extensive “mixing, blending, and cooperating” between cultures and races that was taking place.10 Unlike Nina Rodrigues, his anthropological mentor, who was one of the main proponents of Lombrosean anthropology and augured doom for Brazil because of the high proportion of African and Indigenous elements in its population, Ramos was part of a generation of scholars who opposed this racial framework in favour of a “cultural” approach to the study of African and Indigenous peoples in Brazil. Instead of a sign of degeneracy,

Ramos argued that the extensive miscegenation that had taken place was actually a sign of

Brazil’s modernity and vitality and demonstrated the existence of a unique “racial democracy.”11 In his anthropological studies, Ramos emphasized the “educability” of Black

10 Arthur Ramos, “Acculturation Among the Brazilian Negroes,” The Journal of Negro History 26, no. 2 (1941): 244. 11 Ramos studies and theories, along with those of scholars such as the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, and Edison Carneiro, are thus representative of a major shift in Brazilian intellectual life which involved a repudiation of the tenets of the racial science that had been imported from Europe in favour of a social science paradigm emphasizing objects such as “culture” and “race relations” as well as the “malleability” and “educability” of social groups previously seen as racially degenerate. For more on this shift in Brazilian racial thought see and on the fashioning of the “racial democracy” ideology see Anadelia A Romo, “Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil’s First Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934,” Journal of Latin American Studies 39, no. 1 (2007)., Thomas E Skidmore, “Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870-1940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, ed. Richard Graham et al. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 7–36. Brian Owensby, “Toward a History of Brazil’s ‘Cordial Racism’: Race Beyond Liberalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and

5 and indigenous populations and drew upon Freudian theories of the unconscious, Levy-

Bruhl’s theories about the particular characteristics of the “primitive mentality,” and neo-

Lamarckian theories emphasizing the influence the role of environmental factors in inheritance. Through this amalgam of European concepts, Ramos developed his own concepts and tools — such as that of the “folkloric unconscious” — that he put to use in his comparative anthropological studies of Afro-Brazilian cultures.12

For Ramos, anthropology was not only a science that provided a means to study and observe so-called primitive cultures but also a scientific approach that could be put to use in reformist projects addressing Brazil’s alleged “backwardness” and “degeneracy” through improvements in health, culture, and education. From 1931 to 1938 Ramos worked as the Chief of the Mental Hygiene Service at the Institute of Educational Research in Rio de

Janeiro where he observed and studied thousands of “maladjusted” and “abnormal” children and sought to develop educational reforms that would help uplift these children. In this same period, Ramos published his first anthropological studies including the Brazilian Negro

(1934) and As Culturas Negras no Novo Mundo (1937), which interpreted Afro-Brazilian religious rituals and practices as emblematic of “cultural backwardness” rather than racial

History 47, no. 2 (2005): 318–347. 12 Brad Lange, “Importing Freud and Lamarck to the Tropics: Arthur Ramos and the Transformation of Brazilian Racial Thought, 1926-1939,” The Americas 65, no. 1 (2008): 9–34.

6 degeneracy and argued that practices like the use of curandeiros (traditional healers) should be regulated and reformed through educational methods. 13 By the 1940s, Ramos’ continued his focus on Afro-descendant cultures in Brazil, but abandoned his use of Freudian and psychoanalytic methods in favour of methods from the American social sciences (including social psychology, sociology, and the emergent “human relations” paradigm) while also becoming an outspoken critic of racial science and publishing several essays and pamphlets condemning Nazi theories of racial superiority.14 In 1945, Ramos accepted an offer to become director of UNESCO’s Social Science Department (SSD) and went on to play a crucial role in arranging a meeting of international experts on questions of race, which resulted in the publication of UNESCO’s well-known 1950 Statement on Race.

13 For more on Ramos studies on children and ties to the eugenic ambitions of Brazil’s Department of Education in the late 1930s see: Jerry Dávila, Diploma of Whiteness : Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 47–54; Lange, “Importing Freud and Lamarck to the Tropics: Arthur Ramos and the Transformation of Brazilian Racial Thought, 1926- 1939.” On Ramos’ influence on Brazil’s Mental Hygiene Service and their attempts to regulate religious practices involving spirit possession in the 1930s see: Daniel Stone, “Charlatans and Sorcerers: The Mental Hygiene Service in 1930s Recife, Brazil,” in Sorcery in the Black Atlantic, ed. L.N. Parés and R. Sansi (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 101–102. 14 On the shift in his intellectual framework and increased anti-racist activism see: Carneiro Edison de Souza and James W Ivy, “Arthur Ramos: Brazilian Anthropologist (1903-1949),” Phylon (1940- 1956) 12, no. 1 (1951): 73–81.

1 Post-war anti-racism in the Atlantic world

Ramos’ distinct career trajectory and hopes for post-war restoration illustrate how anti-racism assumed a crucial importance in mid-century projects to restore peaceful relations between nations and to manage cultural and racial diversity at both national and international scales. Indeed, Ramos is emblematic of how the repudiation of racial science drew upon the emergent styles of thought and expert networks of social scientists from throughout the colonial and post-colonial Atlantic world and has a complex history that stretches beyond national borders. Ramos’ scientific investigations and anti-racist advocacy, like that of many anti-racist scholars in the twentieth century, was situated within the intellectual currents of Brazilian, French, and Anglo-American social science, and led him to develop an orientation that emphasized the educability and improvability of all racial groups and which also placed Ramos’ work at the intersection of scientific knowledge production and societal reform. What we can thus glean from Ramos’ professional and intellectual itinerary is a sense of how anti-racist science was constituted for societal and global reform at national and transnational scales and stitched together from the theories, concepts, and practices of the social sciences from both the Global South and North.

This dissertation examines this transnational process of stitching together the trends and intellectual currents of the social sciences in the mid-twentieth century in the name of

8 combating racism. Indeed, this study examines how scientific experts associated with

UNESCO in the post-WWII era sought to overcome the legacy of scientific racism and the kinds of futures they envisioned and sought to enact through the repudiation of race science.

Although scientific experts throughout the world in the post-war era could agree upon the need to combat racism and to disavow the link between scientific knowledge and racist ideologies, they found it much more difficult to reach agreement on seemingly basic questions such as how to define ‘race’, what constitutes racism, and how best to oppose it. As such, post-war anti-racist projects often failed to come into being in the ways they were originally imagined. The challenges mid-century experts faced in reaching agreement concerning questions of ‘race’ stemmed not only from the persistent malleability that is characteristic of its career as a scientific object but also from the multiple and diverse legacies of racial thought that mid-century experts encountered both in their countries of origin as well as in the places where they were led to conduct empirical research. In the context of UNESCO’s campaigns against racism over the course of the late 1940s and 1950s, scientific experts from Latin America, France, the US, and the UK assumed prominent roles.

The diverse linguistic, cultural, and racial background of these researchers, as well as

UNESCO’s stated ambitions of building a world community thus require a historical and geographical mapping of anti-racism that recognizes the historical events surrounding

9 decolonization, the cold war, and civil rights struggles as crucial contexts from which anti- racism was borne.

At the same time, this dissertation shows that mid-century discussions of ‘race’ and anti-racism were deeply intertwined with questions concerning how to reform and improve society at local, national, and transnational scales. In the post-WWII war era, scientific experts, educators, and politicians associated with UNESCO held a heightened sense of the transformative possibilities of their era and grappled with issues concerning how to restore peaceful international relations in the wake of the war, how to narrow the economic and cultural differences between so-called primitive, traditional, and modern societies, and how to create a world community at a moment when conflicts and tensions arising from decolonization and the cold war were beginning to be felt. Within this specific world historical context, questions concerning ‘race’ and the repudiation of racism concerned not only the question of how to distance the world from the destructive legacy of race science but also how to imagine and bring a future into being where ‘race’ does not constitute a barrier to peaceful international and interpersonal relations. Thus, one of the key arguments of this dissertation is that mid-century anti-racist projects were often narrated as projects of redemption that involved coming to terms with the painful and destructive legacy of scientific racism (in the diverse ways it was experienced by anti-racist scientists) and the

10 anticipation of an improved and harmonious future where ‘race’ did not figure as a source of conflict and tension. However, because mid-century anti-racists hailed from a variety of cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds the question of redemption took on different meanings and involved different stakes. By situating post-war anti-racism in the broad geographical context of the Atlantic and within the intellectual currents of the French, Latin

American, and Anglo-American social sciences this dissertation aims to uncover the multiple narratives of redemption and imagined futures that animated UNESCO’s campaigns against racism, and the ways anti-racist projects were variously enabled and constrained by the geopolitics of post-war era.

2 Narratives of redemption and anti-racist historiography

By focusing on the narratives of redemption that animate postwar anti-racism this dissertation seeks to extend historian and anthropologist Ann Stoler’s reflexive examination of the political and epistemological commitments that underpin contemporary anti-racist scholarship. In her influential article “Racial Histories and their Regimes of Truth,” Stoler surveys the anti-racist historiography of racism that historians and social scientists have produced since the 1970s, and argues that it is characterized by the assumption that racism

“once existed in more overt and pristine form” in the form of a “biologized, physiological,

11 and somatic racism” that is fundamentally distinct from “a more nuanced culturally coded and complex racism of the present.” 15 According to Stoler, this underlying assumption has led scholars to structure their histories as searches for the original moment when ‘race’ was introduced as a natural category describing fixed human differences and thus adopted as a justification for racism. Stoler thus describes anti-racist historiography as a fraught search for the original moment when “the dye of ‘race’ was cast” and as a scholarly project resting on the premise that by demonstrating ‘race’ to be a construct, scholars can disprove its credibility and thus “dismantle the power of racism itself.”16 As such, Stoler argues that anti- racist histories of racism often read as “narratives of redemption” that seek to dismantle the negative power of ‘race’ by pointing out the fallacies inherent in the concept and by showing it to be a socio-cultural creation right from the moment of its first emergence.17

Like the anti-racist histories of racism that Stoler has analyzed, the contemporary historiography concerning the demise of scientific racism is shaped by a similar set of

15 Ann Laura Stoler, “‘Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth’,” Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997). p. 185 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. However, it is important to highlight that Stoler does not aim to discredit or devalue anti-racist histories by pointing out their redemptive assumptions. Rather Stoler’s critique is animated by a concern that racism in fact takes on many diverse forms that derive their force and persistent presence not from the production of static taxonomies of racial difference but rather from the highly malleable criteria upon which racial taxonomies are based, and which have often included non-biological criteria such as moral, cultural and psychological sensibilities.

12 redemptive assumptions. Indeed, a common assumption amongst the canonical studies concerning the demise of race science, is that the UNESCO Statements on Race of 1950 and

1951 mark a definitive repudiation of scientific racism when the illegitimate conceptions of

‘race’ that were used as a justification of racism were decisively repudiated by the scientific community. This assumption featured in the work of historians of science such as George

Stocking, Nancy Leys Stepan, William Provine, and Elazar Barkan who described the

UNESCO Statements as emblematic of the scientific community’s rejection of the typological conceptions of ‘race’ that were central to physical anthropology in the early twentieth century and the adoption of anthropological conceptions of ‘culture’ and statistical conceptions of ‘populations’ as less ideologically suspect ways of describing human diversity.18 In these early histories, the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century period figures as the moment when scientific racism reached its apex and the period from

1920 to 1950 is described as a period of transition when the scientific arguments for racial discrimination were overturned by developments in the fields of genetics, anthropology, and

18 See Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the US Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); George W Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution : Essays in the History of Anthropology : with a New Preface, Phoenix (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science : Great Britain, 1800-1960 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982); William B Provine, “Geneticists and Race,” American Zoologist 26, no. 3 (1986): 857–887.

13 psychology. In these accounts, historians have tended to describe the production of the

UNESCO Statements on Race as both a controversial and complex process of consensus building and a watershed moment for anti-racism when scientists who had been struggling against scientific racism since the rise of Nazi Germany in the early 1930s collectively agreed upon the need to condemn racism and disavow the link between scientific views on human biological diversity and racial discrimination. In accounts concerning the demise of race science, the UNESCO Statements thus loom large as an emblem of the scientific community’s response to the Holocaust. The UNESCO Statements have come to figure as a crucial moment of rupture in the trajectory of race science that separates our anti-racist present from a past when a somatic and biologized racism existed in a more pristine form.

However, as the sociologist of science Jenny Reardon has shown, these historical narratives that describe the mid-twentieth century as a decisive moment of anti-racist triumph have spread well beyond the specialized discussions of historians of science and have shaped debates amongst scholars in other fields including critical race studies and political theory.19

Indeed, the spread of this narrative beyond the discussions of historians of science concerning the demise of racial science has tended to produced flattened narratives that

19 Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish : Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 23.

14 emphasize the discontinuity between an overtly racist pre-war past and a more liberal and egalitarian post-war era that extends to our present. For example, this habitual way of narrating the demise of ‘race’ can be found in the writings of Will Kymlicka the acclaimed political philosopher and theorist of multiculturalism. For Kymlicka, the Second World War figures as a crucial turning point signifying an end to racial ideologies and the rise of multiculturalism as a significant and positive political project in the Western world:

Prior to the Second World War, ethno-cultural and religious diversity in the west was characterised by a range of illiberal and undemocratic relations – including the relations of conqueror and conquered, coloniser and colonised, master and slave, settler and indigenous, racialised and unmarked, normalised and deviant, orthodox and heretic, civilised and primitive, ally and enemy. These hierarchical relationships were justiﬁed by racialist ideologies that explicitly propounded the superiority of some peoples and cultures, and their right to rule over others. These ideologies were widely accepted throughout the western world, and underpinned both domestic laws (for example, racially biased immigration and citizenship policies) and foreign policies (for example, in relation to overseas colonies). After the Second World War, however, the world recoiled against Hitler’s fanatical and murderous use of such ideologies and the UN decisively repudiated them in favour of a new ideology of racial and ethnic equality.20

Although there are certainly elements of truth to this account, there are several problematic assumptions that structure Kymlicka’s narrative. In fact, Kymlicka’s narrative acts as a

20 It is important to point out that Kymlicka advances this account concerning the demise of racial ideologies and the rise of multiculturalism as a corrective to what he deems problematic “master narratives” about the “rise and fall of multiculturalism” see Will Kymlicka, Multiculturalism: Success, Failure, and the Future (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2012), 5–6.

15 classic example of the “narratives of redemption” that Ann Stoler identifies as a crucial feature of the way the history of racism has often been written. Kymlicka’s rise-of- multiculturalism narrative shares a similar structure to many stories about the rise and fall of racism insofar as it posits a dark past where an overt and pristine form of racism prevailed and a more enlightened contemporary where racism is submerged and exists only as a

“lingering presence.”21 Kymlicka’s account thus relies on a historical sensibility that suggests a significant separation between the overt and explicitly racist policies of a distant past and a more enlightened and civilized anti-racist present. Further, by positing “the West” as the key site for this transition from illiberal and undemocratic relations to more egalitarian and inclusive relations, Kymlicka’s account, like many of the modernization theories that emerged after WWII, privileges “the West” as an aspirational model of democracy for the rest of the world.

In the past fifteen years, however, historians and science studies scholars have advanced a more nuanced and muted story concerning the shifts in racial conception that took place and have highlighted the mixed legacy of the anti-racist conceptions of ‘race’ that emerged in the post WII-era. Donna Haraway, for example, agrees that the UNESCO

Statements are emblematic of a shift from typological conceptions of ‘race’ to population-

21 Ibid., 6.

16 based conceptions, but argues that the anti-racist consensus of the UNESCO Statements introduced a “flawed biological humanism” based upon a re-fashioned physical anthropology which inscribed the heteronormative nuclear family (with men as hunters and women as gatherers) as emblematic of the human species as a whole. For all its commitment to diversity and anti-racism, Haraway argues, UNESCO’s mid-century humanism reified middle-class whiteness, patriarchy and heterosexuality as aspirational models of human existence.22 Historian of science Robert Proctor has also examined the ideological effects of

UNESCO’s anti-racist stance and argued that the presumption of human unity popularized by the UNESCO Statements constrained debates in archeology about human antiquity and produced a “delay in the recognition of fossil hominid diversity.”23 Rather than a moment of redemption when scientists shed the ideological baggage that had constrained and warped earlier research on human diversity, Haraway and Proctor interpret the UNESCO Statements as symptoms of a postwar liberal orthodoxy whose ideological framework emphasizing human unity and universality shaped conceptions of human nature and the study human biological diversity in the postwar era.

22 Donna Jeanne Haraway, “Race: Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture,” in Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 237–244. 23 Robert N Proctor, “Three Roots of Human Recency,” Current Anthropology 44, no. 2 (2003): 13.

In addition to examining the political assumptions and effects of UNESCO’s anti- racist statements, scholars have questioned the extent to which they reflect a definitive repudiation of ‘race’. Jenny Reardon, for example, argues that contrary to the received wisdom amongst social scientists, ‘race’ did not disappear as a biologically meaningful concept in the post-war era. Rather, Reardon insists that “… [life] scientists have sought to reconstruct its [‘race’] meaning and definition in a manner that would enable them to use it to advance the stores of human knowledge while distancing themselves from what they perceived as the ideological agendas of powerful social interests.”24 On this view, Reardon interprets the 1951 UNESCO Statement, written by geneticists and physical anthropologists, as an attempt to disentangle science from society “so that scientists could define and use

‘race’ in a manner that could not serve any particular social end – whether it be totalitarianism or equality.”25 Similarly, the philosopher Lisa Gannett argues that the shifting conceptions of ‘race’ from the mid-twentieth century did not constitute a wholesale abandonment of ‘race’ as an object of biological inquiry but rather a transformation of ‘race’, where a ‘populational’ notion of ‘race’ substituted for a ‘typological’ one.26 For both

24 Jenny Reardon, “Decoding Race and Human Difference in a Genomic Age,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15, no. 3 (2004): 58. 25 Ibid., 52. 26 Lisa Gannett, “Racism and Human Genome Diversity Research: The Ethical Limits of ‘Population Thinking’,” Philosophy of Science 68, no. 3 (2001): S479–S492.

Reardon and Gannett, the historical thesis concerning the demise of scientific racism at the mid-century mark has served to obscure the ongoing construction of racial conceptions in contemporary life science studies of human diversity such as the Human Genome Diversity

Project.

In a similar vein, recent work by historians of science have highlighted the challenges that mid-century scientists encountered as they sought to disentangle the biological study of human diversity from racist conceptions of human difference. Through a detailed case study of the sampling methods used by the US geneticist and anti-racist activist L.C. Dunn (and

UNESCO collaborator) to study the genetics of a Jewish community in Rome, Veronika

Lipphardt argues that Dunn’s study simultaneously constructed the Jewish community of

Rome as both a socially and biologically isolated population and, despite his efforts to the contrary, ended up re-enforcing historical narratives about Jews as a distinct racial group.27

Similarly, historian and philosopher of science Staffan Müller-Wille’s study of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and his anti-racist publications highlights how Lévi-

27 Veronika Lipphardt, “The Jewish Community of Rome: An Isolated Population? Sampling Procedures and Bio-Historical Narratives in Genetic Analysis in the 1950s,” BioSocieties 5, no. 3 (2010): 306–329. For a discussion of L.C. Dunn as a scientific activist see Melinda Gormley, “Scientific Discrimination and the Activist Scientist: L.C. Dunn and the Professionalization of Genetics and Human Genetics in the United States,” Journal of the History of Biology 42, no. 1 (2009): 33–72.

Strauss elaborated an anti-racist conception of history based upon a detailed engagement with scientific studies of cultural and genetic diversity.28 This recent research concerning biological conceptions of human difference from the post-war era thus suggests that life scientists incorporated both biological and cultural assumptions into their empirical frameworks and simultaneously re-enforced and repudiated conceptions of ‘race’.

These revised accounts concerning the demise of scientific racism suggest that

UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns can no longer be read as a straightforward instance of anti-racist triumph or as a story about the scientific community’s vindication from the legacy of race science. Instead scholars have increasingly shifted their attention to what Michelle

Brattain refers to as “historicizing antiracism” and have come to interpret the controversies surrounding UNESCO’s Statements on Race as indicative of how “movements to dislodge racism are equally contingent, opportunistic, political, and grounded in the same social formations as racism itself."29 As such, this dissertation seeks to extend the revisionist accounts offered by the most recent historiography of the repudiation of race science by attending to the tensions, complexities, and ambiguities inherent in UNESCO’s anti-racist

28 Staffan Müller-Wille, “Claude Lévi-Strauss on Race, History and Genetics,” BioSocieties 5, no. 3 (2010): 330–347. 29 Michelle Brattain, “Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007): 1388.

20 projects. By attending to the messiness and ambivalence of UNESCO’s anti-racist initiatives this study concurs with historian Perrin Selcer’s assessment that the great value of

UNESCO’s Statements on Race as subjects for historical investigation “is the complexity of the intersecting story lines and the variety of possible themes, not the clarity of the antiracist triumph."30

This study explores the intersecting story lines and variety of possible themes that are raised by UNESCO’s anti-racist initiatives by expanding the geographic and linguistic context of existing accounts. Whereas existing histories of race science and its demise have primarily focused on scientific developments in the North Atlantic and the Anglo-American world, this dissertation seeks to expand the geographic terrain of historical studies of anti- racist science by situating the post-war career of ‘race’ within the multiple linguistic and cultural contexts of the Atlantic region: primarily French, Spanish, English, and Portuguese.

By examining how broad networks of experts spanning Europe, Latin America, the

Caribbean, and North America influenced UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns, this dissertation shows that mid-century conceptions of ‘race’ were shaped by the intertwined geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War, European imperialism, and decolonization.31 One of

30 Perrin Selcer, “Beyond the Cephalic Index: Negotiating Politics to Produce UNESCO’s Scientific Statements on Race,” Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (2012): 174. 31 On the entanglement between Cold War politics, imperialism, and decolonization see Gabrielle

21 the arenas where the entanglement of the Cold War and decolonization is most readily apparent is in the various notions of modernization and “development” that vied for international influence after WWII. By linking the history of anti-racist conceptions of ‘race’ with the various narratives of modernization that spanned the Atlantic world in the aftermath of World War II and by paying attention to scholarship both from and about the global South

(in this case Brazil, the Caribbean, Africa) this study thus seeks to reroute the scientific career of ‘race’ through postcolonial itineraries, and show how re-articulations of ‘race’ figured in various imaginaries of modernization and development.

By shifting the terrain upon which we map our historical accounts concerning the repudiation of scientific racism to include the South Atlantic this dissertation not only brings the intertwined dynamics of postcolonial and Cold War geographies into sharper relief, but also makes a contribution towards making the ontological differences between racial discourses in the global North and South more intelligible. From the perspective of colonial history and Latin American history, the historical ontology of race is notably different from that of the US and Europe. Instead of the notions of fixity and permanence that figured prominently in the creation of racial taxonomies in Europe and North America, in colonial

Hecht, Entangled Geographies : Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, Inside Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).

22 contexts and in Latin America racial taxonomies and ontologies have been characterized by their instability and flexibility. In the case of Latin America, historians have attributed the heightened flexibility of racial categories to the extensive miscegenation that took place during the colonial period, as well as to the much wider circulation and adoption of

Lamarckian ideas of “soft” heredity in the late 19th and early 20th century. Similarly, scholars of French and Dutch colonial history have highlighted how the classification of mixed-race children was highly contingent and often decided by non-phenotypic factors such as comportment and “civility”. By bringing this colonial and postcolonial dimension into relief, this dissertation thus examines how racial discourses and taxonomies, as well as their repudiation, have figured into colonial and postcolonial projects of governing populations.

3 How to study ‘race’ as a historical artifact: historical ontology

Historical ontology refers to a way of studying scientific objects that asks us to consider their temporal trajectories as well as the constellation of cultural, conceptual, and material conditions that impinge upon their coming in and out of existence.32 In the case of

32 For discussions of historical ontology and how it relates to the history and philosophy of science see Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Lorraine Daston, Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–14; Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty : Environmental Politics,

23 objects studied within the human sciences, Ian Hacking has persuasively argued that attending to historical ontology requires attention to how practices of naming interact with the things that they name and thus open up and foreclose different forms of human agency. In other words, the study of classification systems that have humans as their targets requires us to collapse distinctions between representation and reality and consider that the categories by which humans are described have a crucial impact upon the formation and performance of their identities. With respect to ‘race’, this dissertation argues, historical ontology means attending to how race conditions “possibility spaces”, that is, the possible modes of describing others and understanding oneself that exist at specific historical moments.33 From this perspective, racial categories are a classic example of what Hacking calls “interactive kinds.”34 Thus, while mapping the various bodies of knowledge that were called upon and

Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2006), 1–18. For a discussion of how ontological anxieties concerning racial identities have figured in colonial projects have see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power : Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain : Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1–17. 33 For a discussion of possibility spaces and their relation to the construction of identities see Ian Hacking, “Making up People,” in Reconstructing Individualism : Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C Heller and Christine Brooke-Rose (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), 222–36. 34 Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999).

24 produced by scientific experts in order to advance UNESCO’s anti-racist aspirations, this dissertation will trace the ways these initiatives sought to re-define the reality of racial difference and thus the historical ontology of race.

In contemporary discussions, racial discourses are often defined as discourses that imply the permanence and immutability of racial groups, and that reference biological descent or heredity as the basis of these fixed differences.35 In many contemporary discussions, in other words, there is a tendency to assume that ‘race’ denotes an ontology of permanence and fixed natural kinds. This way of interpreting the ontology of ‘race’ is backed by the large body literature that historians of science have produced on race science and

“scientific racism”. Indeed from the perspective of European and North American science, the career of ‘race’ as an object of scientific inquiry suggests that roughly from the end of the eighteenth century up until the mid-twentieth century ‘race’ was a way of talking about the main biological divisions in the human species and was based on comparative studies of the bodily differences between human groups. Histories of ‘race’ as a biological entity implying the fixity of racial groups highlight the oppressive practices that these conceptions of racial

35 For a discussion and critique of this assumption see: Peter Wade, Race, Nature and Culture : an Anthropological Perspective, Anthropology, Culture, and Society (London ; Sterling, Va.: Pluto Press, 2002).

25 difference have sought to justify and thus emphasize the complicity of race science with slavery, colonialism, and segregation.

However, historians have paid much less attention to how ‘race’ has been historically constructed for anti-racist ends. In this section, my aim is to show that ‘race’ also has a history as an object of anti-racist inquiry, that is, in scholarly contexts where scientific expert have sought to end racism and where researchers explicitly adopt non-biological conceptions of race and human difference. In these contexts, where experts often sought to alter or improve social relations, biological notions of ‘race’ implying embodied difference where often substituted in favour of immaterial conceptions of human difference such as culture, race relations, ethnicity, and modernity.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of anti-racist conceptions of ‘race’ from the early twentieth century is that they have often been the product of attempts to reformulate and refashion the tenets and idioms of oppressive racial discourses.36 The history of antiracist conceptions of ‘race’ thus highlight the ways that those who have been the target of overtly racist scientific conceptions of race have sought to resist and transform the ways that they have been “made up” by racial taxonomies. At the same time, antiracist conceptions of ‘race’

36 See Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander L Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science,” in The Racial Economy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 170– 193.

26 reflect the way that scientific experts have sought to adapt their methods and theories in response to social and political movements. In other words, paying attention to the history of antiracist conceptions of ‘race’ highlights what Ian Hacking calls the “looping effects” that are often a feature of classification systems in the human sciences.37 Importantly, the majority of the conceptual developments I focus on first emerged during the first decades of the twentieth century and went hand in hand with the professionalization of the social sciences in the US and the reformist and modernizing impulses of middle-class

“Progressives”.38 The emergence of antiracist conceptions of race were thus tied to the rise of a regulatory state concerned with addressing social problems that were the products of the rapid industrialization and urbanization and demographic expansion of the US in the

Progressive era. However, the antiracist conceptions of race that I survey here traveled widely over the twentieth century and had a significant transnational impact while also forming the basis of a developing cosmopolitan sensibility.

37 Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack (Oxford University Press, 1995), 351–383. 38 On the professionalization of the social sciences in the US see Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

A crucial example of an antiracist conception of race that was developed in response to the racist idioms of biological determinism is the work of W.E.B Dubois. As many commentators have shown, Dubois devoted his career towards addressing the social issues of

African Americans and developed a sociological analysis of racism that linked racism to colonialism and imperialism while also maintaining a belief in the reality and need for a concept of ‘race’.39 However, the concept of ‘race’ that Dubois articulated and was best expressed in his essay “The Conservation of Races” (1897) was framed in direct contrast to the biological conceptions of ‘race’ that were a predominant feature of nineteenth century science. In contrast to nineteenth century conceptions of race which emphasize inherent biological differences between racial types, Dubois proposed a sociohistorical conception of race which defined race as a “vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.”40 Although Dubois’ conception of race shared crucial features with many standard notions of race in the nineteenth century, his understanding of race was

39 See Mia Bay, “The World Was Thinking Wrong About Race,” in W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and the City : the Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy, ed. Michael B Katz and Thomas J Sugrue (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 41–60. 40 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” The American Negro, His History and Literature (American Negro Academy, 1897).

28 unique insofar as it sought to validate and recognize the differences between social groups while highlighting their equal potential for innovation and creativity. Unlike the static or deterministic conceptions of race that prevailed amongst nineteenth century physical anthropologists and biologists, Dubois’ conception posited races as dynamic historical entities.41

Dubois’ conception of ‘race’ and the practical consequences it had for his sociological research were best expressed in his landmark 1899 study The Philadelphia

Negro (TPN), which was based on a years worth of ethnographic research on the black population living in Philadelphia’s 7th Ward. What is striking about The Philadelphia Negro is that it conceptualizes “Negroes” as a distinct race with a distinctive lineage and united by a common blood – thus echoing the classic idioms associated with scientific racism – but advanced its claims about Philadelphia blacks on the basis of rigorous sociological fieldwork.

Indeed, one of the guiding principles of Dubois study was that a sociological study of a given race “…must not confine itself to the group, but must specially notice the environment; the physical environment of city, sections and houses, the far mightier social environment -- the surrounding world of custom, wish, whim, and thought which envelops this group and

41 Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 21–37.

29 powerfully influences its social development.”42 This attempt to capture the broader social environment was reflected in Dubois methods, which consisted of going door-to-door and interviewing each of the 2500 households from the 7th ward, classifying them according to social class, and then mapping their distribution on a colour-coded map. Dubois also researched the history of the Negro community in Philadelphia and sought to contextualize the social and economic problems of this community within the broader history of slavery and emancipation. For Dubois, then, ‘race’ was a socio-historical entity whose reality could be mapped through ethnographic inquiry and through contextualization through history and political economy. At the same time, for Dubois, sociological studies of race, and of African-

Americans in particular, were motivated by a desire to improve the social condition of black folk, which was often framed as a question of uplifting and improving the ‘race’.

Dubois conception of ‘race’ thus reflects a distinctive feature of the antiracist sociological and anthropological conceptions of race that emerged in the early part of the twentieth century. By emphasizing the explanatory power of historical and environmental factors as opposed to biological or heredity factors, sociological conceptions of race advanced a conception of human difference that emphasized the malleability of racial kinds.

42 W E B Du Bois, Elijah Anderson, and Isabel Eaton, The Philadelphia Negro : a Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

However, as the historian Andrew Zimmerman has pointed out, this emphasis on malleability did not necessarily constitute a retreat from racist thinking. Indeed, according to Zimmerman the sociological conceptions of race that emerged in the early twentieth century in the work of sociologists like Max Weber and Robert E. Park, shared with their biological counterparts a notion of white superiority. However, unlike static conceptions of race, which suggested that these hierarchies were the result of innate biological differences, what distinguished sociological conceptions of race were that they “left room for reformist corrections to the perceived failings of supposedly inferior races.”43 Zimmerman situates the rise of this sociological conception of race within the social sciences of the North Atlantic and argues that it arose at the height of Western imperialism when “the sharp borders between self and other, inside and outside, characteristic of initial conquest, gave way to a flexible field of others whom political and economic elites might assimilate, exploit, exclude, or deport as they saw fit.”44

One of the distinctive features of antiracist conceptions of race, primarily as they arose in the first half of the twentieth century, is a re-description of racial groups as social

43 Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa : Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, America in the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 206. 44 Ibid.

31 entities whose present circumstances and shared social characteristics are the product of a complex interaction between historical, geographical, economic, and biological forces.

Indeed, this is a conception of human difference that would be adopted by anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, and psychiatrists throughout the Atlantic world, particularly during the period between the two world wars, and was fashioned in contrast to the strictly hereditary views of hardline eugenicists.45 This conception of human difference encouraged experts to examine a distinct set of objects. Instead of the concern with embodied and hereditary differences that animated the agendas of scientific racism, antiracist scientists took up phenomena such as cultural difference, racial consciousness, race relations, acculturation and cultural change, migration, social organization, and folklore as objects of study.46

The legacy of Franz Boas and the emergence of cultural anthropology loom large in the history of antiracist conceptions of race. Through his studies on the change in cranial

45 For discussions of the widespread adoption of this conception of human difference in the US social sciences see Graham Richards, Race, Racism, and Psychology : Towards a Reflexive History (London ; New York: Routledge, 1997); Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution : American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900-1941 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); John Carson, The Measure of Merit : Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 46 Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals : Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

32 shape of second-generation American immigrants compared to those from the first generation, Boas provided empirical evidence for the malleability of so-called racial types and sought to refute scientific arguments for the fixity of racial kinds. Further, Boas advocated for the epistemological significance of “culture” as an explanatory concept for describing the differences between human groups and for the adoption of participant observation and detailed ethnography as a key means of gaining access to other cultures. As historians of the social sciences in the US have shown, Boas’ popularization of “culture” and

“cultural anthropology” provided emergent social sciences like sociology and social psychology with a means of distinguishing their intellectual projects from those of the natural sciences and thus formed the basis of their unique disciplinary identity.47 Further, by forcefully arguing that the differences between so-called savage and civilized peoples were due to culture and not innate biological differences, Boas undermined the paradigm of social evolution and re-oriented the social sciences towards the anti-racist paradigm of cultural particularity.

As the historian Henry Yu has persuasively argued, the history of the antiracist social sciences in the US was also intimately entangled with the history of immigration to North

47 Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution : American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900-1941; John S Gilkeson, Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886- 1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

America. Thus, Yu reads the history of early sociological interest in race relations and the so- called “Oriental Problem” (particularly as it was formulated by sociologists from the

Sociology Department at the University of Chicago) as a form of knowledge that developed as a way of theorizing the effects of migration. However, Yu points out that this was an intellectual project dependent upon the definition and production of an exotic other, whose difference and exoticism was defined primarily as a question of culture and mentality.

Chicago sociologists’ interest in the transformative effects of migration and modes of contact between races focused their attention on the phenomenon of “racial consciousness” -- that is the degree to which individuals think of themselves and others in racial terms.48

Questions of consciousness, mentality, and subjectivity figure prominently in antiracist approaches to race. The forms of consciousness that are produced as the result of racial and cultural contact were studied and theorized not only by Chicago trained sociologists, but also by W.E.B Dubois and Frantz Fanon, who developed similar ideas concerning the fragmentation of consciousness experienced by black subjects as an effect of becoming aware of how they are regarded as inferior and as a result of colonization. Dubois theorized this experience as a form of double consciousness, and suggested that the experience of the African-American is characterized by an unreconciled tension between

48 Yu, Thinking Orientals : Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America, 1–12.

34 thinking of oneself as both black and American. Similarly, in Black Skin, White Masks Fanon documented the psychological effects of colonization on both the colonized and colonizing subject, and like Dubois argued that black subjects experience a fragmentation of consciousness as a result of striving to reconcile the desire to conform to European norms of conduct and assimilate whiteness while coming to terms with through the racist idioms through which their own blackness is perceived.49

In other words, anti-racist social scientists were not content to just study embodied

‘racial differences’ or ‘race’ as a neutral epistemic thing. Instead antiracist social scientists fashioned a moral economy that was committed to its change and to overcoming notions of

‘race’ that are overly concerned with fixity and hierarchy and that serve to oppress rather than enable. In the first half of the twentieth century, scientists who denounced racism often did so by underlining the immense variability and originality of cultural forms and the potentiality and plasticity of all human beings.

4 UNESCO’s 1950 Meeting of Scientific Experts on Race

Instead of seeking to pin down and decisively define the meaning of ‘race’ this dissertation will examine UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives in the 1950s as an emblematic

49 Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008).

35 episode of a shifting historical ontology where ‘race’ was re-fashioned both in its biological as well as cultural, social and psychological formulations. Already in the discussions leading up to the famed 1950 Statement (the production of which has figured as such a significant sign-post in many historical accounts) we can see the emergence of two distinct positions concerning the meaning and reality of ‘race’. The anthropologists at the meeting hoped that genetics could provide a way to decipher how biological diversity was apportioned within the human species, and thus sought to ground the reality of race in the non-essentialist biology of population genetics. In contrast, the sociologists at the meeting were content to reserve the use of the term ‘race’ for the ways people imagined each other in society irrespective of whether they corresponded with genetic mappings. Further, the experts seemed divided upon the best approach to tackling racism. Whereas some emphasized the importance of correcting false beliefs about racial difference through the dissemination of scientific information about human biological diversity, others argued for the importance of knowing and attending to the societal forces that produce racial prejudice. The contestations that took place within the context of UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns, this dissertation argues, were debates where not only the epistemological underpinnings of anti-racism but also the very ontology of

‘race’ was at stake.

To further illustrate the differential meanings and stakes that mid-century anti-racist scientists encountered I’d like to briefly examine the discussions from the meeting of experts on race at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, which was arranged by Arthur Ramos.50

Although Ramos and his colleagues held high expectations for the meeting, the committee of

“experts on race problems” that met at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters in 1949 struggled to reach consensus on how to define what appeared to be basic notions like ‘race’ and “racism” and to recommend a programme of action for tackling race prejudice. The experts attending the meeting hailed from diverse backgrounds and included influential figures in social science such as the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the American anthropologist

Ashley Montagu, the Brazilian sociologist L.A Costa Pinto, the African-American

50 Although he did not live to see his post-war vision of a world free of the odious “philosophy of racial supremacy” come to fruition, Ramos nevertheless played an important role in initiating the campaigns against racism which were central to UNESCO’s ambitions in the decades following WWII. In the six months that he did serve as head of the SSD in 1949, Ramos played a pivotal role in assembling the “team of experts” that went on to draft the 1950 Statement on Race. When the team of experts met in 1949, their meeting began with a tribute to Ramos who was described as the meeting’s “guiding spirit” and whose main hope for the meeting was “that the Committee would establish an “operational” definition of race that would serve as a reference in all discussions of the race problem.” On behalf of “all social scientists in Brazil”, Luiz Aguiar Costa-Pinto, a Brazilian sociologist who was one of the invited experts, described Ramos’ main scientific contributions and explained that one of the outstanding aspects of Ramos’ work was his “…deep sympathy with all backward peoples and cultures and oppressed races”. See “Summary Report (of the Six Meetings), UNESCO/SS/CONF.1/SR1,” in Meeting of Experts on Race Problems, 29 December 1949 (Paris: UNESCO).

37 sociologist Franklin Frazier, the Mexican anthropologist Juan Comas, the Indian philosopher

Humayun Kabir, the English sociologist Morris Ginsberg, and the social anthropologist

Ernest Beaglehole from New Zealand. The meeting was also presided over by officials from

UNESCO’s Department of Social Science including the American psychologist Robert

Angell, and the Spanish jurist José Ramón Xirau, as well as by two observers from the

United Nations. During their meeting the committee of “experts on race problems” was assigned the tasks of: 1) establishing an “operational definition of race”, and 2) recommending proposals for future research on the removal of “race prejudice” based on the established definition.51

However, during the 6 days they met, the group of experts found it difficult to live up to UNESCO’s ambitions. As the meetings proceeded, establishing an operational definition of ‘race’ – the meeting’s first task – proved to be a serious challenge. Some, like the sociologists Ginsberg, Costa-Pinto, and Frazier argued that there had already been many futile attempts to establish a consensus definition and questioned whether reaching a universally agreed upon definition of race was even relevant to fighting race prejudice. Thus,

51 Ibid., 2. The meeting had been organized in response to a UN resolution, which asked UNESCO to consider adopting “a programme of disseminating scientific facts designed to remove what is generally known as racial prejudice,” and the meeting of experts was thus imagined as the first step in this ambitious endeavor. The resolution was passed by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

Ginsberg suggested that instead of aiming to produce a “scientific definition of race” the committee of experts should study “how far it was possible to ascertain the extent of racial prejudice in the world, the different forms it took, and in what measure prejudice affected racial problems.”52 Franklin Frazier and Costa-Pinto raised similar doubts about the need for a scientific definition of ‘race’.53 Costa-Pinto argued the “relations between groups were based on ideology and not on any scientifically definable differences” and that UNESCO should therefore recognize that “race prejudice has its roots in social and political differences not in physiological or mental ones.”54 Similarly, Frazier argued that the dissemination of scientific statements concerning the true meaning of ‘race’ would do little to eliminate race prejudice, and that it was in fact the ideas that people held about ‘race’ that were of “more practical importance than the true meaning of the term.”55

In contrast to the views put foreword by the sociologists, the anthropologists at the meeting including Montagu, Lévi-Strauss, Comas, and Beaglehole, (all of whom had some familiarity with genetics and physical anthropology) argued that a scientific definition of

‘race’ could be found in the field of genetics and that a definition would be necessary if the

52 Ibid., 5. 53 “Summary Report (of the Six Meetings), UNESCO/SS/CONF.1/SR.3.,” in Meeting of Experts on Race Problems, 30 December 1949 (Paris: UNESCO, n.d.), 8–9. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid.

39 committee was to make recommendations for further research.56 Lévi-Strauss, in particular, argued that the Committee should remember that UNESCO’s explicit wish was for a definition of ‘race’ and that “all the experts could agree that genetics had so far provided the only sound definition of ‘race’, and they might therefore take it as a basis for their discussions.”57 Despite Lévi-Strauss’ confidence that genetics could provide a way to objectively define ‘race’, the experts could not reach agreement upon a single operational definition of ‘race’ and instead decided to draft a set of scientific statements clarifying the most important facts regarding racial differences.

The resulting statements were published as the well-known 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race based primarily on the ideas drafted by Ahsley Montagu.58 The 1950 Statement would go on to generate a major transnational controversy amongst scientific experts that forced UNESCO to publish a second statement on race in 1952. UNESCO’s first foray into the realm of anti-racism thus proved a highly charged task which brought out the ways that seemingly straightforward tasks such as establishing an operational definition of ‘race’

56 “Summary Report (of the Six Meetings), UNESCO/SS/CONF.1/SR1,” 4–12. 57 Ibid. 58 For more on Montagu and his views on human nature and biological diversity see Nadine Weidman, “An Anthropologist on TV: Ashley Montagu and the Biological Basis of Human Nature, 1945-1960,” in Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, ed. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 215–232.

40 concerned complex political and epistemological issues where the legitimacy and utility of

‘race’ as a scientific object and as a way of defining and making sense of human differences was at stake.

The contentious discussions held by the committee of experts, as well as the formative influence of scholars from Latin America like Ramos and Costa-Pinto are thus emblematic of the challenges UNESCO faced in the post-war in attempting to advance an anti-racist agenda that was sensitive to the diverse aspirations of nations from both the global

North and South. Over the course of the 1950s and beyond, experts affiliated with UNESCO and the UN system would grapple with questions such as whether experts could fashion a consensus-based definition of the meaning of ‘race’, whether definitions of ‘race’ should be based upon distinctions that exist in nature or upon those created by society, the extent to which conceptions of ‘race’ varied across national and regional areas and whether definitions of ‘race’ matter for the practice of anti-racism. Similarly, many of the social science experts who participated in UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives, also struggled with vexing questions concerning the dynamics of social and cultural change, the best way to provide “technical assistance” to developing nations and the degree to which racial ideologies impeded upon material progress. UNESCO experts, in other words, were challenged with the task of defining and articulating the kinds of knowledge and scientific research that was relevant for

41 combating racism and thus the scope of what would count as anti-racism within the context of the UN.

5 Organization of this study

My dissertation begins by examining how conceptions of ‘cultural change’ were deployed by scientists during UNESCO’s early years in the context of both anti-racism and modernization initiatives. This chapter aims to historicize mid-century conceptions of culture and to understand the way these conceptions served to both advance Western critiques of scientific racism while allowing Western scientists to continue endorsing the kinds of civilizing missions that were previously justified by appeals to ‘race’. This chapter suggests that two distinct narratives of redemption were at stake in the various deployments of

‘cultural change’ during UNESCO’s early years: 1) an anticipatory narrative where modern industrial culture figured as an aspirational horizon promising to bring nations closer together and to deliver underdeveloped nations from poverty and illiteracy, and 2) a nostalgic narrative borne from anthropologists’ longing for a Neolithic and pre-industrial past that served as the basis for their arguments concerning the need to preserve aspects of so-called

‘primitive’ people’s cultures whilst integrating them into modern societies. Although these

42 two narratives are not necessarily incommensurable, this chapter highlights how they acted as aspirations that oriented UNESCO’ actors along conflicting temporal horizons and brought questions about the need to preserve cultural heritage into conflict with the imperative to modernize and transform local cultures in the image of the West. Similarly, this chapter notes how discussions of UNESCO’s place in the world and of ‘cultural change’ were inflected by both evolutionary narratives of progress that equated modernization with the spread of western science and technology and the historical particularism of cultural anthropology, which placed an emphasis on the historical uniqueness and particularity of local cultures.

Like chapter one, the second chapter of this dissertation further explores the relationship between mid-century anti-racist projects and discourses of modernization. In particular, this chapter examines the transnational circulation of analogies used by race relations researchers to describe the relationship between ‘race’ and social structure, and how these analogies shaped their understanding of racism in the context of the UNESCO sponsored studies of Brazilian race relations in the 1950s. In particular, this chapter examines how American race relations researchers in the 1940s imported the-race-as-caste analogy (an influential trope that historians of race relations research have identified as a prominent feature of American race relations research and thought during the interwar period) to Brazil

43 and deployed it as a measure of the degree to which racism existed in Bahian society. This chapter also describes how a second generation of researchers challenged the race-as-caste analogy and turned to notions of ‘class’ as opposed to ‘caste’ as a way of describing how racism operates within Brazilian society. By highlighting the different interpretative frameworks and different analogies deployed by the first and second generations of researchers, this chapter shows how anti-racism in Brazil required repudiating some of the modes of thought being imported from American social science as well as repudiating the national ideology of celebrating miscegenation as an example of Brazil’s unique racial democracy. At stake in race relations inquiry was Brazil’s privileged status as a tolerant and anti-racist nation that punched above its weight in the social domain of race relations

(especially compared to its US counterpart) and whose elites and intellectuals could thus enjoy a sense of moral righteousness.

In the third chapter of my dissertation, I shift focus and examine the anti-racist views of French anthropologists who played prominent roles in UNESCO’s campaigns against racism and how their anti-racist stances were informed by their views on ethnographic observation and anthropological objectivity. Although this chapter highlights the different epistemological stances that anthropologists developed with regards to observation and anti- racism, I argue that the work of these ethnographers indexes a common area of concern: how

44 to produce objective ethnographic knowledge while recognizing the complicity of one’s discipline with colonial violence and racism? By attending to the linkages between French anthropologists’ attitudes towards observation and anti-racism, this chapter thus highlights the ways in which this generation of anthropologists were engaged in a redemptive project that involved attempts to reconcile the hopes initially promised by ethnographic observation with the destructive legacy of Western imperialism and with scientific ideals of objectivity.

In the final chapter, I examine the challenges and difficulties UNESCO representatives faced in attempting to create and international society for the study of race relations and in trying to publish an anti-racist handbook for secondary school teachers. My central argument in this chapter is that UNESCO’s concern with anti-racist pedagogy and its participation in an attempt to create an international society for the study of race relations reflect an attempt to fashion a moral economy in two distinct domains. On the one hand,

UNESCO’s projects in the 1950s focused on a transnational domain where the UN agency sought to re-establish international scientific relations through the creation of various international social science organizations. Within this domain, UNESCO brought social scientists together with the aim of establishing common norms of conduct and collaboration that would operationalize UNESCO’s slogan of “unity in diversity” and thus fashion a moral economy among scientific experts. On the other hand, UNESCO’s anti-racist projects in this

45 time period sought to transform the attitudes and beliefs of schoolteachers and students, and thus targeted the school system as a key site for the cultivation of a moral economy at the level of civil society. UNESCO experts thus sought to fashion a dual moral economy, one among an intellectual elite comprised by the international social science community and the other amongst teachers and schoolchildren, which represented the future and the promise of a cosmopolitan global society.

In sum, this dissertation contributes an important revision to historical understandings of the twentieth-century career of ‘race’ by expanding the linguistic and geographical scope of racial mappings, and expanding our sense of the actors, sites, and languages that were crucial to the repudiation of scientific racism and to the re-fashioning of ‘race’ as a scientific object. By re-situating the scientific career of ‘race’ within this broadly constituted postcolonial terrain, my dissertation illustrates the complex epistemological legacies and transnational racial projects that discourses of anti-racism have been assembled out of and sought to overcome.

Chapter 1

“A Challenge Of The First Order”: ‘Cultural Change’, Anti-

Racism, and Anthropology in UNESCO’s Early Years

In 1950, when the Swiss-American anthropologist Alfred Métraux was appointed to head the Race Division of UNESCO’s Social Sciences Department (SSD), the UN and its specialized agencies were engaged in a project to build peace and create a global community in a world increasingly polarized by Cold War rivalries and where a growing anti-colonial sentiment was gathering force. When Métraux assumed his duties with the SSD, UNESCO was on the verge of publishing the 1950 Statement on Race, which was intended as an objective and impartial instrument against racism, but nonetheless turned into a lightning rod for criticism, forcing the organization to publish a revised Statement in 1952. Before joining the SSD, Métraux was told in a letter from Walter Laves, UNESCO’s Deputy General at the time, that his main responsibilities would be to advance UNESCO’s anti-racism program by producing a series of pamphlets based on the 1950 statement and by organizing a study on race relations in Brazil. In addition to his duties in the field of anti-racism, Laves asked

Métraux to assist UNESCO in throwing “… light on methods of resolving the tensions

47 incident to the impact of modern technology on non-mechanized communities, particularly in

Latin-America and Africa” and also in research projects concerning the effects of industrialisation in “the Near East, the Far East and Latin-America.”59 In Laves’ estimation, the projected duties were ones that would give an anthropologist of Métraux’s qualifications

“a challenge of the first order.”60

The impetus for hiring Métraux stemmed from the sudden and unexpected death of

Arthur Ramos, the Brazilian anthropologist who acted as head of the SSD until he died unexpectedly in November of 1949. After Ramos’ death, Robert Angell, an American social psychologist was appointed as interim director of the SSD and one of his first tasks was to find an anthropologist to replace Ramos within the department. Angell wrote to his colleague, Hadley Cantril of Princeton University, to solicit suggestions for “a non-US anthropologist” to replace Ramos, and explained that an anthropologist was an essential part of the SSD staff because the “Departmental Programme is going into the field of the less developed peoples more and more.”61

59 “H.C. Laves to Alfred Métraux, 7 February 1950,” in Fonds Alfred Métraux, G.C.02.01 : “Papiers UNESCO 1946-1955” (Paris: Archives des ethnologues, Biblothèque d’anthropologie sociale, Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale, Collège de France). 60 Ibid. 61 “Robert Angell to Hadley Cantril, 2 November 1949,” in Statement on Race - Part I, 323.12 A 102, November 1949 - September 1951 (Creation) (Paris: Unesco Archives, epublished on Mar 2004).

These two concerns (combating racism and studying the impact of modern technologies on “less developed peoples”) were at the heart of UNESCO’s institutional ambitions in the post-war era. Founded in 1945, with the mandate of ‘building peace in the minds of men’, the question of race was quickly identified as an obstacle to UNESCO’s task of promoting international co-operation in the fields of education, science, and culture. As stated in its constitution, UNESCO’s founding members believed that the recently ended

World War was “made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races.”62 Similarly, as a specialized agency of the United Nations, UNESCO was also committed to the pledge articulated in the United Nations Charter to “promote higher standards of living, full employment and conditions of economic and social progress and development”.63

During the 1950s the UN and its specialised agencies sought to fulfil this mandate of promoting higher standards of living through what was known as the “Technical Assistance

Program,” which was designed to uplift so-called “backward” countries by providing

62 “Constitution of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,” in Basic Texts, 2004 Edition (Paris: UNESCO, 2004), 7. 63 United Nations, “Article 55” Charter of the United Nations, 24 October 1945, 1 UNTS XVI, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3930.html [accessed 13 August 2013]

49 technical support and consultation from experts in industrialised countries. Social and cultural anthropologists like Métraux assumed important roles within UNESCO’s post-war ambitions because of their intimate experience with those deemed in need of development and because of their expertise concerning questions of ‘race’ and culture. Given its mandate to promote peace through science, culture, and education as well as the access it had to scientific experts of many kinds, UNESCO became one of the UN’s main purveyors of

Technical Assistance. In its formative years, UNESCO thus sought to combat inequality and to build peace worldwide both through its campaigns against racism as well as by narrowing the gap between poor and wealthy nations via technical assistance.

This chapter examines the conceptual entanglements between UNESCO’s efforts to change and modernize so-called “non-mechanized” peoples and its anti-racism programmes in the 1950s. Although there are extensive literatures on the histories of both of these topics

(modernization theories and the critique of scientific racism), the connections between these two post-war practices have not been explored in great detail.64 However, as we can observe

64 On the demise of scientific racism see my discussion in the introduction of this study. For historical accounts of modernization and development theories in the postwar era see Frederick Cooper and Randall M Packard, International Development and the Social Sciences : Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future : Modernization Theory in Cold War America, New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Michael E Latham, Modernization as Ideology : American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era,

50 from the duties expected of Alfred Métraux at UNESCO, anthropologists were often recruited to address both of these concerns. That Alfred Métraux was positioned so squarely between discourses of modernization and anti-racism is a circumstance that raises several questions: what was it about anthropological expertise that led UNESCO and UN officials to see anthropologists as integral to both combating racism and ‘modernizing’ so-called primitive peoples? What connections did scientific experts and UN officials make between these two projects? How did anthropologists apply their knowledge and methods for these two tasks? And what kind of redemptive hopes did these two ambitions reflect? A preliminary answer to these questions comes by way of the object of study that has defined twentieth century cultural anthropology and which has become a key concept for the human sciences: culture.

As a concept that social scientists deployed to understand human diversity as well to anticipate how humans might respond to societal change, culture bridged UNESCO’s various post-war efforts to combat social inequality during its early years. UNESCO’s early anti- racism initiatives sought to combat racist ideology by arguing that group differences in

New Cold War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David C Engerman, Staging Growth : Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War, Culture, Politics, and the Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission : Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, America in the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

51 scientific, intellectual, and artistic achievements were primarily the result of cultural history and not inherited genetic differences. This argument highlighted the equal biological potentiality of all human groups and foregrounded cultural differences as a way of explaining unequal societal development and as a catalyst for societal reform. Anthropological methods for understanding cultural differences thus came to be deployed not only to combat racism but also for various ends related to UNESCO’s technical assistance initiatives: first, as a way to gain access to the ways of life of target communities so as to anticipate the potential ramifications of the introduction of “Western” industrial culture; second, as a means to foster and prompt targeted groups to willingly change their beliefs and adopt new customs and technologies; and, third, as a means to determine how to preserve the ‘cultural integrity’ of local communities in the wake of transformation and reform.

Within the context of UNESCO’s early history, which was characterized by an unbridled optimism and desire to repair international relations in the wake of the Second

World War, UNESCO’s projects enthusiastically embraced the universalistic ideals of the

UN and aspired to create a unified global culture as a way to fulfil its institutional mandate of

‘building peace in the minds of men’.65 Deployments of culture within this unique

65 On the optimistic assumptions of UNESCO’s early years see Chloé Maurel, “Le Rêve D’un « Gouvernement Mondial » Des Années 1920 Aux Années 1950. L'exemple de l'Unesco,”

52 institutional and historical context were thus characterized by the aspiration to change people’s mentalities, ways of life, and material circumstances. In this context, culture was often deployed within projects of ‘cultural change’, which included attempts to rid people’s minds of racial ideologies as well as attempts to modernize the ways of life of those deemed

‘backward’. For UNESCO officials, the malleability of human nature implicit within anthropological conceptions of culture promised a way out of the cataclysmic violence that was a defining feature of the first half of the twentieth century.

Through an examination of the ways that conceptions of ‘cultural change’ were deployed and the aspirations that informed these uses, this chapter argues that there were two distinct narratives of redemption at stake in UNESCO’s early initiatives: 1) an anticipatory narrative where modern technoscientific culture figured as an aspirational horizon promising to bring nations closer together and to deliver underdeveloped nations from poverty and illiteracy, and 2) a nostalgic narrative borne from anthropologists’ longing for a Neolithic and pre-industrial past, and which served as the basis for their arguments concerning the need to preserve so-called ‘primitive’ cultures. Although these two narratives are not necessarily incommensurable, this chapter highlights how they operated as aspirations that oriented

Histoire@Politique 10, no. 1 (December 31, 2010): 9; Glenda Sluga, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley,” Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (2010): 393–418.

UNESCO’ actors along conflicting temporal horizons and brought questions about the need to preserve cultural heritage in conflict with the imperative to modernize and transform local cultures in the image of the West. Similarly, this chapter notes how discussions of

UNESCO’s place in the world and of ‘cultural change’ were inflected by both evolutionary narratives of progress that equated modernization with the spread of Western science and technology and the historical particularism of cultural anthropology that placed an emphasis on the historical uniqueness and particularity of local cultures.

Crucially, both of these redemptive narratives were also bound up with the project of transcending the static taxonomies and biological essentialism that mid-century anti-racists defined as a distinguishing feature of racial ideologies. As genealogies of the culture concept have shown, arguments about the cultural diversity of humans and about the relativity of cultural practices and thought systems have been frequently mobilized in response to racism and ethnocentrism in the twentieth century. Anti-racist social scientists have used cultural data to highlight the malleability and flexibility of human beings and to counter notions of racial essentialism. In this chapter, however, I examine the ways that the malleability of human nature implied in anti-racist and in cultural discourses has served to justify notions of cultural superiority and to re-inscribe racial hierarchies without appealing to biology. My aim is to demonstrate the links between the scientific discourses of “cultural change” that were

54 part of the modernizing agenda of the UN system in the post-war era and scientific investigations into racial difference as well as anti-racist initiatives in this era.

This chapter will map these linkages between ‘cultural change’, ‘race’, and anti- racism through an examination of the genealogy of the culture concept and two case studies concerning the deployment of ‘culture change’ within UNESCO’s early projects. First, this chapter provides historical context to mid-century conceptions of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural change’ by examining recent discussions concerning the genealogy of culture as a scientific object and the how this genealogy is intertwined with the scientific career of ‘race’. Second, this chapter examines how notions of ‘cultural change’ were framed within the context of some of UNESCO’s earliest programmes, including a UNESCO project from the late 1940s to create an international scientific laboratory in the Amazon region that officials hoped would spur modernization in the region and which also had an ambitious anthropological research programme for studying the culture and physiologies of the indigenous populations of the region. Within the context of this initiative, discussions of “cultural change” were informed by narratives of evolutionary progress not unlike those of the late nineteenth century, as well as by anthropological understandings of cultures as local adaptations to different environments. Third, this chapter will examine the way that the notion of “cultural change” was deployed within the context of the UN’s Technical Assistance projects. Here, I

55 examine how notions of “cultural change” informed UN and UNESCO projects to introduce modern technologies to “non-industrialized” nations and promised to provide a means for harmoniously integrating modern technologies into so-called primitive societies while minimizing the negative impact on their ways of life. In this context, “cultural change” figured as a purportedly non-coercive and non-racial governmentality and social science experts were at pains to point out how technical assistance schemes were possible because of the rejection of racial ideologies.

The case studies I examine show that the conceptions of ‘cultural change’ informing

UNESCO’s applied social science projects acted as a theoretical edifice that guided experts in their attempts to intervene upon the lives of others and to transform societies. As such, mid-century conceptions of ‘cultural change’ were deployed in ways that resembled the colonial practices of both the French and English Empires during the interwar years and thus fit with postcolonial theorist David Scott’s description of colonialism as a political project characterized by “… the concerted attempt to alter the political and social worlds of the colonized, an attempt to transform and redefine the very conditions of the desiring subject.”66

By focusing specifically on the conceptual terrain of ‘culture change’ and the ways experts deployed notions of culture in an attempt to alter social worlds and re-fashion cultural values

66 David Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” Social Text no. 43 (January 1995): 214.

56 this chapter thus highlights some of the epistemological complexities that animated the post- war human sciences in applied contexts: the push and pull between the universalist aspirations of organizations like the UN and the intimate and relativistic knowledge and practices of anthropology, the tension between recognizing and validating the equality of all cultures and the desire to re-make cultures in the image of the West, the tension between mobilizing ‘culture’ as an anti-racist and non-racial object and the racialised projects of improvement which characterised early post-war forms of ‘modernization’ and

‘development’. At stake in this chapter is how culture has been mobilized both as an epistemological counter to scientific racism and as a means for representing and re-shaping colonial and post-colonial populations in the image of the West.

1 Historicizing Culture

In order to contextualize mid-twentieth century deployments of ‘cultural change’ within UNESCO’s programmes, this section examines some recent genealogies of the culture concept and recent anthropological critiques of the culture concept. Genealogies of culture have proven to be highly contested with scholars often noting the continuities between

57 anthropological conceptions of culture and the racial discourses they were meant to oppose.67

At stake in these accounts is the extent to which the conceptions of culture adopted by social scientists over the course of the twentieth century differ from conceptions of ‘race’ and the degree to which anthropology and allied social sciences have distanced themselves from the legacy of scientific racism. Critics of the culture concept maintain that in the post-WWII era cultural theories have often been deployed by social scientists to blame marginalized groups for their low socioeconomic status and to describe cultural differences as static and homogenous.68 For these critics, these uses of culture suggest a non-biological form of essentialism and thus the continuation of racial thought in a different guise.

Critiques of the culture concept have typically functioned by demonstrating the continuity between cultural and racial thought. However, these critiques often equate racial

67 Kamala Visweswaran, “‘Race and the Culture of Anthropology’,” American Anthropologist 100, no. 1 (n.d.): 70–83; Kamala Visweswaran, Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Alana Lentin, “Replacing ‘race’, Historicizing ‘culture’ in Multiculturalism,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 4 (2005): 379–396; Alice O’Connor, “Giving Birth to a ‘Culture of Poverty’: Poverty Knowledge in Postwar Behavioural Science, Culture, and Ideology,” in Poverty Knowledge : Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-century U.S. History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 99–123; CL Briggs, “Genealogies of Race and Culture and the Failure of Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms: Rereading Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois,” PUBLIC CULTURE 17, no. 1 (2001): 75–100; Lee D Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 2010). 68 Visweswaran, “‘Race and the Culture of Anthropology’”; Lentin, “Replacing ‘race’, Historicizing ‘culture’ in Multiculturalism”; O’Connor, “Giving Birth to a ‘Culture of Poverty’: Poverty Knowledge in Postwar Behavioural Science, Culture, and Ideology.”

58 thinking with the static taxonomies characteristic of scientific racism and thus critique deployments of culture insofar as they continue to perpetuate essentialist and determinist views about human diversity.69 Although these are important criticisms of the culture concept and its deployment, in this chapter I am less concerned with the ways culture serves to essentialise and more interested in examining how the very malleability and adaptability of human nature that culture implies is also entangled with racial thinking. This requires recognizing the multiplicity of meanings and logics that have characterized racial projects and recognizing that racial discourses have also functioned as discourses of reformation and improvement targeting individual behaviour and cultural competencies.

Within the history of the social sciences, the emergence of the modern anthropological concept of culture is often traced back to Franz Boas’ rejection of two fundamental tenets of nineteenth century evolutionary anthropology and race science: the ranking of cultures in a hierarchical scale ranging from ‘savage’ to ‘barbarian’ to ‘civilized’, and the idea of stable racial types that can be classified based on anthropometric measurements. As the story goes, Boas disproved the stability of racial types through his anthropometric work on the cranial plasticity of immigrants in the US, and came to reject the teleological models of cultural evolution prevalent in his day in favour of a relativistic and

69 Visweswaran, “‘Race and the Culture of Anthropology’.”

59 historicist conception of cultures. Due to Boas’ efforts in institutionalizing his particular approach to the study of human difference at Columbia University, and in training a large number of graduate students, cultural anthropology emerged as a discipline which offered a way to study human behaviour independently from biology, that is, without appeal to biological theories of heredity and evolution. The Boasian approach challenged Eurocentric conceptions of culture, and introduced a way that cultures could be studied and understood on their own terms. During the interwar period and the Second World War, Franz Boas and many of his students including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Otto Klineberg, and Ashley

Montagu, led anti-racist campaigns against scientific racism and defined their disciplinary identity in opposition to understandings of race that presupposed fixed biological differences.

The Boasian conception of culture and critique of race acquired its fullest expression in the post-war era through the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, a large part of which was written by Boas’ student Ashley Montagu, and to a lesser extent through the Brown vs. Board of education ruling in 1954 which was influenced by the UNESCO Statements and the testimony of social scientists. Thus, by the beginning of the post-war era, anthropological conceptions of culture were positioned at the forefront of the critique of scientific racism due to the anti-racist stance largely popularized by the Boasians.70

70 For examples of this narrative see Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution : American Scientists and

In contrast to this well-known narrative about the rise of culture in the twentieth century, recent scholarship concerning the history of the anthropological concept of culture provides a revised account of the relationship between conceptions of culture and ‘race’ in twentieth century cultural anthropology. Whereas received accounts narrate the rise of culture as a significant point of departure from nineteenth century conceptions of ‘race’ and as a definitive corrosive to scientific racism, recent scholarship emphasizes the continuities between the conceptions of culture that emerged in the twentieth century and previous conceptions of ‘race’. The revisionist arguments put forward seek to show the continuities between scientific conceptions of ‘race’ and culture by showing that although anthropological conceptions of ‘culture’ are associated with a conception of human groups as dynamic and changing entities (in a non-evolutionary and relativistic sense), they nevertheless have been deployed in ways that renders those that are the object of anthropological inquiry as static and unchanging (i.e. ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’).71 Thus,

the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900-1941; Carl N Degler, In Search of Human Nature the Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution : Essays in the History of Anthropology : with a New Preface. For an account of how Boasian and German influenced versions of culture became pervasive in twentieth century American thought see: Gilkeson, Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886-1965. 71 For the anthropologist Johannes Fabian the temporal separation that is often established in ethnographic writing between the anthropologist and the culture studied is in fact a crucial aspect of how anthropology as a discipline has defined what constitutes its object of inquiry. See Johannes

61 instead of negating discourses presuming fixed human differences ‘culture’ has become a way to talk about fixity in non-biological terms.

The anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran offers a forceful example of this revisionist argument. Indeed, Visweswaran interprets the anti-racist project of Boas and his students as resting on a fraught attempt to deny the value of ‘race’ as an element of social analysis and identity and to fill the void left through this negation with concepts such as ‘culture’ and

‘ethnicity’. According to Visweswaran, the Boasians’ strategy consisted of an attempt to deny and remove the importance of ‘race’ in society by re-defining it as referring exclusively to the evolved phenotypic differences between human beings. In seeking to restrict the use of

‘race’ to the rarefied realm of physical anthropology and evolutionary biology or to remove its usage altogether, the Boasians hoped to establish a firm demarcation between the purportedly scientific and value-neutral study of evolved human differences and the social study of cultures and societies. According to Visweswaran, the consequences of this attempt to restrict the deployment of ‘race’ to the biological realm, is that ‘culture’ came to be defined as everything that ‘race’ was not (i.e. the non-biological differences by which human groups can be classified) and that ‘race’ was removed from anthropological discourse as a

Fabian, Time and the Other : How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

62 meaningful way to talk about social differences. However, this distinction placed a disproportionate epistemic burden on ‘culture’ and also left social analysts without a language to describe the less obvious racial projects that continued to shape society

(including the project of racial whitening advocated by Boas). “Without a way of describing the sociohistorical construction of race,” Visweswaran explains, “culture is asked to do the work of race.”72

Similarly, Lee D. Baker, a historian of anthropology, has recently shown how the rise of the Boasian concept of culture and the emergence of cultural anthropology in the US in the early twentieth century was built upon a specific racial politics. According to Baker, Franz

Boas’ development of cultural relativism and his critique of 19th century conceptions of race produced a very specific division of labour within the social sciences of early twentieth century America: Native American groups became the preserve of anthropologists while

African-Americans and immigrant groups became the object of study for sociologists. Within this particular “racial politics of culture”, anthropologists came to think of Native Americans as the possessors of an authentic but vanishing culture in need of preserve, but thought of

African-Americans as having lost any unique culture during the middle passage.73 As a

72 Visweswaran, “‘Race and the Culture of Anthropology’,” 76. 73 Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, 5–9.

63 result, African-American culture came to be seen as a poor copy of White culture, which allowed for the emergence of the sociological interpretation of ‘Negro’ culture as damaged and pathological.74 At the same time, the Boasian concept of race, which was restricted to the description and classification of phenotypic differences and which assumed that races are similar in potential, became the basis for projects of racial uplift and assimilation. As Baker puts it, “the anthropological concept of race made it possible to promote the idea that regardless of their race, Indians, Negroes, and Orientals could and should learn to think, behave, and act like good white Protestants…”75 Thus, Baker and Visweswaran both suggest that the rise of the anthropological culture concept did not provide a straightforward antidote to racism and in fact was shaped by a racial politics (about who and who doesn’t have a culture).

Within these recent revisionist accounts, scholars have shown that in the post-WII period anthropological conceptions of culture have been invoked as explanations of poverty

74 This notion of black culture as damaged and pathological became an influential trope in the social sciences during the 1930s and carried through to the post-WWII period, see Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity : Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White : Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 75 Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, 7.

64 and social inequality and have thus become the basis for what some term ‘neo-racism’.76 An often cited example of how culture becomes the basis for neo-racism are “culture of poverty” style studies, which Kamala Visweswaran argues appeal to a kind of cultural essentialism that foregrounds culture as a key explanatory category for inequality while excluding explanations appealing to economic and political forces.77 The historian of social science

Alice O’Connor also illustrates how the rise of “culture of poverty” theories functioned in ways similar to racial discourses. O’Connor argues that “culture of poverty theories” were influenced by the institutionalization of the behavioural sciences in the US during WWII and situates their emergence within a post-war political economy of affluence where poverty was seen as an anomalous phenomenon by social scientists. In this particular historical context, social scientists began to debate whether poverty could be explained as a result of psychological and personality traits that were specific to certain cultures, and by the late

1950s, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis was popularizing the view that poverty could be explained as a result of a constellation of psychological, behavioural, and economic “traits” that defined the way of life of certain cultures and persisted across generations. Among the

76 The term ‘neo-racism’ is often attributed to Etienne Balibar, “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?,” in Race and Racialization: Essential Readings, ed. Tania Das Gupta (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2007), 83–8. 77 Visweswaran, “‘Race and the Culture of Anthropology’,” 76.

65 psychological and social features that Lewis identified as typical of cultures of poverty were attitudes of resignation and dependency, a lack of impulse control, mother-centred families, and the inability to defer gratification. Thus, context of a post-war political economy of affluence in US, when growth and increased economic prosperity were assumed to be inevitable outcomes, the “culture of poverty” theory arose as a way for US social scientists to explain the alleged “paradox” of poverty as a phenomenon born from personal and cultural defects as opposed to something produced by the nation’s economic system.78

Culture of poverty theories as well as theories of damaged and pathological cultures provide examples of how cultural analyses can serve to blame oppressed groups for their circumstances and lend support to Visweswaran’s claim that culture and “its relativist outlines have become increasingly filled by racist content”.79 The normative judgements that are explicit in these kinds of theories re-produce the very racial hierarchies that cultural descriptions are supposed to negate. The worry here is that culture becomes the grounds for what Visweswaran calls a “differentialist racism” or a “racism without races,” which “insists

78 Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge : Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth- Century U.S. History, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 99–123. For further discussion of how psychological and cultural patterns have been used to explain poverty and underdevelopment and why this mode of explanation can be characterised as racist, see Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 79 Visweswaran, “‘Race and the Culture of Anthropology’,” 76.

66 that cultures can neither be composite, shared nor held in common” and which “articulates uncommon cultures as forms of alterity and incomprehensibility, positing that adverse outcomes arise from such cultural difference.”80 In a similar vein, philosopher of social science Thomas McCarthy argues that late post-WII conceptions of culture have been used in an “…attempt to explain away entrenched injustices by reference to the victims’ own shortcomings, which are now taken to be cultural rather than biological in origin.”81

According to McCarthy, explanations that rely on appeals to victims’ own cultural shortcomings represent ideological stances, because they deflect attention away from calls for systemic changes and from analyses that take historical trends and economic inequalities as significant factors in phenomena like poverty and underdevelopment.82

By pointing out the ways that culture has been used to imply fixity of human kinds, these recent critiques of the culture concept go a long way in mapping the racial contours of cultural discourse in the human sciences of the twentieth century. However, it is important to point out that the antiracist critique of static notions of culture relies on the notion that racism is primarily a discourse about fixed, natural differences. However, many scholars have

80 Kamala Visweswaran, ““The Interventions of Culture: Claude Levi Strauss and the Internationalization of the Modern Concept of Race,” in Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 8. 81 McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development, 13. 82 Ibid.

67 argued that the definition of racism as discrimination based upon a belief in fixed racial kinds, represents just one particular form of racism, and that it is important to attend to the multiplicity of forms which racism can take.83 For example, Ann Stoler has shown, that even at the height of nineteenth century imperialism, racial membership and racial projects were based on flexible and non-visible criteria such as “cultural competencies, moral civilities, and affective sensibilities,” and argues that racial discourses have endured and proliferated due to the very instability upon which racial categories are built.84 Further, Stoler suggests that historians have overstated the discontinuity between an overt biological racism operating in the past and a more nuanced and subtle cultural racism operating in the present.

Similarly, David Theo Goldberg argues that there are two distinct forms of racial thought, which have played prominent roles in the formation of modern racial states. The first, which he calls ‘racial naturalism,’ refers to racial discourses that posit racial distinctions based on supposedly well defined, fixed, and biologically rooted differences. The second, which he labels ‘racial historicism,’ refers to discourses that define those who are not

Europeans or of European descent as immature or not fully developed relative to European

83 See Stoler, “‘Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth’”; David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002); Andrew Zimmerman, “Three Logics of Race: Theory and Exception in the Transnational History of Empire,” New Global Studies 4, no. 1 (January 09, 2010). 84 Stoler, “‘Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth’,” 186.

68 standards. Whereas racial naturalism posits the difference between races to be fixed in nature, racial historicism takes these differences to be the product of historical forces over time. Crucially, for Goldberg, both racial naturalism and racial historicism have been implicated in state racial projects, but whereas racial naturalism has lent itself to policies of racial exclusion and racial purification, racial historicism has lent itself to policies of racial blindness and assimilation.85

As the rest of this chapter shows, the anthropological conceptions of culture that are the object of recent revisionist critiques were often deployed in the context of both anti-racist and modernization initiatives in the decades following WWII. Moreover, whereas recent discussions concerning the genealogy of anthropological conceptions have situated the rise and deployment of ‘culture’ within the frame of Anglo-American social science, the examples I examine in the rest of this chapter situate conceptions of culture and ‘cultural change’ within the Atlantic region more broadly and engage with conceptions of culture emerging from the Atlantic South and from Francophone and Lusophone contexts. Within the trans-Atlantic and multilingual context of UNESCO’s modernizing projects, deployments of ‘cultural change’ had more in common with projects of ‘racial historicism’ than those of

‘racial naturalism’. In other words, the conceptions of ‘cultural change’ that informed

85 Goldberg, The Racial State. p. 74-88

UNESCO’s early projects, were simultaneously invested in undermining ideologies of racial fixity and with altering and preserving the life-world of the non-European peoples who had previously been deemed ‘backward races’. By examining early UNESCO approaches to cultural change including the project of creating an international scientific laboratory in the

Amazon, and a Technical Assistance mission to the Marbial Valley in Haiti, I will show how mid-century conceptions of ‘cultural change’ index a messy and complex attempt to distance

UNESCO and anti-racist science from the legacy of scientific racism.

2 Modernizing the Amazon: Evolutionary Narratives of ‘Cultural

Change’

One of the UNESCO projects that exemplifies the complexities of how scientists understood and applied notions of “cultural change” in the immediate aftermath of WWII was the attempt to create an internationally managed scientific research centre in the Amazon river basin. The proposed project, known as the International Institute of the Hylean Amazon

(IIHA), sought to establish a scientific research centre in the heart of the Amazonian jungle so that interdisciplinary studies of the Amazonian biosphere could take place. For officials from UNESCO’s Department of Natural Science including the British biologist Julian

Huxley, the British chemist Joseph Needham, and the Brazilian chemist Paulo Carneirio, the

IIHA project also represented an opportunity to put their ideas about scientific internationalism and societal evolution into practice. For these scientists, whose internationalist ideals were shaped by nineteenth century notions of evolutionary progress, the diffusion of science and technology through the establishment of research centres in

‘peripheral’ areas was seen as a means to accelerate the modernization of less-developed societies and as a means to create a unified global culture. At the same time, these figures viewed science as a civilizing force and as the pinnacle of modern culture. The ambition to create a large international research centre in the heart of the Amazon basin thus represented an attempt to civilize a region long thought of as wild and savage and to create the conditions for a modern scientific culture to flourish in a region imagined as far removed from the centres of scientific inquiry. As such, the notion of modernization through scientific co- operation provided these figures with a model of cultural evolution that was perceived to be non-racial and even anti-racist insofar as it presumed the inherent educability of all humans and the ability of all humans to assimilate the modern industrial civilization. Ironically, however, the notions of ‘cultural change’ and modernization advanced by Carneiro and

Huxley in particular were often infused with organic and biological metaphors drawn from ecology and population biology and tended to equate societal progress with biological

71 progress. Whereas these sorts of evolutionary schemas would have been described in racial terms (i.e. as improvements of the race) prior to the Second World War, in the post-war era they were now stripped of overt references to ‘race’ and more concerned with ‘culture’.

UNESCO’s attempts to modernize the Amazon and the evolutionary narratives that informed these projects thus provide telling instances of how ‘culture’ was increasingly asked to do the work of ‘race’ in the post-war period while also acting as an anti-racist foil to scientific racism.

As such, UNESCO officials hoped that a systematic and internationally coordinated program for studying the Amazonian basin would not only foster harmonious international relations and yield important scientific discoveries, but also accelerate the modernization of the Amazonian region. UNESCO officials imagined that the IIHA would serve as a centre for the accumulation of knowledge based on field studies and they commissioned comprehensive field surveys of the regions’ flora, fauna, climate, soil, indigenous groups, and archaeological history. In addition, UNESCO officials envisioned in-depth anthropological studies of the culture, physiology, and social structure of the indigenous populations of the Amazon basin, and hoped that the IIHA could also become a centre that would serve to modernize the culture of the region’s inhabitants by offering “fundamental education” programs.

The choice of the Amazon basin as a site for the manifestation of UNESCO’s internationalist ambitions teems with symbolic significance. Within the canons of Western scientific exploration, the Amazon has a long history as a region that has been imagined as a place of excessive nature, where life and society are inexorably bound to the rhythms and patterns of the tropical landscape.86 At the same time, during the mid-twentieth century the

Amazon region began to attract the attention of cultural anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-

Strauss, Charles Wagley, and Alfred Métraux who were compelled by the prospect of studying indigenous cultures who had resisted contact with the modern world as well as by the question of how human societies could survive and prosper in a tropical region that they deemed as harsh, severe, and hostile to economic development. The Amazon thus held the allure of the unconquered and the untarnished, a space far removed from modern culture and industrial civilization where ‘nature’ reigned. Within the context of the Amazon region, mid- century discussions of “cultural change” were linked to questions of climate, geography, and environment, and the question of to what extent ‘nature’ could be aligned with modern ways of life. As a region with abundant natural resources, the Amazon has also figured a valuable

86 See Hugh Raffles, In Amazonia : a Natural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

73 economic asset for countries in the region and has been a site where aggressive development and exploitation of the environment has attracted worldwide attention.

The IIHA project was one of UNESCO’s top priorities in the first five years of its existence and embodied the internationalist ideal of world peace through scientific planning that inspired key figures in UNESCO’s natural science department such as Julian Huxley,

Joseph Needham, and Paulo Carneiro. However, the project never came to fruition as

Brazilian politicians accused UNESCO of imperialism, and argued that the project posed a threat to Brazilian sovereignty. The project thus provides an opportunity to further examine the links between the establishment of the UN and UNESCO, and the history of European imperialism that historians have begun to trace. 87 The intellectual framework and rationale for the proposed international laboratory also illustrates the geopolitical stakes that discussions of “cultural change” were rooted in.

Paulo Carneiro, a Brazilian biochemist, brought the idea for an international laboratory of scientific research in the Amazon to the delegates of UNESCO’s member states during UNESCO’s first general conference in London in 1946. During the conference

87 On the historical links between the UN and political interests of European empires see: Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Cambridg, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Sluga, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley.”

74 discussions, Carneiro argued that by promoting concrete projects geared towards international scientific co-operation was how UNESCO could make its most significant contributions to world peace. Thus, Carneiro proposed the creation of a centre for tropical research in the Amazon basin and stressed the importance of an international centre that would transcend national or regional concerns.88

Carneiro’s proposal was met with approval by the majority of the delegates and by the end of the 1946 meeting delegates resolved that UNESCO invite the governments of the

Latin American countries of the region (Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru,

Venezuela), the colonial governments of French Guiana, British Guiana and Surinam, and the United States, together with other specialized agencies of UN, to “form an International

Scientific Commission to investigate on the spot the setting up of an International Institute of the Hylean Amazon.”89 If created, the delegates agreed that the function of the IIHA would be to promote and facilitate research on “all aspects of human welfare in the region” including work in “fundamental education… social sciences, ethnology, nutrition, and the natural sciences.”90

88 UNESCO, "(Records of the) General Conference, First Session, Held at Unesco House, Paris from 20 November to 10 December 1946 (Including Resolutions)," in UNESCO. General Conference. 1 C/Resolutions; UNESCO/C/30 (Paris: UNESCO, 1946). 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., 272.

For Carneiro, the IIHA was an opportunity to put his ideas about social progress and internationalism into practice. Carneiro was born into a middle-class Brazilian family who were committed members of the Igreja Positivista do Brazil (the Positivist Church of Brazil), a movement inspired by the ideas of the nineteenth century French philosopher August

Comte and emphasizing the application of scientific methods for the purpose of modernizing

Brazil. Carneiro embraced the positivist ideals of the Church and carved out a career in science by training in biochemistry at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and going on to work in

Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture in Pernanmbuco during the military regime of Vetulio

Vargas in the 1930s.91

Carneiro’s positivist approach to the modernization of Brazil was also complimented by an evolutionary and ecological approach to international relations. Carneiro believed that organisms were subject to a general biological law dictating that as they evolved in complexity their subordination to their environment increased. He also believed that this law

91 For more on Carneiro’s background and involvement with UNESCO see Paulo E de Berrêdo Carneiro, Marcos Chor Maio, and Unesco Brasil., Ciência, Política e Relações Internacionais : Ensaios Sobre Paulo Carneiro (Rio de Janeiro[Brasília, Brazil]: Editora Fiocruz ; UNESCO Representação no Brasil, 2004); Patrick Petijean e Heloisa M Bertol Domingues, “A Redescoberta Da Amazônia Num Projeto Da Unesco: o Instituto Internacional Da Hiléia Amazônica,” Estudos Históricos, Rio de Janeiro 14, no. 26 (2000): 265–292.

76 applied to the social evolution of societies.92 Carneiro thus likened societies to organisms and argued that advanced societies are characterised by a high degree of interdependence with humanity as a whole whereas primitive or unevolved societies are characterised by isolationism and prone to war and aggression. Building on these ideas concerning the ecological dimensions of international relations, Carneiro argued that the rise of the United

Nations represented an important evolutionary development because it promised a greater interdependence between nations and laid the groundwork for a planetary culture. In contrast to the evolutionary nature of the UN, Carneiro viewed Nazism, Fascism, and Bolshevism as examples of pathological societal forms because of their isolationist and aggressive approach to international relations. The IIHA was an example of social evolution for Carneiro insofar as it promised to be a project of international scientific co-operation promising a comprehensive and multidisciplinary study of the Amazonian ecology and would contribute to forging a greater interdependence between nations through scientific collaboration.93

92 Paulo E de Berrêdo Carneiro, O Instituto Internacional Da Hiléia Amazônica; Razões e Objetivos Da Sua Criação (Rio de Janeiro, 1951); Heloisa Maria Bertol Domingues and Patrick Petitjean, “Darwinismo e o Projeto Da Unesco, Do Instituto Internacional Da Hiléia Amazônica (1946-1950),” Halshs-00115079 version 1 (2006): 1–12. 93 Domingues, “A Redescoberta Da Amazônia Num Projeto Da Unesco: o Instituto Internacional Da Hiléia Amazônica”; Petitjean, “Darwinismo e o Projeto Da Unesco, Do Instituto Internacional Da Hiléia Amazônica (1946-1950).”

Carneiro’s views on internationalism resembled those of UNESCO’s first director general, the British biologist Julian Huxley. But whereas Paulo Carneiro represents someone from the post-colonial elite whose intellectual outlook was largely shaped by his experiences in Europe, Huxley’s scientific outlook was largely shaped by British imperialism. Indeed, as

Glenda Sluga has shown, the particular brand of liberal idealism that Huxley espoused and which guided him in his role as UNESCO’s first Director-General was shaped by political views that stemmed from British imperialism. Since Huxley’s first field mission in 1929 when the British Colonial Office sent him to British East Africa to study the possibilities of improving colonial education in biology, Huxley embraced the view that liberal imperialism was a positive force insofar as it allowed white men to tutor “backward peoples” and thus bring them civilization and education, which would in turn help modernize their societies.

During the Second World War, as Britain faced strong resistance from anti-colonial uprisings in their colonies, Huxley argued that the best way for Britain to regain control of its colonies would be through modernization programs designed to uplift colonial peoples out of their state of primitiveness and raise them to a level of actual equality. Huxley’s interest in projects of racial uplift continued after the Second World War and during his years as

Director-General of UNESCO, he championed the view that UNESCO’s “fundamental education” program should seek to level up the educational, scientific, and cultural facilities

78 in the “dark areas” of the world populated by “darker races” and less privileged classes.94 In order to implement “fundamental education” projects at UNESCO, which were modelled on the “mass education” projects of the British Empire that Huxley had helped to design during the Second World War, Huxley drew upon his experiences in colonial filmmaking, and recruited experts from the British Colonial Film Unit.95

Other aspects of Huxley’s political thought that were also shaped by his entanglements with the British Empire, were his advocacy of scientifically planned and managed societies and economies as an antidote to the excesses and inefficiencies of laissez- faire capitalism. Huxley’s ideas about the importance of scientific planning and governance were influenced by the popularity and growth of ecological thought and by the rise of population genetics in the context of the British Empire of the interwar period.96 In response to the economic depression of the 1930s, Huxley argued for the need to halt laissez-faire individualism in favour of an ecologically engineered economy that would be in balance with nature. In order to accomplish this, Huxley believed that R.A Fisher’s mathematical models of genetics and natural selection provided tools for the rational planning of society and

94 Sluga, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley,” 404. 95 Sluga, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley.” 96 Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945, 206.

“improvement of the race” and also advocated for the importance of planned economies in colonial settings.97

During his time as UNESCO’s Director General from 1946-1948, Huxley further elaborated his political philosophy in a booklet called UNESCO Its Purpose and Its

Philosophy published in 1946. In this monograph, Huxley described UNESCO’s purpose through the lens of an evolutionary narrative positing increasing complexity in all domains of life as the hallmark of progress and where increased scientific and technological complexity was seen as an impartial yardstick for evaluating progress and evolution.98 For Huxley the directional movement towards greater complexity could be seen in the distinction between primitive and modern: “the elaboration of a modern state, or of a machine-tool factory in it, is almost infinitely greater than that of a primitive tribe or the wooden and stone implements available to its inhabitants.”99

In addition to this increase in scientific and technological complexity, Huxley argued that greater control over and independence from the environment and “the understanding and

97 Ibid. 98 Huxley’s account was thus continuous with a Western tradition of evaluating other societies based on their scientific and technological achievements that dates back to the early modern period. See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men : Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Cornell Studies in Comparative History. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 99 Julian Huxley, “UNESCO Its Purpose and Its Philosophy” (UNESCO Archives, Paris : Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 1946), 10.

80 attainment of intrinsic values” were hallmarks of evolutionary progress. Further, Huxley suggested that evolution could be sped up through the conscious choice of values and, like

Carneiro, believed that internationalism was an example of a value that would contribute towards evolutionary progress. For Huxley, growing internationalism and scientific planning as it was taking shape in the UN and its specialized agencies was evidence of a movement towards the simultaneous complexity and unity of social and political life. The IIHA’s goals of international scientific co-operation and the comprehensive study of the Amazonian ecology fit well with Huxley’s ideas. Indeed, the comprehensive scientific studies of the

Amazon region that were envisioned as part of the IIHA’s activities and the international co- operation between scientists that would be required for these initiatives gave Huxley hope many of the region’s problems could be solved. Thus, in a 1947 article published in the

Rotarian magazine, Huxley suggested that the institute was to serve as a “clearing house of information” where international research groups could study “the countless scientific and social problems of the Amazon.”100 One of the more obvious problems, according to Huxley, was the primitive state of the region’s inhabitants: “a measure of the problem can be glimpsed when it is realized that the 300,000 population of the Amazon, scattered in tribal

100 Ibid., 14.

81 villages along the 2,000-mile reaches of the river, are among the last surviving examples of

Stone Age society.”101

Another figure whose ideas influenced the proposed programme for the IIHA was the biochemist and historian of science and technology in China, Joseph Needham. During the

Second World War, Needham spent five years in China as head of the Sino-British Science

Cooperation Office and played an active role in promoting scientific internationalism along with Julian Huxley through their participation in conferences on scientific internationalism organized by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) and the

Association for Scientific Workers (AScW). Like many of their British and French colleagues, Needham and Huxley mobilized against the rise of fascism and the scientific racism of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, and became concerned with issues concerning the application of science for peace and well-being, and the development of international scientific co-operation.102

During this period, Needham developed his unique approach to international co- operation and ‘cultural change’, which was based on what he called the ‘periphery principle’.

101 Ibid. 102 Aant Elzinga, “UNESCO and the Politics of International Co-Operation in the Realm of Science,” in Les Sciences Coloniales - Figures et Institutions , ed. Patrick Petijean (Paris: Orstom éditions, 1996), 163–202.

For Needham, the periphery principle stood in contrast to what he described as the ‘laissez faire’ approach to scientific internationalism. According to the ‘periphery principle’, the world could be divided into ‘bright zones’ where science and technology flourished and

‘dark zones’ where science languished due to isolation and lack of contact with centres of scientific industry. The best way to advance scientific progress, Needham argued, was through planned and strategic scientific co-operation between industrial nations and the third world nations that were at the ‘periphery’ of scientific production. Needham believed that

UNESCO could stimulate scientific development in these dark zones by promoting collaboration with experts from leading scientific centres. Thus, in 1947, Needham oversaw the creation of UNESCO’s system of “Field Science Co-operation Offices” in areas deemed peripheral such as Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia. 103 Indeed, in an article for the first edition of the UNESCO Courier, Needham explained that during UNESCO’s first General Conference many delegates stressed “the importance of international scientific co-operation in the natural sciences, pure and applied, both as an essential element in an integrated world civilisation and as an immediate factor for peace.”104 For Needham the

103 See Patrick Petijean, “The Joint Establishment of the World Federation of Scientiﬁc Workers and of UNESCO After World War II,” Minerva 46 (2008): 247–270. 104 Joseph Needham, “Natural Sciences: Practical Steps for International Co-Operation Amongst Scientists,” Unesco Courier 1, no. 1 (1948): 2.

83 question of “cultural change” was thus one that concerned a worldwide convergence towards a modern culture based upon scientific and technological planning.

The ideas of Huxley, Needham and Carneiro represent a discourse of “cultural change” that often took the form of quasi-evolutionary narratives of civilization and progress.

What these scientists’ visions shared was the anticipation of an interdependent world where nations are brought together into a unified culture as a result of the transnational flow of scientists, techniques, theories, and objects. For these figures, the Amazon represented a vast and uncharted space that could be the testing grounds for this new vision of scientific internationalism. The IIHA held the promise of an institution that would enact this vision of nations brought together in the name of rational and objective inquiry. Thus, from the vast and imperial perspective of nineteenth century evolutionism that these men embraced, the notion of “cultural change” was proposed as part of a narrative describing a movement towards an integrated ‘world civilization’ where scientific inquiry was described as a civilizing force that would help to bring nations closer together and uplift ‘primitive’ cultures out of their traditional ways and into modernity. Further, this notion of ‘cultural change’ enacted through scientific co-operation fit well with UNESCO’s redemptive and anti-racist ambitions of creating unity in diversity and thus creating a unified global culture. For officials from UNESCO’s Department of Natural Science, international scientific co-

84 operation was both a means towards a peaceful and unified global culture as well as a desirable end insofar as scientific internationalism was seen as the pinnacle of high modern culture.

2.1 Modernizing the Amazon: Cultural Adaptations

In contrast to the narratives of evolutionary cultural progress that bore traces of

European imperialism and imagined a global process of “cultural change” converging upon a single world civilization, the anthropological studies that UNESCO officials proposed for the IIHA took a distinct approach to ‘cultural change’. In the documents concerning the proposed anthropological programme for the IIHA, ‘culture’ was cast as a much more local phenomena that involved both social and biological adaptation to a local environment.

Similarly, notions of ‘cultural change’ were described as processes playing out at an intimate and regional level and involving contact and relations between neighbouring ‘tribes’ and

‘races’. Further, the documentation for the IIHA’s proposed anthropological studies show that UNESCO’s researchers were interested in physiological, racial, as well as socio-cultural aspects of the adaptation of people to their geographical environment and demonstrate that both biological and social aspects of “cultural change” were the targets of UNESCO’s proposed interventions in the context of the IIHA.

The designs for the anthropological programme of the IIHA were first proposed during a preparatory meeting in Belem, Brazil. In 1947, UNESCO recruited E.J.H Corner, a

British tropical botanist and Alfred Métraux who was asked to assist Corner “in his capacity as an anthropologist” and to meet with Brazilian scientists and officials and begin formulating a plan for how to create an international institute in the Amazon. Later that year, a meeting was held in the Amazonian town of Belém do Para in Brazil that was attended by representatives from Brazil (including Paulo Carneiro), Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, France,

Peru, United Kingdom, the US, Venezuela, and delegates of UNESCO (including Corner and

Métraux), the WHO, and the FAO, the Pan-American Union, and the Pan-American Sanitary

Bureau. The delegates of the Belém meeting drafted a plan and budget for establishing the

Hylean Amazon Institute and proposed a programme of scientific research.

The participants of the Belém commission gave anthropology a prominent place within the framework of the anticipated Institute and saw anthropology as a crucial bridge between the Institute’s activities and the communities of the Amazon. For example, during the Belém meetings a group of Brazilian researchers who formed the Committee for Social

Sciences and Education (CSSE) resolved that the IIHA should strive to consult anthropologists on all activities that may have a direct or indirect impact on “the life of the natives.” The CSSE also proposed a programme of anthropological studies and interventions,

86 which included studying the causes of the depopulation of “native centres in the Amazon and the necessary resources to stop its continuation” as well as studies in ethno-botany, ethno- zoology, and native medicine, which the committee hoped would help foster the “integrity of native cultures” and “reassert in the mind of the natives the value of their own original culture.”105

In addition to studying the native populations and seeking to foster their cultural integrity, the members of the CSSE proposed several initiatives for uplifting local populations and for industrializing the region. To this end, the committee recommended that the governments of the Amazonian countries “provide scholarships to acculturated Indians so that they might continue their technical and professional educations” and that the IIHA study ways to transmit “to the productive classes of the Amazonian countries, the necessary scientific and technical elements, that could be appropriate for the economic well-being of the populations of these countries.”106

But whereas the officials from the CSSE and the Belém meetings were concerned with questions about how to educate and civilize the Amazon’s inhabitants through the

105 “The Hylean Amazon Project and Anthropology", Fonds Alfred Métraux, FAM.AS.AA.03.03 "Documents sur le projet de l'Hylea amazonienne" (1946-1948), (Archives des ethnologues, Biblothèque d’anthropologie sociale, Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale, Collège de France, Paris, c.1947). 106 Ibid.

87 diffusion of scientific and technological knowledge, UNESCO’s anthropologists stressed the importance of studying the culture of the regions inhabitants before it vanishes either through collapse or through ‘acculturation’. Indeed, in a document titled “The main objective of the

Anthropological Section of the International Hylean Amazon Institute” the author of the report (presumably Métraux) argued that the vast territories of the Amazon region represent a vast “terra incognita” that poses a large “array of problems and few elements for their solution.”107 According to the report, one of the most difficult tasks that anthropologists face in the region is recording the existing cultures before they disappear. Indeed, the author stressed that “specialists of South American ethnology have become sadly aware of the rapidity with which Indian cultures disintegrate and collapse,” and explained that it is very difficult to “find groups sufficiently large to present a front against the impact of white civilization.” It is precisely because of this dynamic, the author of the report further explained, that “for more than fifty years anthropologists have raised their voices to stress the urgency of field work in South America.”108

107 “The Main Objective of the Anthropological Section of the International Hylean Amazon Institute,” in Fonds Alfred Métraux, FAM.AS.AA.03.02 “Documents Sur Le Projet de l’Hylea Amazonienne” (1946-1948) (Paris: Archives des ethnologues, Biblothèque d’anthropologie sociale, Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale, Collège de France, n.d.). 108 Ibid.

According to the author of the report the Amazon region also offered “unequaled opportunities for studies in acculturation.” Whereas some tribes were “practically unaffected by European civilizations” and thus offered “a picture of Indian life in its aboriginal setting,” other groups could be found that were in contact with either “Indian tribes of a different culture”, “Negroes”, “assimilated or acculturated Indians”, or “are in contact only with missionaries, Indian posts, soldiers, settlers or traders.” The existence of these various kinds of cultural contacts as well as isolated groups offered vast opportunities for comparative studies and promised to provide “a wealth of data which will be useful to those who will deal with Indians or who will have to take measures on their behalf.”109

In addition to the studies of cultural contacts, the anthropologist Alfred Métraux drafted a proposal for Amazonian research in the field of physical anthropology. Métraux’s proposal for physical anthropological research suggested that the Amazon region offers an ideal space for studying questions of human adaptation to tropical conditions and that scientific knowledge of the region is necessary for future colonization. Métraux argued that since “within a short radius, there are groups belonging to numerous racial and cultural types, it would be possible to make comparative studies of considerable interest and general

109 Ibid.

89 significance economically and within a relatively short period of time.” 110 Métraux suggested that these kinds of preliminary studies would be necessary “if this region of South

America is to be opened to colonization” so that “science might help in the expeditions and healthful settlement of the colonists.” By so doing, Métraux argued, “many otherwise unavoidable errors could be foreseen and overcome.”111

In his report, Métraux suggested that the best way to approach physical anthropological studies of Amazonian populations would be through a team consisting of

“one or two cultural anthropologists, one or two social psychologists, a rural sociologist and one or two physical anthropologists.” Métraux suggested that at least one of the physical anthropologists be medically trained and that one of the members of the team should be

“…familiar with the broader problems of food habits and nutrition.”112

Métraux was careful to differentiate the proposed studies from those traditionally carried out by physical anthropologists. "Today physical anthropology is no longer concerned exclusively with anthropometric measurements and the description of human groups,”

Métraux explained and further argued that the field was in fact increasingly drawing upon

110 Alfred Métraux, "Physical Anthropology in the Hylean Amazon Institute 1947-1948?", Fonds Alfred Métraux, FAM.AS.AA.03.04. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid.

90 methods from the fields of physiology and medicine. In contrast to its previous obsession with measuring crania and comparative anatomy, Métraux argued, physical anthropology was now focused on “physiological functions and race” and on objects such as “metabolic rates, energy output, susceptibility to disease, hormone balance and the activity of ductless glands, nervous excitability, perceptions, etc.” In particular, Métraux flagged “the establishment of precise energy ratings of the various groups within the Amazon basin and the determination of the influence of climate and diet on the energy quotient” and “the influence of climate on metabolism” as pressing research problems in need of scientific attention.113

For Métraux, research on the physiologies and metabolic processes of the indigenous groups of the Amazon held the potential to clarify many misunderstandings about human differences as well as to act as a bridge between the social sciences and the biomedical sciences. By encouraging close co-operation between social anthropologists, physical anthropologists and medical investigators, the proposed research promised benefits to both social and life scientists: the social scientists stood to gain greater awareness of the health problems faced by indigenous groups and the physical anthropologists would benefit by gaining access to “cultural data which are too often neglected because of a lack of time and

113 Ibid.

91 training.” Métraux suggested that through this co-operation between these two branches of the human sciences, “... many misconceptions currently existing about race and heredity could be dispelled and many of the possible factors could be taken account of in a realistic manner.”114

Other documents pertaining to the proposed designs for the anthropological studies of the IIHA also show that questions about ‘race’, about the kinds of bodies that are best suited to the Amazonian environment and about how to best populate the region in order to extract its natural resources were prominent concerns. For example, in a UNESCO document titled

“Regional Studies - The Tropic Division,” which outlines the questions and methods for a proposed community study in a small Amazonian city called Santarém, the author suggests that the Amazon forest is “suited for increased production and population” given that jungle products such as rubber are abundant and that there is a large amount of land suitable for cultivation. However, despite the abundance of natural resources that make the Amazon region an excellent candidate for an increased population, the document claims that the issue of populating the Amazon is complicated by racial factors. A “pure white culture or race [is] unsuited to [this] environment” the author of the report explains and suggests that “white colonization on permanent self-supporting basis” has never been “successful in this or

114 Ibid.

92 analogous regions.”115 At the same time, the document suggests that the “Indian population”, at 300,000 – 500,000 people, is small and “culturally too different from Western Civilization to expect complete eventual conversion,” making it an unsuitable candidate for populating the region. Consequently, the author posed the following question: “what physical types can form [the] basis of population, labor force, consuming market, etc.?” and offered a tentative hypothesis:

a mixed population: Indian-white, negro-white; Indian-negro-white. Supposedly such a combination would combine Indian or negro physical adaptation to tropical environment with nervous energy of whites. Studies needed to settle this point.116

Having suggested a tentative solution to this racial problem of what kinds of bodies are best suited to growing the Amazonian economy, the author of the report raised the question of “what kind of culture can these people have which combines cultural adaptation to environment together with participation on a self-supporting basis with white civilization?”117 Similar to the proposed solution of racial miscegenation, the author hypothesized that a syncretic culture “combining Indian subsistence techniques with

115 “‘Regional Studies - The Tropic Division’,” in Fonds Alfred Métraux, FAM.AS.AA.03.09, “Documents Sur Le Projet de l’Hylea Amazonienne” (1946-1948) (Paris: Archives des ethnologues, Biblothèque d’anthropologie sociale, Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale, Collège de France, Paris, n.d.). 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid.

European economic and political values and procedures” would best suit the economic development of the region. According to the report, the payoff to solving these kinds of questions of “human resources” would be that it would make it “possible to go ahead with intelligent planning for its development economically, politically, intellectually, culturally, or what you will.”118

The anthropological studies that were proposed as part of the IIHA project show that social, physiological, and cultural knowledge of Amazonian populations were fundamental to the proposed scientific centre and to UNESCO’s ambitions in the region. Some reports emphasized the conditions necessary for economic productivity in the region. In contrast, the officials at the preparatory meetings for the IIHA were keen to determine the potential impact of the centre on the lives and culture of the indigenous groups in the region and sought to include anthropological research into the framework of the IIHA as a way to minimize any negative impacts from the centre and as a way to ensure that the IIHA would contribute towards modernizing the region while fostering the cultural integrity of local populations.

At the same time, the documents surrounding the proposed creation of the IIHA suggest that UNESCO experts were also motivated to conduct anthropological studies in the region

118 Ibid.

94 because of racial anxieties about the degree to which the Amazon could provide a climate hospitable to non-indigenous bodies and ways of life. For UNESCO officials, studying the cultures of indigenous groups was as a means to learn practical lessons about the ways that these groups made use of the region’s natural resources as well as a way to determine what sort of ‘civilization’ the region could support. Given the perceived harshness of the region’s climate and the purported distance between the culture of the region’s inhabitants and

“Western civilization” anthropologists argued that the region would only be able to support a racially mixed and culturally syncretic “civilization”. At the same time, the notion of adaptation figured prominently in the conceptual framework that anthropologists deployed, and was described in biological as well as social terms. Anthropologists described the populations of the Amazon as physiologically and culturally adapted to the specific geographical demands of the Amazonian environment and sought to understand the ways indigenous groups had adapted to their local environment in order to develop a culturally syncretic and racially mixed Amazonian civilization.

In the early post-war imaginaries of anthropologists, the question of ‘cultural change’ simultaneously involved knowledge of social organization and social customs but also considerations of biological questions concerning the metabolic processes and physiological adaptations to harsh tropical climates. Although Métraux described the proposed

95 anthropological studies as distinct from the static racial typologies that characterised much of the race science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the anthropological research agenda he described nevertheless contained a racial dimension of determining what kinds of bodies would be best suited for populating and colonizing the region, as well as a cultural dimension that involved figuring out how the techniques and scientific skills of

“Western civilization” could “be grafted intimately and understandingly into these indigenous folkways.” From the perspective of the anthropological research programme of the IIHA, the question of ‘cultural change’ was both a forwards and backwards looking project. In these accounts, anthropologists were keenly aware of the dangers of racial thinking and sought to distance their proposed studies from claims about inherited genetic differences by stressing the physiological and cultural adaptations of the Amazon’s inhabitants as examples of the malleability and flexibility of the human species. However, their research proposals were nevertheless saturated with racial thinking. Indeed, by granting that racial and cultural differences were not fixed by genetic inheritance but rather by environmental and ecological factors, UNESCO’s anthropologists did not evade ‘race’ but instead sought to work through a different set of racial questions concerned with how to harness the economic potential of domains beyond the body such as culture, environment, climate, and nutrition. At the same time, anthropologists proposals were both forward and

96 backward looking in the sense that they were not only interested in the issue of how to create a modern technoscientific society but also in how to preserve the customs and integrity of existing cultures. The anthropological proposals for the IIHA thus show how mid-century conceptions of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural change’ were deployed for various and at times conflicting ends, many of which did not escape from anthropology’s long-standing concern with ‘race’.

2.2 Modernizing the Amazon: ‘Community Studies’ and Cultural Change

Although many of the proposed anthropological studies for the IIHA were never carried out, UNESCO officials did succeed in sponsoring a preliminary survey of an Amazonian community that was conducted by the Columbia trained anthropologist Charles Wagley.

Wagley’s community study of the Amazon region advanced a cautious and circumspect attitude towards the question of ‘cultural change’. In the reports from his community study,

Wagley characterized cultures as fragile as well as dynamic entities that were carefully adapted and adjusted to the conditions of their ecological environment. On this view, Wagley suggested that the introduction of modern health practices and modern technologies was already having a disruptive effect on local cultures and called for thorough empirical and

97 comparative studies of the different Amazonian communities before any large-scale transformations are introduced. Wagley’s approach to ‘cultural change’ thus exemplifies the anthropological conceptions of societal transformation that took shape during the mid- century which simultaneously emphasized the need to preserve and respect the traditions of

‘non-industrialized’ communities while recognizing that they would be inevitably transformed through the spread of industrialized culture.

Wagley’s approach to questions of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural change’ bore the imprint of his mentor Franz Boas who he studied under in the 1930s. The community surveys he produced for UNESCO and their stress on a comparative approach to the different geographical regions of the Amazon also hint at the influential role Wagley would later play in the development of the anthropology of Brazil and the Amazon as well as in the emergence of

“area studies” research. During the Second World War, Wagley supervised the publication of public health pamphlets and slide shows in the Amazon region and carried out research on the demography of the forest-dwelling Tapirapé indigenous group, as part of a joint public health initiative between the Brazilian and US governments.119

119 For more on Wagley’s biography see: University of Florida Digital Collections, “The Papers of Charles Wagley,” http://ufdc.ufl.edu/dlosawagley.

In 1948, during a second conference in Iquitos, Peru, UNESCO officials and delegates from the Amazonian countries decided that the first step towards the establishment of the

Hylean Amazon Institute would be to prepare a series of scientific surveys concerning different aspects of the Amazonian environment. Among the proposed surveys, was an anthropological survey of a typical Amazonian community that would be conducted by

Charles Wagley, an American Anthropologist who spent the Charles Wagley was a lifelong friend of Alfred Métraux and was trained at Columbia University by Franz Boas.120

Wagley went on to conduct a community survey of an Amazonian town called ‘Gurupa’ and described the proposed study in an article published in the UNESCO Courier titled

“Social Studies Planned of Amazon Peoples.” Wagley suggested that the IIHA’s research on

Amazonian populations should focus on “man and his past, present, and potential adjustment to the Amazon environment” and should call upon a wide variety of scientists with a variety of specialities: botanists for studying “the plants which are used now, which have been used by the Indians in the past, and which may be useful to man in the future”; soil experts for an analysis of “the earth from the point of view of present and future agricultural production,” agronomists for assessing “what is good and bad about the present techniques of tilling the

120 A second survey was also conducted by Anibal Buitron, an Ecuadorian anthropologist whose name was recommended to UNESCO by Métraux, conducted the anthropological survey of the Rio Huallaga valley of Peru.

99 soil,” nutritionists for investigating the “vitamin, mineral and energy content of Amazon foods,” and physiologists for studying “the energy output and other physiologically determined reactions of man under Amazon conditions.”121

But before this diverse range of experts are brought in, Wagley argued, the first step towards understanding “man in relation to the Amazon environment” was the study of the

“contemporary culture, or way of life, of the present population of the Amazon Valley.”122 In a brief outline of this contemporary culture, Wagley described it as the product of “three racial stocks” and as bearing traces inherited from “Portugal or Spain, from Africa, and from the American Indian.”123 Wagley argued that knowledge of the contemporary Amazonian culture as well as its history is important because “any social planning must take into consideration the habits, values, customs, beliefs and in general the organized way of life of the people who are there.”124 Wagley also pointed out that from this perspective of “social planning,” the purpose of anthropological studies of Amazonian people is to “determine the basic patterns of the present culture and to be able to in the future advise social planners as to the feasibility of programs of change in this region.” However, any proposed changes to the

121 Charles Wagley, “‘Social Studies Planned of Amazon Peoples’,” Unesco Courier 1, no. 6 (1948): 5. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid.

100 cultural patterns must be approached delicately, and he suggested that “like the physiological organism, human culture has environmental limitations and environmental reactions, and it must be handled with care.”125 In this proposal for the study of the region Wagley thus conceptualised cultures as fragile entities not unlike biological organisms that need to be skilfully attended to and managed and that need to be treated with special care when changes are introduced.

In order to begin understanding the basic culture of the Amazonian region, Charles

Wagley and a small research team lived in a small Amazonian town called Gurupá for a period of over six months and conducted ethnographic observations. Wagley’s research team included his wife Cecilia Wagley, Ecuadorean anthropologist Eduardo Galvao, and his wife

Clara Galvao. During their time in the Amazon, the couples immersed themselves in the intimacies of the town life and carefully observed the townsfolk’s ‘way of life’ through door- to-door visits to nearly all of the homes in the town, through extended visits to the homes of the people they befriended, by attending local festivals, by being treated by the “local medicine man,” by attending evening prayers at the local church, and by making trips to the huts of the rubber gatherers on the farms inland from the river. As Wagley describes their

125 Ibid.

101 methods, “every effort was made to witness at first-hand as wide a gamut of Gurupá life as was possible during the few months at our disposal.”126

Wagley communicated the observations he made in Gurupá to UNESCO officials in a report titled “A Social Survey of an Amazon Community with recommendations for future research”. In the introduction to the report, Wagley continued with the ‘adaptationist’ theme suggested by the earlier proposals. Wagley described the Gurupá region as a promising research site because of its varied ecological sub-regions, which he suggested provide a

“different physical setting for the adaptation of man to the Amazon tropics.” Whereas on the high land, Wagley explained, “man plants… manioc or cassava,” in the islands “man is typically a collector” and on “terra firme” he is “generally an agriculturalist.” Thus, Wagley explained, that because of its two principal sub-regions (“terra firme” and “islands”), Gurupá offers “the student of man in the Amazon two varieties of ecological conditions.”127

One of the key examples of ‘cultural change’ that Wagley identified in his report on

Gurupá referred to the major transition the town was experiencing as a result of the encroaching influence of modern science and technology. Wagley explained that the

Gurupán’s “world view is changing from a supernatural to a scientific one under the impact

126 Ibid. 127 Charles Wagley, “‘A Social Survey of an Amazon Community with Recommendations for Future Research’,” UNESCO/NS/11HA/14 (Paris: Unesco, 1948).

102 of modern technological influences” and as a result, “many aspects of life which were formerly assigned supernatural causes are now viewed as the result of secular causation.”128

As an example of this transformation, Wagley cited changes in how the inhabitants choose to deal with health problems. Previously, Wagley suggested, most of the people in Gurupá took their health concerns to the local “pagés” (religious medicine man), and “curandeiro” (local curer), who employed healing methods such as “massaging, sucking, and fumigating the body of the patient in order to remove an extraneous malignant object which is to have been inserted in the body by magical means” and whose purported power “rests on his control over ‘spirits of the river’ (bichos de fundo) which come to his aid during his cures putting him into a trance state.”129 However, in more recent times Wagley explained, the community members were developing a greater reliance on the local physician at the Health Post instead of the traditional “pages.”130

In the concluding section of the report, Wagley argued that the culture of Gurupá represents a “microcosm of the basic culture of the Amazon basin.”131 Although thorough empirical studies have not been conducted in other towns, Wagley suggested that there was

128 Ibid., 20. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid., 21.

103 enough anecdotal evidence from reports of travellers and naturalists and from his own scattered observations, to suggest that people in “Menaos, Santarem, Iquitos, and Belem, where modern industrial influences are felt, live by cultural standards and by custom similar to those described for Gurupá.”132 The culture observed in Gurupá, Wagley suggested, is thus a “relatively simple folk culture” that is the “basis upon which modern technology is being and will be imposed.”133 However, Wagley also suggests that further studies of Amazonian communities are required in order to decipher the many local manifestations of the basic

Amazonian culture and recommends that these kinds of studies be adopted as part of the scientific programme of the IIHA. Although he suggests further anthropological studies of the area, Wagley is cautious about rushing to find practical applications for these studies. “It is of the opinion of the writer,” Wagley asserts, “that such studies should not be directed primarily toward the solution of immediate practical problems but should have the basic scientific end of understanding the present cultural adaptations of man to the Amazon region.” 134

Wagley’s written reports for UNESCO demonstrate a prudent and circumspect attitude towards the question of ‘cultural change’. Wagley emphasises the importance of

132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid.

104 careful empirical study and classification of cultural varieties before undertaking any social planning or guided development. Further, Wagley conceptualises the customs and ways of life that make up a given culture as adaptations to a geographical environment and characterises ‘cultures’ as similar to biological organisms insofar as they maintain a delicate relationship to their environment. Wagley’s conceptualization of culture thus represents an ecologically informed definition of culture, which suggests that cultures are dynamic insofar as they exist in a continual relation to their environment as well as fragile inasmuch as changes threaten to disturb and disrupt this balance. Wagley’s interpretation of cultures as malleable and fragile entities is thus at odds with the interpretations of ‘culture’ as something fixed and deeply ingrained that circulated in the 1950s and which sustain contemporary critiques suggesting that ‘culture’ has become the grounds for a neo-racism. Clearly, for

Wagley, cultures did not represent static entities that were fixed by nature and resistant to change. On the other hand, Wagley recognized that cultures are characterized by patterned and habitual ways of doing things and that abrupt change could prove harmful to a culture’s existence. Like Métraux and other anthropologists, Wagley’s anthropological research revealed conflicting imperatives: to change and to preserve, to modernize while retaining a sense of the traditional, to re-make non-Western societies in the image of the West and yet retain some sense of their cultural distinctiveness. At the same time, Wagley’s research as

105 well as the various anthropological studies imagined as part of the IIHA and the evolutionary notions of progress espoused by officials from UNESCO’s Department of Natural Science, exemplify the kind of issues that were at stake with respect to the study of biological differences in the context of mid-century anti-racist science. Whereas notions of static racial differences based upon genetic inheritance were widely rejected as fraught with danger, interest in biological differences persisted at the environmental and ecological register for cultural anthropologists while evolutionary notions of progress continued to provide a viable

‘meta-narrative’ of ‘cultural change’ for the likes of Huxley and Carneiro. Further, Wagley and other anthropologists’ studies demonstrate that the study of environmental and ecological differences emerged as an acceptable domain for making claims about racial difference.

4 Failure of the IIHA and Accusations of Imperialism

Although UNESCO officials imagined the IIHA as a cosmopolitan initiative designed to foster international co-operation, Brazilian politicians saw the project as an imperialist exercise and prevented it from materializing. The internationalist ideals that buoyed

Carneiro, Huxley, and Needham’s ambitions for the IIHA proved out of sync with the nationalist interests of a rapidly industrializing Brazil whose politicians sought to expand

106 territorial and economic control into the Amazonian region so as to keep up with the demands of a rapidly growing urban population.135 The project also proved to be out of sync with emerging cold war politics and in particular with the strategic interests of a US state that increasingly saw Latin America as a strategic region in its rivalry with the USSR. The failure of the IIHA highlights the limitations of UNESCO projects in this period, which were narrowly focused on cultural transformation as a vehicle of societal change and proved to be inadequate for contending with the conflicting economic and political imperatives of this period.

Indeed, the IIHA met with significant resistance from Brazilian politicians when

Carneiro originally proposed the project in 1945 to the Brazilian ministry of agriculture. In his original proposal, Carneiro envisioned an international foundation under the care of the

French and Brazilian governments, with two research centres in the Amazonian towns of

Belém and Cayanne and a strong emphasis on the systematic study of the indigenous populations of the region. However, the project was rejected by the Ministry of Agriculture

135 See Seth Garfield, Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil : State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937 - 1988 (Durham, NC : Duke Univ. Press, 2001).

107 whose director, Felisberto Camargo, likened it to the kinds of projects carried out by scientists of the colonial era like Alexander Von Humboldt.136

Even after Carneiro took his proposal to UNESCO and had it accepted during the 1946 general conference, the project was met with resistance particularly from the US. During

UNESCO’s second General Conference in Mexico in 1947, American diplomats cautioned against moving the project forward too quickly. Later that year, the US national commission declared it would withdraw financial support for the project. Although the reasons behind this decision are unclear, Joseph Needham suggested that it was because the US wanted to protect its regional interests in Latin America and because they had decided to reduce the budget of projects not directly related to meeting their cold war objectives.137

The project, and, in particular UNESCO’s handling of it, also drew sustained criticism from EJH Corner, a British botanist who was appointed to act as UNESCO’s Latin American

Field Officer and given significant responsibility for organizing the project on-the-ground.

Before a conference was held in Iquitos, Peru in 1948 for the purpose of drafting a convention for the IIHA, Corner sent a letter to UNESCO officials expressing his concerns

136 Petitjean, “Darwinismo e o Projeto Da Unesco, Do Instituto Internacional Da Hiléia Amazônica (1946-1950).” 137 Domingues, “A Redescoberta Da Amazônia Num Projeto Da Unesco: o Instituto Internacional Da Hiléia Amazônica.”

108 with the direction of the project. Corner worried that an international institution within the boundaries of sovereign states had the potential to be seen as a foreign intrusion and a form of scientific imperialism and hence he urged UNESCO to make sure that the founding documents for the Institute clearly state how it will collaborate with local institutions and how it will incorporate local scientists into its programme.

Despite Corner’s concerns about the language of the Iquitos conference, the delegates of the conference ratified the proposed convention for the Institute. Subsequently, Paulo

Carneiro took the Iquitos Convention to the Brazilian president and national congress and asked for its approval. Carneiro’s congressional proposal met with strong opposition by

Brazilian politicians and members of the Brazilian who raised concerns about the imperial dimensions UNESCO and the IIHA project. The most vocal critic was the former president of Brazil, Artur Bernardes, who was then a deputy in Brazil’s chamber of deputies.

Bernardes argued that the IIHA opened the door to imperial domination of the Amazon hidden under the pretext of scientific and economic objectives. In order to shore up nationalist opposition to IIHA, Bernardes sought the advice of the “Instituto Brasileiro de

Geopolitica”, which published a report condemning the proposed institute and described it as a threat to national sovereignty and as an attempt to colonize Brazil. Further the report suggested that the task of ‘colonizing’ the Amazon should be left to Brazilians and stressed

109 that Brazil was sufficiently equipped to do so on its own.138 In the end, Bernardes’ concerns proved to be determinant and the Brazilian government withdrew support for UNESCO’s initiative. Without the support of the Brazilian state, UNESCO was unable to bring the project to fruition.

The Hylea project thus reveals that during mid-century discussions of cultural change, the question of who controls the direction of ‘cultural change’ and whose interests those changes serve were often at stake. The ideal of ‘cultural change’ as a convergence towards a global unified culture, proved to be out of sync with the national interests of Brazil who saw the

Amazonian region and its peoples as resources integral to its own nation-building imperatives as opposed to the kinds of transnational aspirations of UNESCO.

5 Technical Assistance and Cultural Change

Another domain that sheds light on how conceptions of “cultural change” were deployed by human scientists working within the UN system for the purpose of altering social worlds and re-fashioning cultural mores is the UN programme of “Technical

Assistance.” Within the context of international organizations, Technical Assistance initiatives can be traced back to the internationalist projects of the interwar period when the

138 Ibid.

110 member states of the League of Nations began to request the assistance of technical experts from other nations. With the rise of the UN and its specialised agencies in the post-war era this practice became even more widespread and spurred on by Point IV of the US President

Harry Truman’s inaugural address in 1949, the UN established the “Expanded programme of

Technical Assistance for the Economic Development of Less-Developed Countries.”139 The guiding principles of the UN’s Technical Assistance programme held that assistance in the form of expert advise should only be given if specially requested by a government, that the requesting government should assume some a portion of the costs required to implement the proposed development programme, that all requests for assistance should have a direct influence on the economic development of the country, and that the aid given should be

“free” of any political considerations.140 The Technical Assistance programme was thus envisioned as a technical and politically neutral means for industrialized nations to provide tutelage to ‘underdeveloped’ nations in the hopes of lifting them out of their economic immaturity.

139 David Owen, “The United Nations Expanded Program of Technical Assistance - a Multilateral Approach,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 323, no. May (1959): 27. 140 Ibid.

111

In its capacity as a UN specialized agency focusing on science, culture, and education, UNESCO became a key purveyor of Technical Assistance programmes and communicated the principles and implementation of Technical Assistance programmes through its monthly publication, the UNESCO Courier. Articles in the UNESCO Courier described Technical Assistance as a great experiment designed to put nations on a sure path towards economic development with the aid of scientific and technological experts. The kinds of projects that UNESCO initiated included building or improving centres of scientific research, providing technical support to improve educational systems, raising standards of living through fundamental and adult education, and training people in better methods of agricultural production. One article from 1950 described technical assistance as “a weapon for man” that would counter the “economic under-development” that had become an “enemy of man” due to the “yawning gap” created between the highest and lowest nations.141 In the same issue of the Courier another author suggested that “the use of science in such countries as India can make the technical assistance programme meaningful and demonstrate to the world how the conquests of science can help liberate all mankind from many of its ancient

141 “'Economic under-Development – Enemy of Man; ‘Technical Assistance’ – a Weapon for Man,,” UNESCO Courier 3, no. 10 (1950): 5.

112 ills.”142 Technical Assistance was thus portrayed as an emancipating force destined to guide countries around the world out of economic backwardness through the modernizing forces of science and technology.

It was the combination of UNESCO’s initiatives against racism in the early 1950s, and the UN’s Technical Assistance programme, which created the opportunity for Alfred

Métraux to lead the Race Division of UNESCO’s Department of Social Science in 1951.

When he was hired in 1951, Métraux had already acquired extensive experience conducting field research with the kinds of non-industrialized societies that were the target of the UN’s

Technical Assistance mission and had also spent the past five years working for the UN’s

Department of Social Affairs. During his five years with the UN, Métraux worked as a consultant for UNESCO on several Technical Assistance projects including the Hylean

Amazon project as well as a pilot project on fundamental education in Haïti. Thus, by the time he joined UNESCO in 1951 Métraux was very familiar with the workings of “Technical

Assistance” schemes at UNESCO.143

142 Maurice Goldsmith, “Science and Technology to Help Under-Developed Lands,” UNESCO Courier 3, no. 10 (1950): 10. 143 Harald Prins et Edgar Krebs, “Vers Un Monde Sans Mal : Alred Métraux, Un Anthropologue à l’UNESCO (1946-1962),” ed. UNESCO, 60 Ans D’histoire de l'UNESCO (Paris, 2005), 118.

113

During his years at UNESCO, Métraux published several articles, reports, and unpublished documents where he reflected on the relationship between the human sciences, technical assistance, racism, and cultural change. In these writings, Métraux described his contemporary as one of rapid global changes spurred on by the worldwide spread of what he referred to as ‘industrial’ or ‘Western civilization. Métraux saw the spread of Western civilization as a positive historical development but also expressed concern that rapid technological progress was inevitably destructive and suggested that it had to be carefully managed. “Progress, in the form in which the United Nations seek to propagate it throughout the world,” Métraux wrote, “must inevitably destroy the many forms of local culture still surviving on several continents.”144 The reason for his pessimistic assessment was the haste with which such changes were occurring. Métraux argued that while in the past cultural changes were “slow and new techniques were blended harmoniously into the existing order of things without causing serious upheaval,” the present moment was characterised by

“revolutionary changes brought about by the engulfing sweep of modern technology.”145

Despite the violent and revolutionary changes spurred on by modern technology,

Métraux believed that anthropologists could work towards lessening the harmful impact and

144 Alfred Métraux, “‘Dangers in Technical Change’,” Unesco Courier VI, no. 7 (1953): 3. 145 Ibid.

114 rate of destruction that the engulfing sweep of modern technology would have on local cultures. In particular, Métraux suggested that Technical Assistance programmes, which he saw as one of the catalysts for these kinds of revolutionary changes, would stand to have a less negative impact when informed by “the experience and acquired instinct of the anthropologist to foresee what repercussions any slight change may have on a society as a whole.”146 Thus, for Métraux Technical Assistance offered a unique domain where “the long experience acquired by anthropologists” could be deployed for the “development of economically backward countries.”147

One of UNESCO’s first Technical Assistance missions was the Marbial Valley project in Haiti, a project where Alfred Métraux held an important role. The project was

UNESCO’s first pilot project in fundamental education and represents an early form of

Technical Assistance programme that was to become a crucial part of the UN developmental apparatus in the 1950s. The Haitian government identified the Marbial Valley as one of the poorest regions in Haiti and chose it as an ideal site for a Technical Assistance mission. The

UNESCO Courier also described the valley as a suitable site for an experimental project

146 Alfred Métraux, “Applied Anthropology in Government: United Nations,” in Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, ed. A Kroeber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 885. 147 Alfred Métraux, “UNESCO and Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 53, no. 2(Apr. - Jun., 1951) (1951): 300.

115 citing its “wide-spread illiteracy, lack of educational means, overpopulation, tropical diseases, deforestation, primitive agriculture, soil erosion” and its “population eager for education and schooling.”148 According to the same issue of the Courier, the purpose of the

Marbial project was to “try out the most advanced techniques of Fundamental Education, test new educational materials (improved textbooks, visual and oral-aids) and use education to raise social, economic and health levels.”149

When Métraux began the project he was already familiar with Haïti having travelled there several times with Rhoda Métraux, his wife who was also a cultural anthropologist.

During the early 1940s when the Métrauxs made their first visits, the Catholic Church was in the midst of a campaign to rid the country of its Vodou heritage at the same time that Haitian ethnology was becoming institutionalized. During their visits the Métrauxs met several

Haitian ethnologists and developed a strong interest in the Vodou religion after visiting several Vodou sanctuaries.150 Due to their early experiences in Haiti, the Métrauxs came to believe that they should assist local ethnologists in preserving Vodou heritage and, further,

148 “Highlights of Haitian Project,” Unesco Courier 1, no. 3 (1948): 4. 149 Ibid. 150 Christine Laurière, “D’une Île à L'autre,” Gradhiva 1 (2005): 3.

116 that the religion needed to be scientifically studied before it disappeared.151 Both Alfred and

Rhoda Métraux went on to become leading specialists in the study of the Vodou religion.

After the Marbial project was approved at UNESCO’s General Conference in 1947,

Alfred Métraux was awarded a two-year contract to conduct field research on the Marbial

Valley and to set the project in motion. After conducting a six-month field survey in 1948,

Métraux produced several reports for UNESCO where he described the Marbial project as an exercise in “applied anthropology” and argued that an anthropological approach would be crucial to gaining the support of the peasants from the Marbial Valley and to ensuring that the project does not harm their way of life.

In a preparatory report for the mission from 1948, Métraux appealed for anthropological studies of the general pattern of the peasants’ social life (including their labour practices, familial relations, and religious practices) and of the “cultural values” that inform the peasants’ daily routines as important preparatory work before UNESCO introduces programs to change the culture of Haitian peasants. Métraux’s report also stressed the importance of having an anthropologist involved in the mission so that they can establish a good rapport with the local community and help gather the peasants’ views on the value of education, their ambitions in life, and the kind of training that they might benefit from.

151 Ibid.

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For Métraux this kind of intimate knowledge about the valley’s culture possessed instrumental value insofar as it would allow anthropologists and other experts to anticipate if any of the reforms introduced by UNESCO’s project would be met with resistance, and allow experts to better guide the people of the region toward the desired outcome of modernization.

“So armed,” Métraux argued, “the prudent educator or reformer may draw the people toward the desired goal by persuasion and collaboration. Educators, health and agricultural experts may provoke deep cultural change; if the results are to be positive the process must be carefully controlled.”152

Indeed, Métraux characterized UNESCO’s decision to include an anthropologist in the

Marbial Valley project as an act of great foresight and suggested that it would prevent the organization from having to bring in “trouble shooters” in later stages of the project. For

Métraux, the inclusion of the anthropologist would not only prevent future rifts between

UNESCO and the Haitian peasants but also ensure that any modernization that occurs preserves the cultural integrity of the community:

In a changing culture the native is often tempted to despise his cultural heritage and to adopt indiscriminately the ideas and ways brought to him. The danger is particularly great in Haiti where the wish of the more educated people is to westernize the country as rapidly as possible. One of the duties of the anthropologist would be to point out to his fellow workers aspects of the

152 Alfred Métraux, Fundamental Education: Basic (sociological) Surveys in Fundamental Education, ed. Unesco (Paris: Unesco, n.d.), 3.

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culture, which are worth maintaining and supporting. By so doing, one may prevent a feeling of inferiority from developing in the community with regard to the past, and at the same time avoid an exaggerated and superficial respect for what is new.153

Métraux thus saw anthropologists as having a dual duty to modernize and to preserve and conceived of cultures as both patterned wholes based upon underlying values as well as dynamic entities that could be systematically altered. As the previous quote suggests,

Métraux also envisioned anthropologists as crucial intermediaries between the cultural heritage of pre-modern communities and the modern and Western culture represented by agencies such as UNESCO. The duties of applied anthropologists as described by Métraux thus illustrate some of the conflicting temporal imperatives and redemptive aspirations implicit within mid-century discourses of ‘cultural change’. Métraux imagined the duties of anthropologists as including both the forward looking project of shepherding so-called

‘primitive peoples’ into the modern world by introducing them to the technologies and ways of thought of modern Western culture, as well as the backward looking project of preserving cultural heritage and ensuring that communities maintain a connection to their pre-modern past.

Crucially, Métraux argued that racist ideologies assuming a fixed hierarchy of races were antithetical to UNESCO’s goals because they denied the possibility of ‘cultural change’

153 Ibid.

119 and the ability of non-Europeans to adopt Western ways of life. Thus, Métraux saw the circulation of these kinds of racial ideologies as a threat to the modernizing ambitions of

UNESCO’s Technical Assistance projects:

Racism is one of the most disturbing phenomena of the great revolution of the modern world. At the very time when industrial civilization is penetrating to all points of the globe and is uprooting men of every colour from their age-old traditions, a doctrine, treacherously scientific in appearance, is invoked in order to rob these men of their full share in the advantages of the civilization forced upon them. There exists in the structure of Western civilization a fatal contradiction. On the one hand it wishes and insists that certain cultural values, to which it attributes the highest virtues, be assimilated by other people. But conversely, it will not admit that two-thirds of humanity is capable of attaining this standard which it has set up. 154

However, the previous quote indicates the conflicting temporal imperatives at play in

Métraux and UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives. Racist ideologies figure as an obstacle insofar as they deny the possibility that “two-thirds of humanity” (i.e. the non-European races) can catch up to the standards of “Western civilization”. What goes unquestioned in this argument and in UNESCO’s ‘cultural change’ initiatives in this time period is the desirability of Western industrial civilization as an anticipatory horizon. At the same time,

Métraux’s argument acknowledges that the spread of “industrial civilization” is an

154 Alfred Métraux, “Race and Civilisation,” Unesco Courier 3, no. 6 (1950): 8.

120 imposition that uproots “men of every colour from their age-old traditions”. Thus, while

Métraux opposes the determinism implicit in scientific racism he also hints at the destruction of non-‘Western’ culture that his anti-racist stance implies.

A further example of the conflicting imperatives at play in Métraux’s anti-racist outlook comes from an article he wrote for the UNESCO Courier in 1950 about a young slave girl from an indigenous tribe in Paraguay. In this article Métraux recounts the story of a

French anthropologist who was conducting fieldwork in Paraguay and took pity on a girl held in servitude by a Paraguayan tribe and decided to bring her back to France. In France, the girl was raised by the anthropologist’s mother and given a French name (Marie-Yvonne) and raised “exactly like a French child.”155 According to Métraux, the girl’s learning curve in

France was nothing short of miraculous. Despite her lowly origins, Marie-Yvonne quickly learned French and within a year had adopted speech and manners that were better than those of European children her age. By the age of seven, Métraux explained, “the girl was already speaking French and Portuguese and liked to ask questions about Greek mythology.”156 By the time she was twenty, she had started working as a research assistant to her adoptive father and was recognised as “superior to most white girls of her age in intelligence and ability.”157

155 Alfred Métraux, “‘An Indian Girl a Lesson for Humanity’,” Unesco Courier 3, no. 8 (1950): 8. 156 Ibid., 8. 157 Ibid.

121

Métraux concluded his article with the assertion that this story illustrates that the mental abilities of people from all ethnic groups are much the same and that it is the cultural environment that an individual grows up in which has the biggest impact on their intellectual abilities.

Métraux’s argument in this article further demonstrates some of the contradictory imperatives at play in the anti-racist arguments he popularised through his work with

UNESCO and how they were related to notions of ‘cultural change’. On the one hand,

Métraux’s story makes the egalitarian argument that social environments are far more constitutive of intellectual ability than genetic inheritance and that therefore there is little evidence to support the view that racial groups can be differentiated by inherent mental ability. On the other hand, Métraux suggests that the young girl’s intellectual prowess is specifically due to her exposure to European culture and thus suggests the superiority of

European culture compared to “primitive” ways of life. Métraux’s argument for the equal potential of people of all races thus rests on the evidence that a “primitive” slave girl from

Paraguay can come to behave just like white European children and even outperform them.

The slave girl becomes noteworthy in this account because of her ability to enact European forms of conduct and thus transcend her own allegedly impoverished cultural heritage. Thus, the argument for the biological unity and equipotentiality of all human groups that this story

122 conveys and which is one of the key components of UNESCO’s anti-racism programmes, becomes the basis for arguing that peoples everywhere can adopt European ways and lifestyles. By opposing biological arguments about racial inferiority, Métraux thus advances an argument for cultural assimilation. Indeed, in another article for the Courier, Métraux argued that the convergence of cultures towards modern industrial cultures was in fact a positive refutation of scientific racism. Thus, Métraux posed the rhetorical question “how can the doctrines of racialism possibly hold water when the races of the world are setting such an example of pliability and adaptability?” 158

Métraux’s stance with respects to questions of ‘race’ and cultural change was also elaborated in a report he gave as part of a UNESCO seminar on the use of visual aids in fundamental education. In this report, Métraux argued for the importance of producing visual aids such as films that are sensitive to the cultural values of local communities, while also recognizing that in some cases there will be intractable cultural differences that visual aids will not be able to overcome. Within this same report, Métraux also argued against the view that differences in cognitive ability between races are due to a different physiological constitution and argued that they were rather due to cultural differences:

158 Alfred Métraux, “‘A Man With Racial Prejudice Is as Pathetic as His Victim’,” Unesco Courier 6, no. 8–9 (1953): 4.

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One idea which is still too widely held is that the so-called "primitive races" are endowed with sensory organs of a different quality from ours. All the experiments made in this connection go to show, however, that the acute sight and hearing and the prodigious memory apparently displayed by certain groups are the result, not of any disparity between our respective nervous systems, but simply of a specialization that is cultural in origin. "Primitives" see, hear, and respond to certain perceptions in a manner conditioned by their traditional activities and interests - just as we do ourselves.159

In light of this argument suggesting the equal potentiality and shared biology of people throughout the world, Métraux suggested that it was crucial not to treat so-called primitives as inferior. Indeed Métraux argued, that it would be a “very great mistake to approach

"primitives" as though they were children,” and emphasized that “they are grown men, whose ability and intelligence are directed towards different aims and guided by different traditions from ours, but whose capacity for learning is equal to our own.”160

What is important to highlight with respect to the anti-racist stance adopted by

Métraux and its relation to discussions of ‘cultural change’ is how projects of ‘cultural change’ and modernization act as a pragmatic context to the concern about whether there are significant biological and physiological differences between racial groups. By arguing against the inegalatarian presumptions of racial science, the kinds of anti-racist arguments

159 Alfred Métraux, Cultural Anthropology and Visual Aids, UNESCO/ED/MC22, (Seminar on the Use of Visual Aids in Fundamental Education, Messina, Italy: UNESCO, 13 Sept. 1954), 40. 160 Ibid., 41.

124 deployed by Métraux and UNESCO become a way of granting racial groups formal but not substantive equality. That is, people from different races are presumed to be equal in potential (formally equal) but not necessarily equal in achievement (substantively equal).

Implied in this sort of stance is the notion that non-European races lag behind and are in need of improvement, which in turns produces a relation of tutelage between Western experts, whose more fully developed cultural knowledge and expertise is presumed to be a valuable asset to those lagging behind.

However, it is important to point out that although Métraux described the introduction of industrial civilization to primitive groups as both inevitable and desirable, he also expressed serious misgivings about the values and lifestyle associated with ‘Western civilization’. Thus, in an interview given shortly before his death in 1963 titled “Comment et pourquoi devient-on Ethnologue?” (“How and why one becomes an ethnologist?) Métraux described how he became interested in anthropology at the peak of the French surrealist movement in Paris of the 1920s and characterized this period as one of rebellion and ferment that inspired many artists and intellectuals to explore the art and customs of non-European cultures.161 Like many of his intellectual and artistic peers, Métraux claimed to be drawn by

161 Alfred Métraux; Fernande Bing, “Entretiens Avec Alfred Métraux,” L’Homme 4, no. 2 (1964): 20– 32.

125 the bizarreness of these cultures and the alternatives to European culture that they presented, but unlike his peers he decided that the best way to understand these cultures was through the scientific methods deployed in anthropology. During his first ethnological field expeditions with Indigenous tribes in Latin America, Métraux claimed to have discovered in himself a deep feeling of comfort and rest that was the product of a slower paced life and a culture free of anxieties faced by modern Europeans. Métraux described this feeling as a nostalgia for the

Neolithic:

I also believe that this contact with primitive civilisations made me realize that the sense of rebellion that pushed me towards such distant civilizations from our own, was based in a sort of nostalgia, a nostalgia that, I think, we Western men have always felt and which I denote through the some what comical phrase of nostalgia for the Neolithic. It seems to me, and this is without wanting to fall into a simple Rousseauism, that humanity was potentially mistaken in going beyond the Neolithic. 162

Although this reflexive moment came at the end of Métraux’s life and constitutes a retrospective analysis of his decision to become an anthropologist, it nevertheless captures a common sentiment in mid-century anthropological discussions concerning the differences

162 Ibid., 21–22. “Je crois aussi que cette prise de contact avec les civilisations primitives m’a fait sentir qu’au fond, la protestation qui m’avait précisement pousser vers des civilisations tellements éloignées de la nôtre, trouver son motif dans une sorte de nostalgie, une nostalgie, que nous, hommes d’Occident, avons, je crois, ressentie de tout temps et que j’appelle peut-être comique, enfin que je veux tel, la nostalgie du néolithique. Il me semble, et cela sans vouloir tomber dans un rousseauisme facile, que l’humanité a peut-être eu tort d’aller au-delà du néolithique.”

126 between so-called primitive and ‘Western civilization’ and how they were informed by both a longing for the past and a sense of malaise about the present and future.163 The sentiment which Métraux dubs ‘the nostalgia for the Neolithic’ typifies the ways that many anthropologists approached ethnographic encounters with the ‘primitive’ as a means of escaping the malaise that they had come to associate with modernity and as an inspiration for critiquing modern ways of life, which stood in contrast with the aspiration to modernize and improve so-called primitive civilizations.

Further, this passage illustrates some of the conflicting imperatives in Métraux and other anthropologists’ discussions of anti-racism and cultural change. On the one hand,

Métraux upheld the egalitarian and anti-racist discourse that all human groups irrespective of their purported ‘race’ are capable of enjoying the fruits of Western Civilization and are thus equal in terms of their potential for learning and ingenuity. On the other hand, Métraux’s descriptions of material progress and ‘cultural change’ suggest that an important measure of cultural advancement and cultural achievement is the degree to which so-called primitives are able to adopt the customs, ways of thinking, and technologies of ‘Western Civilization’.

163 Christopher Johnson has noted how Métraux’s friend and colleague, Claude Lévi-Strauss expressed a similar sentiment of nostalgia towards the Neolithic period. See: Christopher Johnson, Claude Lévi-Strauss : the Formative Years (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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This line of argumentation suggests that the only way for non-Europeans to be recognized as

‘equals’ is the degree to which they adopt European ways. At the same time, however,

Métraux’s ‘nostalgia for the Neolithic’ suggests that the lifestyle and values that he associates with ‘Western civilization’ are damaged and damaging, and thus places himself in the paradoxical position of advocating for a way of life that he does not fully embrace.

Anthropologists’ misgivings about modern lifestyles and culture and their potential impact on those who have yet to embrace them, are also reflected in a technical assistance manual titled Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, which was jointly published by

UNESCO, the World Federation of Mental Health, and the UN Economic and Social Council in 1955.164 The manual was edited by the eminent American anthropologist Margaret Mead and was intended as a resource guide for individuals involved in Technical Assistance projects including policy makers, educators, and social scientists. Like Métraux, Mead had extensive experience in the domain of ‘applied anthropology’ and ‘cultural change’ as well as in publicly opposing the dictates of scientific racism. A student of Franz Boas, Mead became one of the most prominent popularizes of cultural relativism during the interwar period and was thrust into the public limelight as a result of the popularity of her landmark

164 Margaret Mead, Cultural Patterns and Technical Change , Technology and Society (Paris: Unesco, 1953).

128 study Coming of Age in Samoa, which examined the sexual life of adolescent women in traditional Samoan cultures and was used to both critique the sexual prudence of early twentieth century American culture and the circumscribed choices available to Samoan women within their own culture.165 Like many of her colleagues during WWII, Mead lent her expertise to war-time efforts and, most notably, was recruited by the US Ministry of Defence as one of the head researchers for the Committee of Food Habits, which was a large interdisciplinary project that brought various social scientists together (including Rhoda

Métraux who had recently married Alfred Métraux) to apply their knowledge to the problem of changing American diets given the limited variety of food available during the war.166 For her work on food habits, as well as for her wartime work on “National Character,” Mead often considered the relationship between culture and personality formation and advanced the view that culture plays a crucial role in shaping individual’s personality. For Mead, the

165 See Louise Michele Newman, “Coming of Age, but Not in Samoa: Reflections on Margaret Mead’s Legacy for Western Liberal Feminism,” American Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1996): 233–272. 166 For Mead’s relationship to WWII and ‘Cold War Anthropology’ See: Peter Mandler, “One World, Many Cultures: Margaret Mead and the Limits to Cold War Anthropology,” History Workshop Journal no. 68 (2009): 149–172. For Mead’s contributions to the Comitte of Food Habits see: Brian Wansink, “Changing Eating Habits on the Home Front: Lost Lessons from World War II Research,” Journal of Public Policy Marketing 21, no. 1 (2002): 90–99.

129 pragmatic issue of how to change people’s cultural habits was thus part of the broader research agenda made possible by the refutation of racial determinism.

Mead’s interest in the relation between culture and personality, and the potential ramifications of cultural changes on individual psyches, are manifest in the Cultural Patterns and Technical Change manual. In her introductory chapter to the UNESCO manual, Mead argued that a crucial consideration when introducing technical and cultural changes is the potential ramifications of these changes on the mental health of individuals. Questions about the relation between mental health and cultural change were particularly pertinent in the twentieth century, Mead argued, due to the growth of the behavioural sciences (including psychiatry, psychology, and cultural anthropology), which provided experts with better tools for understanding and fostering mental health and policy makers and experts with greater ability to conduct technological changes in a “purposive” manner. Further, she argued that one of the keys to directing technological change and to cultivating mental health is a firm understanding of culture. In this text, Mead defines culture as a patterned and systematic whole that includes the arts and sciences, technological practices, political practices, and domestic practices such as preparing and eating food and taking care of children, as well as the learned behaviours that individuals pass on to their children. 167 For Mead, a crucial

167 Mead, Cultural Patterns and Technical Change , 9–10.

130 element of this patterned system of habits and behaviours is that it provides individuals with a repertoire of strategies and coping mechanisms for dealing with challenges in their environment. However, she argues that this patterned whole is also very delicate and that changes to any one part of the system can have repercussions on other parts of the system, producing psychological strain and tension for individuals. Thus, Mead argues that the mental health of individuals depends on their ability to function within the system provided by their culture.

In the same introductory chapter, Mead argued that in addition to taking into account the potential mental health ramifications of technological changes, anthropologists often have to persuade people to adopt reforms because they may not be self-evident to them or because they cling irrationally to old customs:

When specific needs of a locality or culture are discovered, it is often still necessary to teach people to recognize them, and the desirability of improvement. In most areas people cannot be motivated to adopt new ways on the basis of logical evidence of better results or of charts or scientific arguments. Most people fear experimentation, or fear excursions into the unknown, since only the tried is known and safe.168

For Mead, then, the task of the applied anthropologist is to delicately lead people out of their patterned behaviours and habits and into the unknown. The anthropologist is positioned as an

168 Ibid., 259.

131 expert who is able to see or discover what is lacking in a local society and who has the cultural sensitivity to persuade people out of their primitive state and towards modernity.

Cultural sensitivity becomes a means to cultural re-engineering.

5 Conclusion

Having surveyed the various ways that discussions of ‘cultural change’ were framed within the context of UNESCO’s early initiatives, what is apparent is that ‘culture’ was a concept that implied both stasis and change for mid-century human scientists. Natural scientists such as Carneiro, Huxley, and Needham who were also highly influential voices in shaping UNESCO’s ideology in the early post-war years, advanced an understanding of

‘cultural change’ that characterised ‘culture’ as highly pliable and alterable. For these figures,

‘culture’ did not carry the relativistic connotations embraced by cultural anthropologists and instead was more closely related to nineteenth century notions of ‘civilization’ as a social formation that was the end result of an evolutionary progression. However, unlike nineteenth century imperialists, these figures advanced ideas of social evolution that they considered anti-racist and non-racial insofar as they did not posit so-called ‘primitive’ peoples as permanently stuck at an earlier evolutionary stage because of an inherent biological inferiority but rather as lagging behind due to a lack of contact with modern civilization.

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Further, these figures tended to view science as emblematic of the heights reached by modern civilization and embraced projects of international scientific co-operation such as the IIHA as crucial means for fulfilling the UN mandate of narrowing economic inequality.

UNESCO’s social scientists, on the other hand, were much more cautious and circumspect towards the desirability of ‘cultural change’. Unlike UNESCO’s natural scientists who characterized science and modern society as a civilizing and enlightening force, social scientists such as Métraux, Wagley, and Margaret Mead expressed concern for the potentially destructive and negative ramifications that the introduction of modern technologies and cultural practices could have on so-called traditional societies. For these anthropologists, ‘cultural change’ was an inevitable outcome of the rapid spread of industrial civilization and was a process that would need to be carefully and skilfully managed in order to retain some vestige of the ways of life of those peoples who had yet to assimilate modern practices and in order to ensure the mental health and well being of these populations. In these anthropological conceptions of cultural change, ‘culture’ figured as a much more static object characterized by entrenched customs and patterns but also vulnerable in the face of overwhelming change.

I would like to conclude this chapter by offering some final points of reflection on the relationship between conceptions of “cultural change”, anti-racism, and race as they took

133 shape in UNESCO’s early years. First, the logic of cultural change was not a straightforward instance of the ‘neo-racism’ or ‘cultural racism’ that many scholars have associated with the culture concept and its post-WWII career. It did not rely on static notions of culture nor did it suggest that so-called primitive groups were inevitably held back because of their ‘backward’ cultures. However, this does not mean that considerations of cultural change in post-colonial contexts were entirely free from considerations of race and biology. As we have seen, for anthropologists like Métraux, the very possibility for cultural change and improvability was built upon the anti-racist position that the different races are equal in terms of their potential for educability, and that racial groups are not biologically different in any significant way. At the same time, we have also seen that the anthropological research proposals for the IIHA did not negate the importance of embodied biological differences altogether, and held a keen interest in the ways indigenous populations of the Amazon were physiologically adapted to their environment. In this sense, Métraux’s anti-racist stance was very much indebted to the

Boasian tradition, which does not so much represent a negation of the race concept but rather a re-working of race as a concept implying biologically malleability.169 Crucially, what was

169 After all, Boas’ physical anthropological work did not negate the possibility of an anthropometric study of racial kinds but rather disproved the notion that racial kinds are characterised by fixity. In fact, Boas continued to do anthropometric work and publish articles in physical anthropology well into the twilight of his career.

134 at stake in the way that anthropologists such as Métraux, Wagley, and Mead had come to define ‘culture’ was the recognition of both the patterned and fragile nature of cultural customs and behaviours coupled with the alterability and improvability of cultures. Thus, rather than a straightforward instance of ‘neo-racism’ the articulations of cultural change that can be observed in UNESCO’s postcolonial archive bear continuities not with the static and determinist science of racial typologies, but with imperial projects of racial uplift and with civilizing mission ideologies of the early twentieth century. UNESCO’s politics of anti- racism was thus able to co-exist alongside discourses of cultural uplift and assimilation.

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Chapter 2

The Race-as-Caste Analogy in The U.S. and Brazil and Its

Effect On Conceptualizations Of Racism

As seen in the introduction and first chapter of this study, UNESCO’s anti-racist response to the racial ideologies of the first half of the twentieth century involved a negative project of undermining the epistemic foundations of scientific racism and a more positive project of celebrating cultural differences. The previous chapter showed how mid-century anthropologists involved in UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns deployed conceptions of culture not only as a foil to scientific racism but also for projects of ‘cultural change’, which in the context of the UN’s Technical Assistance programme were often framed as projects of cultural uplift and improvement designed to narrow the economic gap between so-called primitive and modern societies. The previous chapter thus highlights the ways that scientific experts simultaneously sought to distance themselves from the theoretical edifice of scientific racism while seeking a distinct theoretical grounding for projects designed to civilize, or rather modernize, formerly colonized others. But whereas the previous chapters focused on the ways social science experts sought to distance themselves from politically untenable

136 conceptions of ‘race’, this chapter examines the ways that ‘race’ was retained by social scientists as an object of social inquiry. More narrowly, this chapter examines UNESCO’s attempts to study positive examples of race relations. It describes how social scientists’ judgments about what constitute ‘harmonious’ race relations were shaped in a comparative context where social scientists turned their gaze to the various patterns of race relations within Brazil and contrasted them to those of other nations affected by the legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. At stake in UNESCO’s studies on race relations research was the privileged status Brazil enjoyed as an anti-racist nation, which lent it a kind of comparative moral advantage internationally, as well as the ideal of a racism-free nation that lent hope to the anti-racist ambitions of UNESCO in the post-war era.

For UNESCO, the positive study of race relations represented the next phase in their anti-racism campaigns. After the publication of the 1950 and 1952 Statements on Race, and the series of booklets from the Race Question in Modern Science series, UNESCO’s

Department of Social Science turned their attention to studying race relations in response to a resolution adopted during UNESCO’s General Conference in 1951, which prompted the organization “to undertake, in collaboration with Member States, a critical inventory of the methods and techniques employed for facilitating the social integration of groups which do not participate fully in the life of the national community by reason of their ethnical or

137 cultural characteristics or their recent arrival in the country.”170 Building on this resolution,

UNESCO experts identified a lack of scientific research concerning positive examples of race relations and proposed that the Lusophone nation of Brazil would be a promising case for understanding the social forces that allow for harmonious racial integration. Given the reputation it had enjoyed since the late nineteenth century as a nation with a racially mixed population with little racial prejudice and re-enforced by a series of sociological studies conducted during the 1930s and 40s, Brazil appeared as an ideal location for UNESCO’s

Department of Social Science to initiate a pilot study examining the economic, political, cultural, and psychological factors that allow for such favourable race relations.171

Thus, over the course of 1951, Alfred Métraux, who was already in contact with

French and US social scientists conducting research in Brazil, travelled to Brazil on various occasions and assembled a research team who conducted a cycle of studies on race relations in various locations including Salvador de Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. For

Métraux, the racially mixed and unsegregated population of Brazil offered one of the strongest arguments against the “racialist creed” that “men of different races cannot mix without condemning themselves to moral and physical decadence” and thus promised to

170 See Charles Wagley and Marvin Harris, Minorities in the New World : Six Case Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), ix–x. 171 Charles Wagley, “Race and Class in Rural Brazil,” Race and Society (Paris: Unesco, 1952).

138 advance the goal of undermining the scientific justification for racism that was part of

UNESCO’s broader anti-racist agenda.172 However, just as Métraux began laying the groundwork for the proposed studies in 1951, racial tensions began to flare up in Brazil’s industrial centres as evidenced by an episode where the American dancer and anthropologist

Katherine Dunhman was denied admittance into a hotel in São Paulo, prompting a national discussion on racism that culminated in the passage of an anti-discrimination law by congress in 1951. In light of the tensions emerging in the rapidly industrializing centres of Rio and São

Paulo, UNESCO decided to expand the scope of the studies beyond the region of Bahia and include studies of Rio and São Paulo so as to reflect the different patterns of race relations that were emerging. Instead of confirming the view that Brazilian society was free of racial prejudice that could serve as a model for the rest of the world, the UNESCO studies ended up frustrating this thesis and shaping the contours of race relations research for much of the latter half of the twentieth century.

UNESCO’s cycle of studies have been extensively studied by both historians and social scientists specializing in Brazil.173 A common thread in historical analyses of the

172 Alfred Métraux, “An Inquiry into Race Relations in Brazil,” Unesco Courier V, no. 8–9 (1952): 6. 173 Example of studies dealing with the history of these studies include: Thomas E Skidmore, Black into White; Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Edward Eric Telles, Race in Another America : the Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Antonio Sérgio A Guimarães, Racismo e Anti-Racismo No

139

UNESCO cycle of studies concerns the different regional portraits of Brazil that the studies produced and how these distinct portraits served to both re-affirm and undermine the notion of Brazil as a racial democracy. The historian Marcos Chor Maio, for instance, has highlighted the importance of the multi-sited approach of the UNESCO studies, and how the national as opposed to strictly regional scope of the studies revealed a variety of patterns of race relations that frustrated the racial democracy thesis.174 Examining the influence of the

UNESCO studies on representations of Bahia, historian Anadelia Romo has shown American social scientists served to re-affirm the image of Bahia as a traditional culture with race relations that had remained frozen since the colonial era of the late nineteenth century in contrast to the rapid changes taking place in the city centres of the South including Rio and

Sao Paulo.175 For the sociologist Edward Telles, the UNESCO studies mark the transition

Brasil, 1. ed. (São Paulo: Editora 34, 1999); Owensby, “Toward a History of Brazil’s ‘Cordial Racism’: Race Beyond Liberalism”; Marcos Chor Maio and Ricardo Ventura Santos, Raça, Ciência e Sociedade (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil : Editora FIOCRUZ, 1996); Carl N Degler, Neither Black nor White : Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Marcos Chor Maio, “UNESCO and the Study of Race Relations in Brazil: Regional or National Issue?,” Latin American Research Review 36, no. 2 (2001): 118–136; Marcos Chor Maio, “From Bahia to Brazil: The UNESCO Race Relations Project,” in Imagining Brazil, ed. Jessé Souza and Valter Sinder (Lanham, ML: Lexington Books, 2005); Anadelia A Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum : Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 174 See:Maio, “UNESCO and the Study of Race Relations in Brazil: Regional or National Issue?”; Maio, “From Bahia to Brazil: The UNESCO Race Relations Project.” 175 Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum : Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia, 133–150.

140 between a first generation of race relations researchers who upheld the racial democracy thesis and a second generation, which argued that racial discrimination, was widespread but would eventually be wiped out through modernization.176 In particular, Telles notes how the

UNESCO studies conducted in Bahia continued the tradition of research initiated by the first generation of race relations scholars which focused primarily on what Telles calls “horizontal relations” (i.e. the degree of social interaction between individuals from different racial groups as well as the attitudes and perceptions that shape their interactions), and was strongly influenced by the theories and methods of Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre as well as the

Chicago sociologist Richard Park.177

In contrast, the studies conducted in the emerging industrial centres of Sao Paulo and

Rio de Janeiro focused on how the social and economic order in these urban centres was shaped by racial discrimination and the lingering effects of slavery and disparaged Brazil’s extensive miscegenation as part of a state-led attempt to whiten the population. These studies, which were conducted by mostly Brazilian researchers influenced by the nascent movement of Afro-Brazilian activists known as the Teatro experimental do negro (Black

Experimental Theatre), tended to focus on “vertical relations” and represent a second

176 Telles, Race in Another America : the Significance of Skin Color in Brazil, 46. 177 This generation was comprised primarily of American social scientists including Donald Pierson, Franklin Frazier, Ruth Landes, and Charles Wagley.

141 generation of research concerned with uncovering Brazil’s pervasive patterns of racism and social exclusion.178 The divergent epistemological traditions and emphases that scholars have identified as shaping the UNESCO cycle of studies thus highlight crucial differences within mid-century trans-Atlantic research on race relations in the twentieth century. Race relations researchers did not necessarily agree upon what constitutes racism, or how to identify and investigate how racism operates within society.

This chapter expands upon the existing literature on UNESCO’s cycle of studies by examining the transnational circulation of analogies used by race relations researchers to describe the relationship between ‘race’ and social structure and how these analogies shaped their understanding of racism, as well as how narratives of modernization acted as a political, ideological, and explanatory framework for the patterns of race relations that researches observed. In particular, this chapter examines how American race relations researchers in the

1940s imported the-race-as-caste analogy (an influential trope that historians of race relations research have identified as a prominent feature of American race relations research and thought during the interwar period) to Brazil and deployed it as a measure of the degree to which racism existed in Bahian society, as well as how the second generation of

178 Among the researchers involved were Florestan Fernandes, Luiz-Aguiar Costa-Pinto, Oracy Nogueira, René Ribeiro, Guerreiro Ramos, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Otávio Ianni. See: Ibid., 8.

142 researchers challenged the race-as-caste analogy and turned to notions of ‘class’ as opposed to ‘caste’ as a way of describing how racism operates within Brazilian society. By highlighting the different interpretative frameworks and different analogies deployed by the first and second generations of researchers, this chapter shows how anti-racism in Brazil required repudiating some of the modes of thought that were being imported from American social science, as well as repudiating the national ideology of celebrating miscegenation as an example of Brazil’s unique racial democracy. At stake in Brazilian race relations inquiry was

Brazil’s international reputation as a tolerant and anti-racist nation -- a reputation which allowed Brazilian intellectuals and politicians to maintain a sense of moral enlightenment relative to the US and Europe.179 In focusing narrowly on ways that the race-as-caste analogy was deployed in race relations research in the US and Brazil this chapter sheds further light on the transnational construction of ‘race’ as an anti-racist object, and the ways researchers have had to adapt their methods to suit different national and regional circumstances. The history of the “race-as-caste analogy” within race relations research thus highlights the complexities and pitfalls that have structured and plagued comparative analyses of race relations, and which continue to plague and inform comparative analyses of

179 This is a point made by the eminent historian of Brazil Thomas Skidmore. See: Jerry Dávila, Zachary R. Morgan, and Thomas E. Skidmore, “Since Black into White : Thomas Skidmore on Brazilian Race Relations,” The Americas 64, no. 3 (March 04, 2008): 409–423.

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‘race’.

This chapter also builds on a theme covered in the previous chapter, namely the relationship between anti-racism and modernization. In Brazilian race relations studies the prospect of modernization and economic development acted as an anticipatory narrative through which race relations researchers prophesied differing outcomes for Brazil’s racial landscape. For researchers who upheld the racial democracy thesis (most notably the

American Charles Wagley) the harmonious racial relations implied by the racial democracy thesis were seen as vestige of Brazil’s pre-industrial culture and led them to argue that Brazil would have to take care to preserve this cultural heritage in the face of rapid industrialization and technological development. In contrast, the Brazilian researchers who denied the existence of a racial democracy tended to argue that a true racial democracy could only come to fruition once Brazil became fully modernized and all of its citizens were given access to the opportunities enjoyed by the privileged classes. A notable exception amongst critics of racial democracy was Luiz Aguiar Costa-Pinto who suggested that modernization would not necessarily cure the nation’s racial problems. The UNESCO cycle of studies thus situated anti-racism and the possibility for racial democracy within an epistemological framework that privileged processes such as modernization, industrialization, and technological development as the primary catalysts of social change. The hope that social scientists placed

144 in modernization as a means of overcoming racist legacies coincided with the Brazilian state’s optimistic ambitions during the 1950s, which is often referred to as the

‘developmental decade’ and known as a period where Brazil sought to rapidly modernize and industrialize its economy and thus establish its economic and cultural independence. What is significant about the UNESCO cycle of studies within the context of the postcolonial circuits of knowledge making, and the geopolitical alignments produced by the Cold War, is how modernization in the form of rapid industrialization emerges as a narrative of redemption promising a national body free from the cleavages of race and class. However, by situating the question of race relations within the framework of modernization, race relations analysts were also pushed to contend with the connections between Brazil’s system of race, the distribution of wealth and privilege within Brazilian society and Brazil’s place within the world-economic system. Subsequently, by documenting the persistence of economic inequality along racial lines despite a long history of miscegenation and cultural syncretism, analysts of race relations in Brazil have shown that producing harmonious interpersonal relationships is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the practice of anti-racism.

1 ‘Race’ and ‘Caste’: intertwined genealogies

As a way of showing how ‘race’ is a social construct, historians of race science and

145 scholars of race and ethnicity often point to the multiple and contradictory taxonomies of race that scientific experts have generated at the height of scientific racism. By pointing out the multiplicity of racial definitions, and the lack of a common consensus about how to define ‘race’, historians have highlighted its instability as social category as well as the ways conceptions of race can be adapted and crafted to fit social and political agendas. Indeed, one of the ways that historians have traced the malleability of ‘race’ as a scientific concept is by showing how notions of ‘race’ have often been articulated through analogical reasoning -- that is through explicit and implicit comparison to other categories of human difference such as gender and infancy. A classic example of this kind of analysis is the seminal article on the role of analogy in science written by the historian of science and eugenics Nancy Stepan. In her article, Stepan showed that analogies between race and gender occupied a central place in the study of human differences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.180 However, whereas Stepan’s historical account focused primarily on conceptions of race during its emergence as a scientific object and during the heyday of scientific racism, there have been few scholars who have sought to understand what roles analogies play in grounding conceptions of ‘race’ during the twentieth century and especially during the period between

180 Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” Isis 77, no. 2 (1986): 261–277.

146 the world wars when scientific racism was said to retreat and when race became an object of sociological study through race relations research.

This section aims to address this gap in the literature as well as to provide context to

UNESCO’s race relations studies in the post-war era by examining the history of analogical comparison between notions of ‘race’ and notions of ‘caste’. The analogical comparison between conceptions of race and caste reached its peak during the interwar period as sociologists in the US turned their attention to the study of race relations and began to think of ‘races’ not as distinct natural kinds based upon anthropometric measurements of the body but rather as nominal kinds (categories reflecting socially agreed upon conventions and not distinctions in nature).181 Race was thought to exist insofar as individuals and societies believed in its existence.182 Deprived of a biological reality grounded in the body, sociologists instead turned to a different set of metaphors and analogies for describing ‘race’.

Race came to be seen as analogous to other sorts of social categories with hierarchical significance, namely class and caste. For analysts of race relations in the US during the first half of the twentieth century, caste became the predominant metaphor for understanding the

181 On the distinction between realist and nominalist commitments to classification and how these commitments shape scientific practice and debates concerning the reality of scientific theories see: Hacking, The Social Construction of What?. 182 See: Yu, Thinking Orientals : Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America, 11.

147 nature of race relations because it evoked a fixed and hierarchical system whereas class suggested a more flexible social structure where social mobility was possible.

However, although the analogical comparison between ‘race’ and ‘caste’ is most prominent in social science studies of the twentieth century, recent historical work suggests that this analogy has a long and complex history. For example, Renato G. Mazzolini has shown that when the concept of race was first introduced into the European study of natural history to denote a fixed biological entity, naturalists derived their categories for describing racial mixing from the las castas system used for administrative purposes by the Spanish

Empire.183 Because there was little data available on interracial breeding in Europe, eighteenth century naturalists drew their empirical evidence about racial differences from the reports of missionaries, travelers, and physicians in Latin America and Central America.184

The information provided by these travelers included categories for describing the offspring produced from mixed-race marriages which were based on the classification system that the

Spanish and Portuguese had developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to control the inhabitants of their empires. Known as the las castas system, the classification

183 Renato G Mazzolini, “Las Castas: Interracial Crossing and Social Structure, 1770-1835,” in Heredity Produced : at the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870, ed. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 349–373. 184 Given that in Europe there was relatively little interbreeding between people who were deemed by naturalists as belonging to different racial groups.

148 scheme sought to establish the ancestry of each individual in such a way that he/she would be assigned to a specific casta or “caste” based on clues such as the caste of the parents and skin-colour.185 Although the system varied locally, it had the consistent and clear aim of creating a hierarchical social structure based on birthplace and ancestry. The rights and obligations of individuals were contingent upon their caste affiliation and caste affiliation precluded or enabled access to certain careers and religious orders.

However, when the categories derived from the las castas system were first introduced into the works of European naturalists in the latter half of the eighteenth century, naturalists were not fully aware that they were dealing with the administrative system of the Spanish colonies and the term casta, which was little known by non-Iberian scholars, was often translated as ‘race’. According to Mazzolini, the first recorded use of the term casta was in the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century and was used to denote progeny, stock, lineage, and breed. By the early sixteenth century, Portuguese scholars began using casta in the plural to describe the hereditary social classes of India, whereas in the seventeenth century casta was used by the Spanish in the Americas to describe the descent of a single people as well as the progeny of interbreeding between people with different skin colour. By the end of the eighteenth century, European historians studying Indian literature used the term caste as a

185 For example: mulatto, quarteron, octavon.

149 translation for indigenous concepts and began applying it to the social systems of other ancient civilizations, such as Egypt. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the term race began to be used with much greater frequency, caste also became more frequently used by European historians and naturalists, and European scholars began to develop interpretations of the Indian caste system as reflecting a division among races.186 What

Mazzolini’s historical research suggests is that the biographies of race and caste as objects of scientific study are very much intertwined and that race and caste have in effect been co- produced as ways of describing hereditary descent.

In addition to acting as analogous terms for describing hereditary descent in natural historical studies of human variation from the eighteenth century, ‘race’ and caste also have a history of mutual re-enforcement as categories of political analysis used to describe unequal social hierarchies. In the nineteenth century, for example, abolitionists and anti-caste activists made frequent comparisons between race and caste. American abolitionists during the antebellum period and anti-caste activists from turn-of-the century in India both highlighted the structural similarities between slavery in the Americas and the Indian caste system. In the

US, prominent abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Cassius Clay, likened slavery to the

Indian caste system in order to highlight the anti-republican aspects of racial hierarchies. For

186 See Ibid., 360–364.

150 these abolitionists the idiom of caste was useful because it allowed for the condemnation of slavery without making explicit mention of race, thus allowing abolitionists to insist on the unity of the human species. Similarly, Indian anti-caste activists from the late nineteenth century identified important similarities between the Indian caste system and American slavery. Jotirao Phule, an influential anti-caste activist in the late nineteenth century dedicated his major anti-Brahman polemic Slavery to the US abolitionists, while the scholar and activist B.R. Ambedkar, who was born into the untouchable caste, corresponded with

W.E.B Dubois and argued for the similarity between negroes and untouchables.187

In the late 1920s, the Indian caste system was widely popularized to a global audience through the publication of the polemical bestseller Mother India (1927) written by American journalist Katherine Mayo, which argued against Indian self-rule by attacking Indian culture.

Mayo's book took aim at Hindu society by suggesting that the deviant sexuality of Hindu men was at the core of many of Indian society’s problems and strongly criticized the practice of animal sacrifice as well as the treatment of untouchables. Mayo described untouchability as a kind of bondage that made the practice of Negro slavery look like freedom by comparison. Although the book did not receive high praise, it did succeed in drawing

187 Daniel Immerwahr, “Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 2 (2007): 279.

151 attention to India’s caste system, and in imbuing the notion of caste with a moral overtone.188

By the 1930s, the American public had become familiar with the use of the term ‘caste’, as a way of describing an oppressive and rigid social structure not unlike the American plantation system.189

The use of caste as an analogy for the deleterious effects of race-based social arrangements can also be seen in the work of W.E.B. Dubois. Dubois’ routinely linked race with caste in his social commentary and political writings and often used the term caste as shorthand for describing the harmful effects of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow.190 In fact, in his 1909 essay “the Evolution of the Race Problem” Dubois argued that the “Negro Problem” began with the idea of caste which he defined as “a definite place preordained in custom, law and religion where all men of black blood must be thrust”.191 In the American South, this way of thinking about society was applied to black people due to their long history of enslavement and the subsequent association between blacks and certain kinds of labour.

188 See: Ibid., 279–280; Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India : the Global Restructuring of an Empire, Radical Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 1–23. 189 Immerwahr, “Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States,” 280. 190 Kamala Visweswaran, “Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations,” in Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Articulation of Cultural Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 111–114. 191 W.E.B. Dubois, “Evolution of the Race Problem,” in Proceedings of the National Negro Conference 1909 (New York, 1909), 142.

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However, according to Dubois even after the abolition of slavery this system of “color-caste” persisted when free blacks were kept in a position of economic dependence and continued to be treated as if they were slaves.192 For Dubois, the concept of “color-caste” served to describe the race relations of the American South as a historically specific formation associated with practices of social rigidity, exclusion, and segregation. Dubois also linked the practice of color-caste with imperialism and thus tied together the struggles of black people in America with the struggles of disenfranchised groups in Japan, China, and India.193

In the 1930s the language of caste became widely adopted by US sociologists and anthropologists studying the social relations of the American South, which gave rise to what is often referred to as the “caste school of race relations”. During this period, race relations research was significantly shaped by the theoretical and methodological tenets of Robert Park and the Chicago school of sociology who inaugurated a shift in social science methodology away from theoretical speculation and towards empirical and on-the-ground methods for understanding society.194 Chicago sociologists rejected conceptions of race as a natural kind and placed an emphasis on races as nominal kinds, existing in the minds of individuals and

192 Ibid., 154. 193 Visweswaran, “Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations,” 113. 194 Pierre Saint-Arnaud and Peter Feldstein, African American Pioneers of Sociology: a Critical History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).

153 produced through societal relations and historical forces. At the same time, race relations research at the University of Chicago was guided by a historical narrative and theoretical framework that placed the assimilation of immigrants and racial minorities into American culture as a desirable outcome of contact between cultures and races. Chicago researchers also saw the cultural assimilation and integration of immigrants and minorities into the US, as the enactment of an antiracist politics, and saw racism and racial prejudice as barriers to their melting-pot ideal.195

The career of ‘race relations’ as an object of study is entwined with the social and intellectual biography of Robert Park. Park, like many of his colleagues from the Chicago school, hailed from a small rural town in the Midwest of the US but went on to spend much

195 For overviews of the history of the Chicago School of Sociology and the rise of the ‘caste school of race relations’ see: Oliver C Cox, “The Modern Caste School of Race Relations,” Social Forces 21, no. 2 (1942): 218–226; John P Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice : Making the Case Against Segregation, Critical America (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 17–42; O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge : Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, 74–99; Saint-Arnaud and Feldstein, African American Pioneers of Sociology: a Critical History; Visweswaran, “Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations”; Yu, Thinking Orientals : Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America.Davarian L Baldwin, “Black Belts and Ivory Towers: The Place of Race in U.S. Social Thought, 1892-1948,” Critical Sociology 30, no. 2 (2004); Michael Banton, “Race Relations ,” in A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, ed. David Theo Goldberg and John Solomos (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002), xiii, 610 p. For an analysis of American and German sociology’s contributions to imperial projects in the Global South and to the elaboration of an ‘imperial racism’ in the early twentieth century see Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa : Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South.

154 of his career crisscrossing the Atlantic. Park’s early intellectual influences include the pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and William James, but like many influential social scientists of his generation including W.E.B Dubois, Jane Addams, Will Thomas, and

Edward Shils, Park’s ideas were also shaped by late nineteenth century German philosophy and social science. In 1899, after completing his Masters at Harvard, Park moved to

Germany and studied philosophy and sociology with prominent German sociologists including Georg Simmel in Berlin and eventually obtaining a PhD in 1903.196

One of the crucial lessons that Park absorbed from his pragmatist mentors and from the neo-Kantian Simmel, was an approach to society and social phenomena that takes relations between individuals and between social groups as constitutive elements of society. This relational approach to social phenomena can be seen in Park’s approach to questions of race and culture. Whereas prior research on race relations in the US tended to assume that race relations imply an analysis of relations between individuals from different races (thought of in biological terms) Park argued that race relations were better understood as relations between individuals conscious of racial differences. Thus, for Robert Park ‘races’ did not constitute natural-kind like entities that existed independently of an observer, but were rather

196 On the influence of German sociology on Park’s theories and his interest in the Tuskegee institute and the sociology of race and labour in the American South see Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa. p. 219-225.

155 nominal entities that were produced through societal relations and existed insofar as individuals continued to believe in them.197

Robert Park’s race-relations theory relied on an understanding of caste that drew comparisons between Indian and European experiences of differentiation.198 In a 1928 article, Park argued that the Indian caste system determined who individuals could associate with and marry on the basis of birth, whereas in Europe who individuals associated with and married was determined by birth as well as circumstances and education. Further, Park described the race prejudice of the American south as an example of caste prejudice. In 1930

Alfred Kroeber wrote an article on caste for the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences where he described a caste-class continuum, wherein castes represent a particularly rigid form of social class.199

However, the work that historians have highlighted as being particularly influential in launching the caste school of race relations was the anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner’s 1936

197 On Park’s intellectual influences and conceptualizations of ‘race’ see Baldwin, “Black Belts and Ivory Towers: The Place of Race in U.S. Social Thought, 1892-1948”; Yu, Thinking Orientals : Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America; Banton, “Race Relations .” 198 Visweswaran, “Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations,” 114. 199 Ibid.

156 article titled “American Caste and Class”.200 Warner was an anthropologist who played an important part in re-orienting the discipline of anthropology to include ethnographic studies of the culture of complex industrial societies such as the US and played an influential role in the development of areas of study such as institutional anthropology and community studies.

In 1935 Warner was appointed professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of

Chicago and soon after proposed his interpretation of the race relations system in the

American South.

Although Warner made no explicit mention of the Indian caste system in his writings, he used the term ‘caste’ throughout his writings as a way to describe the social structure of the

American South. Warner defined caste as a “theoretical arrangement of the people of a given group in an order in which the privileges, duties, obligations, opportunities, etc. are unequally distributed between the groups which are considered to be higher and lower” and suggested that this type of organization can be distinguished from class organization insofar as a caste organization is one where “marriage between two or more groups is not sanctioned and where there is no opportunity for members of the lower groups to rise into the upper groups or of members in the upper to fall into the lower ones.”201 The situation that could be

200 Visweswaran, “Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations.” 201 W Lloyd Warner, “American Caste and Class,” American Journal of Sociology 42, no. 2 (1936):

157 observed in the American South according to Warner was one where a class system and a caste system, which are normally antithetical, had in fact accommodated each other. The consequence of this accommodation was that the caste system deprived blacks of occupational, social, and educational opportunities to a point where middle-class whites enjoy greater social advantages than black elites. In other words, because practices of segregation were upheld by both custom and violence, blacks and whites had their own independent class systems but the relations between blacks and whites where better described as caste-style relations. Describing this system through the concept of caste allowed Warner and his followers to describe a racialised system of segregation without giving credence to a biological notion of race.

In the ten years that followed the publication of Warner’s paper, the caste thesis became a guiding concept for social scientists interested in the race relations of the American South. In

1937 the psychologist John Dollard published a major work titled Caste and Class in a

Southern Town that extended Warner’s thesis and defined a caste system as one with barriers to social contact that defines inferior and superior groups and regulates the behaviour of members in each group.202 In 1939, Warner and his colleague Allison Davis, a black

234. 202 Visweswaran, “Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations,” 115.

158 anthropologist who had come through Chicago’s sociology department, published “A

Comparative Study of American Caste” where they attempted to systematically compare the

American and Indian caste systems and concluded that the Indian system was more flexible than they had assumed and that the American and Indian systems were similar insofar as they both prohibit marriage between individuals from different castes (or races in the case of the

American south).203 Warner and Davis extended their work on the caste system in the

American South by publishing a book titled Children of Bondage in 1940 based on a study where they asked what effect the caste system in the American South had on children. The study was based on interviews Warner and Davis conducted with children that they determined to be deprived of full human opportunities and status, and who hailed from New

Orleans and Natchez, Mississippi.204

The caste thesis received even fuller treatment in the 1941 study Deep South. Based on ethnographic research conducted by a biracial research team composed of Allison and

Elizabeth Davis (a black couple who observed a southern black community) and Burleigh

Gardner and Mary Gardner (a white couple who observed a southern white community)

Deep South provided a richly descriptive account of the behaviours, customs, and forms of

203 Ibid., 116. 204 Ibid., 117.

159 violence that re-enforced the caste system.205 Like the caste studies that preceded it, Deep

South noted the existence of two separate castes (black and white) with their own internal class systems. The authors of Deep South concluded that the caste system served to divide the social world of the South into two, and to disproportionately distribute the privileges and obligations of labour, school, and government.206 The book highlighted the psychological tensions that this caste system created, especially in the case of upper-class blacks who despite being much wealthier than lower class whites were still considered to be lower in status than them.

The caste thesis also influenced the design of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma.

Myrdal consulted closely with W.E.B Dubois during the research for his book, and quoted passages from Dubois’ autobiography Dusk of Dawn discussing caste as a psychological form of segregation. 207 In reference to black-white relations in the US, Myrdal referred frequently to a “caste system” and argued that “caste struggle” was a much more appropriate characterization than “class struggle.”208 Myrdal argued that the problems of blacks differed significantly from those of other minority groups in the US because blacks were the only

205 Ibid., 119. 206 Saint-Arnaud and Feldstein, African American Pioneers of Sociology: a Critical History, 82. 207 Visweswaran, “Is There a Structural Analysis of Racism? Louis Dumont and the Caste School of Race Relations,” 118. 208 Immerwahr, “Caste or Colony? Indianizing Race in the United States,” 280.

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Americans who had been enslaved and subject to a rigid caste system.209 According to

Myrdal, this caste system was upheld by white Americans who held deep-seated and irrational feelings about dark-skinned people and feared race mixing and interracial sex.210

By the time the Second World War began, social scientists routinely associated the deeply entrenched racial prejudice of the American South and the Indian caste as examples of oppressive and illiberal societal arrangements. This comparison was made possible by social scientists rejection of biological interpretations of ‘race’. In the wake of the Boasian critique of racial typologies and the widespread adoption of ‘culture’ as a key concept for the social sciences, social science experts from the US increasingly sought to understand how individual conceptions and attitudes about ‘race’ shape social structure and effect the degree to which racial minorities are ‘assimilated’ into the dominant society. With this framework in mind, human scientists determined that black/white relations in the US were structurally analogous to the relations between people of different castes in Indian. Using on-the-ground research methods such as surveys, questionnaires, and participant observation, sociologists and anthropologists identified a series of social mechanisms such as the prohibition on intermarriage that served to maintain the social distance between blacks and whites in the

209 David W Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations : the Use and Abuse of An American Dilemma, 1944-1969 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 59. 210 Ibid., 59.

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American south and which rendered blacks second-class citizens. In the context of the

American social sciences between 1920 and 1950, when scientific racism was being most forcefully contested, social scientists deployed the analogical comparison between systems of

‘race’ and ‘caste’ to demonsrate the ways that rigid systems of racial classification functioned to cement a hierarchical social arrangement deemed antithetical to the liberal and meritocratic society that the US proclaimed itself to be.

2 From The US To Brazil: Comparative Race Relations

Research in the 1930s and 40s

As the previous section showed, the historical entanglement between the concepts of

‘race’ and ‘caste’ dates back to the eighteenth century and was made possible by the transnational networks and circuits that arose through European imperialism. The circulation of observations, data, and information, which established ‘race’ and ‘caste’ as categories of scientific analysis flowed from the Spanish colonies of the 17th and 18th centuries, to the

European centres of Enlightenment during the 18th century, to the US, India, and back. In the interwar period the rise of race relations research in the US during the twentieth century, was similarly located within a global and transnational context and Chicago school researchers

162 began expanding the empirical scope of their race relations studies beyond the borders of the

US. Indeed, during the 1930s and 1940s sociologists and anthropologists mentored by the

Chicago sociologist Robert Park and most notably Donald Pierson adopted the lens of

Chicago style sociology to study the race relations of Bahia (the northeastern region of Brazil with the highest concentration of Afro-Brazilians). In Bahia, Pierson arrived at the conclusion that Brazil’s race relations were characterised by an exceptional level of harmony and social adjustment. Pierson’s study Negroes in Brazil: A Study of Race Contact at Bahia

(1942) became required reading for subsequent generations of race relations researchers and compiled vast amounts of observational data showing that there was very little social distance between the racial groups of Bahia and that the distance between the different racial groups had diminished due to the extensive miscegenation which had taken place.

However, as historian Anadelia Romo has shown, Pierson’s conclusions about Bahian race relations and the degree to which racism existed in Bahia were based on an explicit comparison to race relations in the US.211 Indeed, as I will show in this section, Pierson upheld the race-as-caste analogy as a quintessential example of US style racism and concluded that Bahia was free of a caste-like social structure, and was better classified as a

“multi-racial class society” where individuals place on the social hierarchy was based upon

211 See Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum : Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia, 113–119.

163 merit as opposed to ‘race’. Pierson’s research is thus emblematic of the ways American researchers sought to advance an anti-racist critique of US race relations by upholding

Brazilian race relations as a model of racial redemption, where ‘race’ did not constitute a barrier to social advancement and where people from different racial groups freely mixed and intermarried. However, Pierson and subsequent researchers’ idealization of Bahian race relations were also based on the nostalgic notion that Bahia’s race relations were the vestige of a traditional and static culture that had remained unchanged since the colonial era. Thus, although Pierson would argue that Bahian race relations were dissimilar to the caste-like relations of the American south, Bahia and the American south can be linked together as examples of the ways mid-century social science research tended to characterize some regions and cultures as frozen in time. As such, the promise of ‘modernization’ and ‘cultural change’ was one that threatened to disrupt both the caste-like relations of the American south as well as the purportedly harmonious relations of Brazil’s northeast.

Chicago sociologists’ interest in Brazil dates back to the 1930s when Robert Park made his first visits to Bahia. As historian Lícia do Prado Valladares has recently argued,

Robert Park’s visits to Brazil and Bahia in 1935 and 1937 played a significant role in exposing Bahia to the international social science community and establishing its reputation

164 as a “social laboratory.”212 During his first visit in 1935, Park met some of Brazil’s most prominent social scientists including the anthropologist Arturo Ramos with whom he would maintain an active correspondence. Having established these lines of communication, Park’ encouraged his graduate students, most notably Donald Pierson and Ruth Landes, to conduct research in Brazil. By the time Park made his second visit to Brazil in 1937, Donald Pierson was already two years into his doctoral research in Salvador de Bahia, where he had been living with his wife Helen Pierson since 1935. During this trip Park met with Arthur Ramos in Rio and toured Salvador de Bahia with the Piersons. According to Valladares, during this second trip Park and Pierson spent long hours walking about the city of Salvador, observing the social relations in the city, interviewing people from the city, and speculating about the conclusions that could be reached about Bahian society. During this visit, Pierson and Park also arranged to attend and observe the rituals held by practitioners of Candomblé, an Afro-

Brazilian religion based upon the worship of Yoruban Orishas.

Pierson’s dissertation research in Salvador de Bahia was based upon Park’s race relations cycle and focused on the processes of contact, accommodation, and fusion that could be observed between blacks and whites. As the region with the highest concentration

212 Lícia do Prado Valladares, “A Visita Do Robert Park Ao Brasil, o ‘Homem Marginal’ e a Bahia Como Laboratório,” Caderno CRH 23 (2010): 35–49.

165 of Afro-descendants in the Americas and the entry point for the Portuguese slave trade, Bahia presented Pierson with immense opportunities to observe the social relations between the distinct racial groups. Although focusing on race relations seemed an obvious entry point for someone like Pierson who had been intellectually reared by Robert Park, the Brazilian researchers that preceded Pierson in studying Bahia had mostly focused on questions relating to Bahian culture and the degree to which it was African in origin. Furthermore, Park and the other members of his dissertation committee (Robert Redfield and Louis Wirth) encouraged

Pierson to jettison the question of African cultural origins and to think of Bahia’s race relations in comparison to those of the US South. Indeed, following Park’s recommendation,

Pierson prepared for his visit to Bahia with a stay at Fisk University in Nashville which allowed him to the observe the racial system of the American south first hand. When the anthropologist Ruth Landes prepared to do research in Bahia in the 1940s, Park gave her similar advice.213

Pierson’s conclusions about Bahian race relations confirmed the thesis that the

Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre had popularized in his 1934 book Casa-Grande y

Senzala (Masters and Slaves). Freyre was one of the first Brazilian scholars to directly

213 Romo, “Rethinking Race and Culture in Brazil’s First Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934 1,” 115– 116.

166 challenge the dominant racial discourses adopted by Brazilian elites during the late nineteenth century that diagnosed Brazilian society as in a state of degeneration and doomed to failure because of its extensive racial mixing. In contrast, Freyre (who completed a

Masters degree under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1922 and referred to him as a major intellectual influence) described miscegenation as a positive force in Brazilian culture and argued that Portuguese colonialism was a much more humane form of imperialism that had encouraged sexual and social relations between members of different groups from the outset. Freyre argued that because of Brazil’s syncretic culture and long history of miscegenation, Brazilian society could be characterized as a racial democracy largely free from the segregation and overt racism that could be observed in North America.214

Pierson extended Freyre’s assessment of Brazilian society and added significant observational data and evidence to support the claim that there were harmonious relations between blacks and whites in Brazil. Indeed, in a 1950 article Pierson published in the

UNESCO-sponsored International Social Science Bulletin he argued that Brazilian society

214 Brazilian sociologist Antonio Sergio Guimarães argues that Freyre built opon characterizations by nineteenth century American abolitionists of Brazil’s race relations as emblematic of a kind of racial paradise. However, in contrast to the abolitionists Freyre specifically described the relations between racial groups in Brazil as democratic and spoke of a “social democracy” as the most signigicant contribution of Luso-Brazilian civilization to humanity. See António Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, “El Mito Del Anti-Racismo En Brasil ,” Nueva Sociedad 144, no. Julio-Agosto (1996): 32–45; Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, “Racial Democracy,” n.d.

167 constituted a “negative case” with respect to race prejudice.215 Pierson’s characterization of

Brazilian society as a “negative case” was based on a comparison to the racial situation in other parts of the world. Thus, Pierson argued that the Brazilian situation stood in contrast to the situation of Jews in Europe, the Negro in the US, and the caste-system in India. The only comparable situation to Brazil, Pierson argued, was “the Hawaiian racial situation”, which

Pierson argued should be classified as a “multi-racial class society.”216 In the case of Brazil,

Pierson acknowledged that this “multi-racial class society” took on a pyramidal shape where whites are disproportionately concentrated in the “upper brackets” and blacks in the “lowest brackets,” but Pierson noted that each group and “especially the mixed-bloods” is represented to some extent in all the occupational classes.217 For Pierson, this racial distribution was evidence that Brazilian society took the form of a meritocratic and

“…competitive order in which individuals find their places on the basis of personal competence and individual achievement rather than of racial descent.”218

Further evidence for Brazil’s lack of prejudice, according to Pierson, was the fact that the spatial distribution of the population was “largely the consequence of economic sifting”

215 Donald Pierson, “"Race Prejudice as Revealed in the Study of Racial Situations,” International Social Science Bulletin 2, no. 4 (1950): 467–478. 216 Ibid., 467. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid.

168 as opposed to voluntary or forced segregation.219 In addition to a meritocratic social order and an economically determined distribution of social groups, Pierson suggested that the strongest evidence for the lack of racial prejudice in Brazil was the extensive miscegenation that had taken place. Indeed, Pierson argued that apart from a small number of “tribes” living in remote and underdeveloped areas of Brazil, “the Indian, as a racial unit, has disappeared,” and that despite the fact that more Africans were imported into Brazil than any other region of the new world “the negro as a racial unit, is also disappearing.”220 For Pierson all of this evidence taken together indicated that Brazil was one of the few places in the world where

“the amalgamation of peoples of divergent racial origin proceeded so continuously and on so extensive a scale.”221 In fact, Pierson argued, that the only sort of racial problem that

Brazilian society had to contend with was “the resistance which any group offers, or is thought to offer, to absorption.”222 Crucially though, Pierson argued that in contrast to the situation of other nations “there are in Brazil no castes based upon race; there are only classes.”223 At the same time, Pierson also pointed out that these classes are nevertheless largely identified with colour but insisted that the crucial point is that they are “classes none

219 Ibid. 220 Ibid., 468. 221 Ibid. 222 Ibid. 223 Ibid.

169 the less and not castes.”224 For Pierson, Brazil’s history of racial mixing and purportedly meritocratic order represented an incarnation of the melting-pot ideal cherished by scholars from the Chicago School of Sociology, as well as the ideal of a meritocratic society where skin colour happens to overlap with class hierarchies but where there are no significant social barriers to the economic and social advancement those in the lower classes.

Nevertheless, Pierson acknowledged that social discrimination did in fact exist in

Brazilian society. However, Pierson was careful to emphasize the specificity of Brazilian social discrimination and argued that the kinds of discrimination that existed were concerned with ‘class’ rather than ‘race’. “A black cannot escape his colour,” Pierson argued, and explained that “on the contrary, [he] constantly carries with him an indelible badge of low status…”225 Due to this ‘indelible badge’, argued Pierson, a black person will tend to be catalogued by those meeting him for the first time as a member of the lower status group; however, Pierson explained that once a black person gives evidence of “characteristics ordinarily associated with superior status, such as professional skill, educational achievement, economic competence, ‘gentlemanly bearing’, or personal charm, this sort of snap judgment will tend to be modified.”226 Based upon this line of reasoning, Pierson

224 Ibid. 225 Ibid. 226 Ibid.

170 arrived at the conclusion that discrimination in Brazil was not a case of racial prejudice because it was not based upon beliefs about the inherent inferiority or superiority of racial groups, but rather based upon class-based judgments about individuals’ degree of civility and personal refinement. According to Pierson, although this kind of prejudice tended to follow colour lines, it did not provide enough reason to conclude that it constitutes race prejudice similar to that in South Africa or the US because it exists primarily in the upper classes and is practically non-existent in the lower classes.227 Further, Pierson argued that the fact that there were people of colour who had successfully climbed the social ladder and who no longer experienced any kind of prejudice once they had done so, provided further evidence that prejudice was class-based as opposed to racial.

Pierson’s studies and assessments of Bahian and Brazilian culture exemplify the ambivalent attitude that many US social scientists held with respect to Brazilian race relations around the mid-twentieth century. Trained in a tradition where the overtly antagonistic race relations of the American South were upheld as a paradigm of racial prejudice and functioned as a focal point for anti-racist critique, American researchers invested themselves both politically and epistemologically in the search for a model of race relations that would show that racial harmony was possible and that racial miscegenation was

227 Ibid., 469.

171 beneficial to nation-building. For Chicago-trained researchers like Pierson, the Northeast region of Bahia was construed as an ideal laboratory to observe and examine the conditions that produce racial harmony. Since the popularization of Gilberto Freyre’s ideas in the 1930s,

Brazilian intellectuals and elites were similarly invested in promoting the notion of a

Brazilian racial democracy as it gave them moral leverage relative to the US and the rest of the world. As such, the 1940s marks a moment when both American social scientists and

Brazilian elites were mutually invested and aligned in promoting the view that Brazil’s race relations were comparatively better and more democratic than those of the US. Given the collective and transnational investment in the notion of a Brazilian racial democracy, researchers like Pierson had little incentive to study and identify racial prejudice in Brazil.

Furthermore, the prominence of the race-as-caste analogy as a model of racial prejudice functioned to narrow researchers assessment of what counts a racial prejudice. Indeed, as

Pierson’s discussion of racial discrimination shows, the tendency was to deny the racial specificity of any discrimination faced by blacks and other racial minorities, and to characterize it as a sort of class prejudice. The defence of the notion that Brazil constitutes a racial democracy seemed to boil down to the question of how can racial prejudice exist in a society where there was so little in the way of racial consciousness?

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3 UNESCO Turns to Brazil In Search of a Model Anti-Racist

Polity

By the outset of the 1950s when UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns were in full swing, Brazil’s reputation as a racial democracy was at its peak. Thanks to the work of

Gilberto Freyre, Arthur Ramos, Donald Pierson, E.Franklin Frazier, Melville Herskovits, and

Ruth Landes, Brazils’ seemingly affable race relations and traditional colonial culture was in the eye of social scientists from across the Atlantic. Indeed, during UNESCO’s 1950 meeting of experts on race that led to the publication of the first UNESCO Statement (which I discussed in the Introduction to this dissertation), researchers proposed the idea to conduct a series of comparative studies of race relations throughout the world and between Brazil and the US in particular. During the discussions, the Chicago trained sociologist Franklin Frazier and Luiz Auguiar Costa-Pinto, a sociologist from the University of Rio de Janeiro, raised doubts about the need for a race statement and argued that because the beliefs people have about ‘race’ are based on ideology, educational campaigns would be limited in their effectiveness.228 In response to Frazier and Costa-Pinto’s observations, the members of the committee discussed various ideas and proposals for comparative studies of racial

228 “Summary Report (of the Six Meetings), UNESCO/SS/CONF.1/SR.1.,” in Meeting of Experts on Race Problems (Paris: UNESCO, 12 December 1949), 8–9.

173 attitudes.229 Indeed, during their fourth meeting, the experts devoted their discussions to the proposal put forth by British sociologist Morris Ginsberg to consider a study comparing the attitudes of “Latins and Anglo-Saxons” towards race and colour and discussed several possible sites for such studies including: South Africa, the US, and Brazil. 230 Frazier, who had conducted research in Bahia during the 1940s which confirmed the racial democracy thesis, suggested that it could be rewarding to study people’s attitudes towards “half-breeds” throughout the world and referred to his own studies comparing the attitudes of Europeans and North Americans towards indigenous people in Brazil and his conclusion that there were not only psychological factors involved in shaping people’s attitudes but also political, economic, religious, and demographic factors to be considered.231 Frazier, Ginsberg, Costa

Pinto and Comas all suggested Brazil as a promising site for the study of race relations.232

The idea of conducting sociological studies in Brazil gained further impetus during

UNESCO’s 1950 General Conference in Florence, Italy. During this conference, Paulo

Carneiro, the chemist who was Brazil’s representative to UNESCO (see Chapter 2), argued that UNESCO should pay particular attention to Brazil because of the extensive

229 “Summary Report (of the Six Meetings), UNESCO/SS/CONF.1/SR.1.,” 10. 230 “Summary Report (of the Six Meetings), UNESCO/SS/Conf.1/SR4,” in Meeting of Experts on Race Problems (Paris: UNESCO, 13 December 1949), 1–6. 231 Ibid., 4. 232 Ibid.

174 miscegenation that had taken place there and because of the generally amicable social relations it had produced. Robert Angell, an American sociologist, endorsed Carneiro’s proposal and pointed out that up until then, social scientists had paid very little attention to studying positive examples of race relations.233 As a result of the discussions that took place during the General Conference, UNESCO adopted the following resolution: “To organize in

Brazil a pilot investigation of contacts between races or ethnic groups, with the aim of determining the economic, political, cultural and psychological factors, whether favourable or unfavourable to harmonious relations between races or ethnic groups.”234

By 1950, social scientists throughout the Atlantic and UNESCO officials were united in the belief that Brazil constituted a promising site for studying race relations and for deriving important clues about what produces racial harmony. UNESCO’s social scientists approached Brazil with the expectation that they could learn practical lessons about governing race relations by studying the inner workings of Brazilian society and using the insights from these studies as a template for building harmonious race relations in other parts of the world. This vision was clearly expressed in the preface to a pamphlet titled “the Race

233 Marcos Chor Maio, “Un Programme Contre Le Racisme Au Lendemain de La Seconde Geurre Mondiale,” 60 Ans D’histoire de l'UNESCO: Actes Du Colloque International (Paris: UNESCO, 2007), 193. 234 "Records of the General Conference of Unesco, Fifth Session, Florence, 1950: Resolutions; 5 C/Resolutions." p. 40.

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Question”, which contained the text of the 1950 Statement on Race. In the preface to the pamphlet, Brazil is described as a nation that has developed a “unique civilization” thanks to the contributions of different races and which suffers less than other nations from racial prejudice.235 Indeed, the pamphlet described Brazil as a place that provides a unique opportunity to uncover the conditions that make racial harmony possible:

We are as yet ill informed about the factors which brought about such a favourable, and, in many ways, exemplary situation. But in the present state of the social sciences, general speculations no longer suffice. We must have specialists make searching inquiries in the field. We must learn from them exactly why and how social, psychological and economic factors have contributed in varying degrees to make possible the harmony which exists in Brazil. Then the results of their inquiries can be set forth in publications in order to stimulate those who are still struggling elsewhere to introduce more peaceable and happier inter-racial relations.236

In the early stages of UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns, experts throughout the Atlantic had thus come to agree that Brazilian society was a veritable ‘social laboratory’ in need of comprehensive study and which promised to yield various insights on how to govern intergroup relations. Brazil was thus imbued with multiple redemptive aspirations. For

235 The pamphlet does not list an independent author but given that Montagu was the one who drafted the original text of the 1950 Statement and the one who wrote the preface for other publications containing the 1950 Statement he is most likely the author of this preface as well. 236 "Unesco and Its Programme, No 3: The Race Question," (UNESCO, 1950), 4.

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American social scientists, Brazil’s lack of segregation and extensive miscegenation served as a model to which the US could aspire and hopefully redeem itself from its past and present. For Brazilian intellectuals and politicians, the racial democracy thesis gave Brazil a moral advantage relative to its more powerful and influential neighbours in the North and allowed them to describe miscegenation as a project of racial integration as opposed to a project of racial “whitening” as some scholars would later describe it. For UNESCO officials, as we can see in the quote from the race question pamphlet, Brazil contained the promise of a model that could be exported throughout the world and thus serve to enact the vision of a peaceful world that was at the heart of its institutional ambitions.

At the same time that UNESCO was focusing its attention to Brazil in hopes of deriving practical insights for its institutional ambitions, Brazilian politicians were trying to rapidly modernize and develop Brazil’s economy. At the outset of the 1950s, Brazil was undergoing a rapid process of industrialization linked to and emergent nationalist discourse of “development.” At the outset of the decade, Brazil was a country of 55 million people with an economy mainly geared toward the export of agricultural products, where coffee made up more than half of export revenues. In order to push the country further along a path towards modernization and industrialization, ruling politicians and leading economists argued that

Brazil should redefine its economy by moving away from an economy based on traditional

177 agricultural export and towards rapidly industrializing and diversifying its economy. The developmentalist ambitions of this period crystallized in the administration of Juscelino

Kubitschek who became president in 1955 and set his administration the goal of accomplishing fifty years worth of industrial modernization in five years. The Kubitschek government’s state-led program was called the “Targets Plan”, which targeted six key areas of growth: energy, transportation, food, basic industries, education, and the integration of the

Brazilian interior into the national economy which was to be achieved by the construction of

Brasilia as a new state capital.237

The intellectual inspiration for Brazil’s national development strategy came from the work of social scientists at the Economic Commission of Latin America (ECLA) based in

Santiago, Chile and the Instituto Superior de Estudios Brasileiros (Higher Institute of

Brazilian Studies, ISEB) based in Rio de Janeiro. During the 1950s intellectuals from both of these research centres developed critical theories of the world capitalist system and argued

237 For overviews of Brazil's developmental ambitions in this time period see: Rafael Ioris, “Crossing Intellectual Borders: Brazil and the World, and the Quest for National Development in the 1950s,” ISA - ABRI JOINT INTERNATIONAL MEETING (Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro Campus (PUC-Rio), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2009); Rafael Rossoto Ioris and Jeffrey Lesser, “Industrial Promotion and Political Instability: ‘Fifty Years in Five’ and the Meanings of National Development in 1950s Brazil,” History Dissertation, Emory University (Emory Univerisity, 2009); Thomas E Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 1930-1964 : an Experiment in Democracy, Updated (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Thomas E Skidmore, Brazil : Five Centuries of Change, Latin American Histories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

178 that the underdevelopment of the Latin American region was primarily due to the imperialist interests of nations in the industrialized “centre” who sought to maintain the non- industrialized nations at the “periphery” in their condition of exporters of agricultural goods and raw materials. For example, prominent economists at the ECLA, such as the Brazilian

Celso Furtado and the Argentinian Raul Prebitsch argued that contrary to the law of comparative advantage, the international economic structure in place did not result in a system that was beneficial to all nations. Rather, because of their advanced technological and social systems, the industrialized nations are able to retain more of the wealth generated from trade, while those in the “periphery” are forced to export more and more to get the same value for their imports. Consequently, the economists of the ECLA argued that only an ambitious state-led project of industrialization and modernization would bring Latin

American nations out of their economic dependence on industrial nations.238

The approach Brazil took toward economic development in the 1950s situated it both within and against the sphere of US influence.239 During the Second World War, Brazil and

238 For more on the ideas and theories of ECLA economists see: Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, “De La Cepal y El ISEB a La Teoría de La Dependencia,” Desarrollo Económico 46, no. 183 (2006): 419– 439; Kathryn Sikkink, “Development Ideas in Latin America,” in International Development and the Social Sciences : Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, ed. Frederick Cooper and Randall M Packard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 228–256. 239 On Brazil’s relationship with the US during the Cold War era see Stanley E Hilton, “The United States, Brazil, and the Cold War, 1945-1960: End of the Special Relationship,” The Journal of

179 the US maintained a mutually beneficial relationship where Brazil opened its borders to US air and naval bases and made its vast natural resources available to the US at friendly prices.

In exchange, the US provided Brazil with a steady source of government aid, which allowed

Brazil to build the first South American steel mill in Volta Redonda and to develop its economy. However, after the Second World War, the relationship deteriorated as the US became increasingly concerned with its growing conflict with the Soviet Union. Although, the US remained interested in Brazil’s natural resources it became less and less interested in providing Brazil with economic aid and increasingly opposed Brazil’s state-led development policies. Instead, the US pressured Brazil to open its borders to foreign investment, which

Brazil viewed as an unreliable source for economic development.240 By the end of the decade, as Brazil-US relations had deteriorated, Brazil briefly considered the idea of joining the Non-Aligned Movement and sent an observer to the 1961 conference in Belgrade, which was the follow-up to the 1955 Bandung Conference.241

The significant societal changes that were taking place as a result of Brazil’s rapid

American History 68, no. No. 3 (Dec., 1981) (1981): 599–624. 240 Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, The Rich Neighbor Policy : Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 241 James G Hershberg, “‘High-Spirited Confusion’: Brazil, the 1961 Belgrade Non-Aligned Conference, and the Limits of an ‘Independent’ Foreign Policy During the High Cold War,” Cold War History 7, no. No. 3 (2007): pp. 373–388.

180 industrialization had a significant bearing on UNESCO’s research design for the race relations studies. The responsibility of bringing the envisioned studies of Brazilian race relations to fruition fell to UNESCO’s Department of Social Science, whose ties to Brazil and Latin America remained strong even after the unexpected death of Arthur Ramos. The responsibility for organizing and coordinating the race relation studies fell to Alfred Métraux

(who had already been to Brazil on several occasions as part of his involvement with the

IIHA). Métraux was appointed Director of the newly created “Race Division” of the DSS in

April 1950 and one of his first duties was to draft a plan of study for the race relations studies with Ruy Coehlo, a Brazilian anthropologist who was hired to act as his assistant, and with the Canadian social psychologist Otto Klineberg.

Together, the three DSS officials drafted a plan of study that was very much influenced by the sociological studies conducted in Bahia by Donald Pierson and Franklin

Frazier during the 1940s.242 Indeed, Métraux, Coehlo, and Klineberg proposed the northeastern region of Bahia as the key site that would act as a focus for the race relations studies and which they hoped could act as model for the patterns of race relations in the rest of the country.243 Bahia appeared to DSS officials as an ideal site not only because of its high

242 “‘Suggestions for Research on Race Relations in Brazil’,” Race Question and Protection of Minorities, Dossier 323.1, Part. I up to 30/VI/50 (Box REG 145) (UNESCO Archives, n.d.). 243 Ibid.

181 percentage of Afro-descendants and reputation for racial harmony, but also because Métraux was in close contact with Charles Wagley (the American anthropologist who had carried out the community studies of the Amazon as part of the Hylean Amazon project, see Chapter 1) who was in Bahia conducting a multi-sited ethnographic study with a team of American researchers and could easily be recruited for the purposes of doing race relations research.244

The DSS plan of study also suggested that the racial democracy thesis might serve to obscure any existing racism in Brazil and raised the possibility that racism might exist in Brazil in a subtle and unconscious manner. Thus, the research proposal suggested that because the overt displays of race prejudice were not socially acceptable for most Brazilians, psychological methods like Rorschach tests and interviews using attitude scales and pictorial techniques would have to be used to assess whether Brazilians might harbor unconscious racial prejudices.245 The plan of research also called for the use of the Rorschach technique to map out the different personality types in minority groups and in white populations.246

However, after DSS officials held conversations with Brazilian experts and had the opportunity to observe Brazilian society first hand the project’s framework was significantly altered in order to incorporate previously uncounted for social dynamics. Indeed, in the

244 See Maio, “UNESCO and the Study of Race Relations in Brazil: Regional or National Issue?”. 245 “‘Suggestions for Research on Race Relations in Brazil’.” 246 Ibid.

182 months leading up to his trip to Brazil, Métraux held conversations with Paulo Carneiro who encouraged him to consider expanding the geographic scope of the proposed studies and explained that racial questions in Brazil could vary significantly depending on the region. 247

Further, once Métraux travelled to Brazil and spoke with social scientists working in different parts of the country, he came to the conclusion that Brazil’s social landscape was much more complex than the DSS had accounted for and suggested the need for a very different research design.248 In Brazil, Métraux made visits to Bahia as well as the urban centres of Brazil’s south where he became convinced that there were significant differences in race relations and decided that the UNESCO studies would have to include Rio and São

Paulo as research sites.249 In Rio, Métraux met with L.A Costa Pinto, the sociologist from the

Universidade do Brazil who had participated in the 1949 meeting on race and who was a close friend and colleague of Métraux’s predecessor, Arthur Ramos. During Métraux’s visit,

Costa-Pinto showed great interest in participating in the UNESCO studies and recommended

247 Alfred Métraux, Rapport Au Directeur Général En Mission Au Brésil (16 Nov.-20 Déc. 50), SS/Memo/2779, ed. Directeur Général, Race Question and Protection of Minorities, Pt. II from 1/VII/50 to 31/XII/51, Dossier 323.1, Box 165 (UNESCO, n.d.). 248 Alfred Métraux, Rapport Au Directeur Général En Mission Au Brésil (16 Nov.-20 Déc. 50), SS/Memo/2779. 249 For a discussion of how Métraux and other officials expanded the geographical scope of these studies see: Maio, “From Bahia to Brazil: The UNESCO Race Relations Project”; Maio, “UNESCO and the Study of Race Relations in Brazil: Regional or National Issue?”.

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Rio de Janeiro as a research site because of the interesting changes that were taking place as a result of the industrialisation transforming the city. Because the Department of Social

Science had already displayed strong interest in studying the effects of industrialization,

Métraux agreed that Rio would be a good research site and hired Costa-Pinto to conduct a study.250 In São Paulo, a city which Métraux described as the leading Latin American centre of social science research, Métraux met with sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists from two different institutions: la Faculdade de Filosofia from the Universidade de São Paolo and l’Escola Livre de Filosofia. Because of its pre-eminence as a social science research centre and because of the strong reputation that the “paulistas” had developed internationally,

Métraux argued that it would be crucial to have their participation in the research project and agreed to have Roger Bastide, a French sociologist who had been teaching in São Paulo since

1938, and Florestan Fernandes, a young Brazilian sociologist, conduct the studies. Aside from the strength of the researchers available in this urban centre, Métraux also argued that race relations in São Paulo represented a unique case study because of the rapid industrialization that was taking place.251 However, Métraux cautioned that the São Paulo research might reveal conclusions that stand in contrast to those of the original study design:

250 Métraux, Rapport Au Directeur Général En Mission Au Brésil (16 Nov.-20 Déc. 50), SS/Memo/2779, 4. 251 Ibid.

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Conflicts and tensions are coming into being following from the rapid industrial development of Sao Paulo. This giant city presents us with a unique opportunity to learn the factors that incite racial antagonisms, which are otherwise latent or lacking in virulence. I don’t ignore the fact that by organizing a study in Sao Paulo we risk arriving at conclusions that will not respond to the hopes of those that presented and voted for the aforementioned resolution, but it would be a treason to the scientific spirit that should inform our study if we brush aside newly arising problems in order to hold on to happy but outdated view of the situation. The Bahia study can only offer us an incomplete image of the racial question of Brazil.252

Consequently, after Métraux’s visit to Brazil the plan of study was significantly altered.

Whereas the original design of the project called for the studies to concentrate on the northeastern state of Bahia that had been described by American researchers such as Donald

Pierson and Franklin Frazier as a racial democracy free of caste prejudice, after Métraux’s visit to Brazil in 1950 the research plan grew to encompass several regions and city centres.

Métraux’s visits suggested a much more complex reality than the portrait that underpinned

252 Ibid. Des conflits et des tensions sont en train de naître, à la suite du rapide développement industriel de Sao Paulo. Cette ville géante nous offre une occasion unique de connaître les facteurs susceptibles de sucsiter des antagonismes raciaux qui, autrefois, étaient à l’état latent ou manquaient de virulence. Je n’ignore pas qu’en organisant une étude à Sao Paulo nous risquons de parvenir à des conclusions qui ne répondront pas aux espoirs de ceux qui ont présenté et voté la résolution citée plus haut, mais ce serait trahir l’esprit scientifique qui doit animer notre enquête que d’écarter les problèmes nouveaux pour nous en tenir à un état de choses heureux mais périmé. L’enquête de Bahia ne peut offrir de la question raciale au Brésil qu’une image incomplète.

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UNESCO’s hopes to find positive examples of race relations and Métraux thus felt obliged to temper overly optimistic expectations for the project.

The study of race relations in Brazil thus posed an interesting epistemological challenge for UNESCO’s social scientists. Whereas the expectations for the study were largely shaped by UNESCO’s anti-racist ambitions and post-war aspirations to build a cosmopolitan world community, the complex and geographically diverse pattern of race relations in Brazil necessitated a multi-sited approach that did not promise any redemptive lessons that could be easily exported to other countries. Members of UNESCO’s Department of Social Science hoped the studies would strike a careful balance between providing redemptive lessons concerning the social conditions that lead to racial harmony and a commitment to scientific and empirical rigor that involved not excluding the possibility that racism might exist in unexpected ways and places. UNESCO officials thus sought to hedge their bets by insisting on a multi-sited and multi-regional approach to the study of Brazilian race relations as well as the adoption of research methods that might reveal subtle or unconscious prejudice.

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4 UNESCO Studies of Bahia: Racial Democracy Threatened by

Modernization

The studies of Brazilian race relations that were produced thanks to UNESCO’s initiative capture the multiple and clashing interpretations of Brazilian society that emerged in the post-war era. On the one hand, the studies of Bahia and other rural areas of Brazil

(intended as the fulcrum of the original design for the UNESCO project and conducted by

Charles Wagley and his team of researchers and) confirmed the notion that Brazil was relatively free of a caste-like social structure and of racial prejudice while issuing a note of warning that rapid modernization of the region might unsettle the traditional culture that allowed democratic race relations to flourish. The Bahia studies served to affirm the idyllic image of Bahia as a place free of racial animosity and tension that had been advanced by the first generation of researchers in the 1930s and 40s. Like Pierson’s studies in the 1940s, the studies produced by Wagley’s research team noted the ways that the economic structure of

Bahian society was racially patterned and also documented the existence of various racial stereotypes and various folk systems of racial classification. However, Wagley’s research team concluded that these were relatively ephemeral and innocuous manifestations of ‘race’ because they did not produce segregated social landscapes nor prevent people from different races from having intimate relations or moving up and down the social ladder. In Bahian

187 society and in rural Brazil, these researchers concluded, ‘race’ did not function as a rigid classification system that locked people into a given place on the social hierarchy and further concluded that ‘race’ was thus wanting in ontological significance in Brazilian society.

Instead, Wagley’s team argued that ‘class’ was the most influential social category in Bahia and rural Brazil. The category of ‘class’ allowed the American research team to contrast

Brazilian race relations with the caste-like race relations of the American South, and served as the basis for their optimistic assessment for Brazil’s future where, if properly managed, the process of modernization would level the playing field and minimize social inequality.

The studies of race relations in the rapidly industrializing centres of Rio and São

Paulo, on the other hand, produced a very different portrait of Brazilian society. These urban studies, which were conducted by a team of Brazilian and French social scientists, suggested that the structural and ideological forces that were the remnant of the plantation economy from Brazil’s colonial era acted to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a predominantly light-skinned elite and to prevent darker-skinned Brazilians from climbing the social ladder. In the writings of sociologists such as Florestan Fernandes and Roger Bastide who led UNESCO’s urban studies, ‘racial democracy’ emerged as either an unfulfilled ideal or an ideological discourse that masked the kinds of racial discrimination and inequality that shape Brazilian society. In the rest of this chapter, I examine the differing interpretations of

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Brazilian society arrived at in the UNESCO studies and how they were shaped by both the race-as-caste analogy as well as the theme of modernization. In particular, this section highlights how the American researchers in Bahia continued to deploy the-race-as-caste analogy as a measure of racial prejudice in their studies, whereas researchers from Rio and

São Paulo sought out different concepts and theoretical frameworks for describing the ways in which Brazil continued to have a racial problem.

UNESCO’s studies of race relations in Bahia and rural Brazil responded not only to

UNESCO’s anti-racist ambitions but also to Bahian’s politicians desire to modernize Bahian society. As the 1940s drew to a close, the state of Bahia was undergoing a significant transformation spurred by the discovery of petroleum in the region. Whereas Bahia tended to be thought of as place where Brazil’s traditional culture stemming from the plantation economy that flourished prior to the abolition of slavery remained intact, by the late 1940s

Bahian politicians were keen to modernize and reform this image of Bahian society. The most ambitious of these reformers was Anísio Texeira, the education minister of Bahia who would become one of Brazil’s best-know educators and who introduced the ideas of John

Dewey to Brazil. In 1948, Texeira launched a plan to overhaul Bahia’s education system so as to produce individuals better prepared to handle the rigours of modern society and thus

189 curb the potential for social upheaval in the region.253 Texeira’s plan was based on a concern that Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian culture was backward and stagnant and that if Bahia’s children were not sufficiently civilized by the school system they may go on to cause major social disruption. Unlike social scientists such as the French sociologist Roger Bastide, the

American anthropologist Melville Herksovits, and the Brazilian anthropologist Arthur Ramos who were fascinated by the remnants of ‘traditional’ African culture that persisted in Bahia,

Texeira argued that the cultural traditions that were brought over from Africa, such as the

Candomblé religion, impeded Afro-Brazilians from incorporating into modern society and held the region back as a whole.

Although Texeira’s modernizing ambitions clashed with many social scientists reverence for Bahia’s traditional culture, he nevertheless sought social scientists’ support in order to bring his plan of modernizing Bahia to fruition. Thus, in 1948 Texeira assembled a team of social scientists to conduct a series of community studies intended to shed light on the social differences between the regions of Bahia so as to design schools better suited to their region. Texeira initially asked Donald Pierson to oversee these studies but after finding

253 Romo, Brazil’s Living Museum : Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia, 136–142.

190 out that Pierson was not available, he enlisted Charles Wagley to assemble a team of researchers for these studies.254

As we saw in the previous chapter, by 1948 Wagley was already well acquainted with field research in Brazil having spent several years conducting ethnographic research in the

Brazilian Amazon, first under the auspices of the US and Brazil’s Public Health Agency and then in conjunction with UNESCO’s IIHA project. In order to conduct Texeira’s proposed studies, Wagley assembled a research team made up of three of his graduate students from

Columbia’s anthropology department (Ben Zimmerman, Marvin Harris, and Harry

Hutchinson) as well as several Brazilian social scientists: Eduardo Galvão, Luiz A. Costa

Pinto, Gizella Valladares, and Thales de Azevedo. Initially, Texeira and Wagley agreed that the objective of the community studies would be to examine processes of social change in the

“folk” societies of Bahia’s interior, which were undergoing change due to the introduction of radio, television, new roads, and schools. Wagley recommended examining several communities from different physical environments and at differing stages of progress in order to obtain a snapshot of how communities were transitioning from “premodern” to

“modern.” However, after hearing that UNESCO intended to conduct a series of studies on

Brazil’s race relations, Wagley contacted his friend Alfred Métraux and recommended Bahia

254 Ibid., 136–137.

191 as an ideal place for these kinds of studies, and suggested that he could oversee such studies seeing as he had a team of researchers in place. Thus, as a result of the collaboration with

UNESCO the scope of the studies expanded beyond the question of social change and the process of modernization, to encompass questions concerning Bahia’s pattern of race relations.255

The kind of studies which Wagley and his team carried drew their inspiration from the urban sociology of the Chicago school of sociology, and the tradition of ‘community studies’ that was characteristic of many of the studies carried out by Chicago sociologists.

Adopting Wagley’s concern that the studies cover the geographical as well as social diversity of Bahia, the studies focused on three separate sites: a traditional plantation community (Vila

Recôncavo), which was studied by Harry W. Hutchinson, and an old mining town in the

Brazilian plateu (Minas Velhas), which was studied by Marvin Harris, a typical community of the arid north eastern region (Monte Serrat), which was studied by Ben Zimmerman.

When UNESCO published the results of these studies in a book called Race and Class in

Rural Brazil, Wagley also included a chapter on race relations in the Amazon community of

Itá that was based on research that Wagley had conducted as part of the ethnographic surveys for the International Hylean Amazon Institute (as discussed in Chapter 2). The studies drew

255 Ibid., 142.

192 on well-established community studies methods as well as psychological methods of attitude analysis including participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, surveys, and the use of statistical and historical documents to create a portrait of the daily life in the communities and the attitudes and preconceptions held between people of different races. Through interview and participation observation methods the researchers carefully documented the criteria and categories that the community members from each site used to establish people’s identity and collected information in the form of folk tales and sayings to get a sense of what kinds of stereotypes people had about racial groups.256

In addition to participant observation, the researchers developed survey and questionnaire techniques for gaining access to the attitudes that Bahians held about members of other racial groups. Hutchinson, for example, conducted a survey where he asked 85 community members of different racial and sexual background to examine eight photographs consisting of both males and females from each of the four locally acknowledged racial types

(the caboclo, the preto or black, the mulato, and the branco).257 No information was given about the social background of the people depicted in the photos and the participants were

256 For a discussion of the methods used for these studies and how they differed from those used in the studies in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro see Roger Bastide, “Race Relations in Brazil,” International Social Science Bulletin 9, no. 4 (1957): 498. 257 Wagley, “Race and Class in Rural Brazil,” 36.

193 asked to rank the photos by considering which they found most physically attractive, those they believed to be most wealthy, the best worker, the most honest, and the most religious.

Marvin Harris showed 96 individuals of different colour, class, sex, and age three pairs of photographs corresponding with males and females from three ‘racial types’ (Negro, mulatto, and white) and asked the participants to rank them using similar criteria (beauty, wealth, ability to work, honesty, religiosity).258 Ben Zimmerman made use of a similar method by showing eight photographs (corresponding to men and women from four racial types) to 100 participants and asking them to judge them based on the same criteria but also asking them to indicate whether they would accept the man or woman as a neighbour, friend, guest, dance partner, brother-in-law or sister-in-law.259 The researchers believed that these tests made it possible to measure the attitudes of the various racial groups, the social distance between people of different colour, and to evaluate to what extent physical appearance determined how individuals were allotted to different social and economic strata.260

The main conclusion that Wagley and his team drew from their observations and data was that ‘race’ was of little importance in determining Bahian social structure and that Bahia could indeed be characterized as a ‘racial democracy’. In the historical backdrop that the

258 Ibid., 57–58. 259 Ibid., 98-99. 260 Ibid.

194 researchers provided for their studies they suggested that Bahian society may have been formerly made up of castes, but that the extensive miscegenation which had taken place since the colonial era now rendered it a society of classes.261 However, although the studies concluded that ‘race’ does not play a strong role in shaping Bahia’s social structure, they did show Bahians to have strong inclinations towards making racial classifications based on phenotypic differences, as evidenced by their recognition of numerous racial types. Despite the evidence that racial type was an important and omnipresent element of Bahian social classification, Wagley and his team argued that it was only one of many factors including wealth, profession, and education that individuals used to determine social status. Thus,

Wagley claimed that the “most crucial alignment in rural Brazilian society was that of social classes, and that racial type was generally but one criterion by which individuals were assigned to a social class.”262

Wagley’s studies also suggested that Bahia’s harmonious relations between the races were the product of a pre-modern culture where there was little economic competition between social groups. Indeed, Wagley argued that Bahia’s social patterns of inequality had

261 Ibid., 7-8. 262 Ibid., 9.

195 remained unchanged the same since the abolition of slavery and that this was due to the fact that Bahia had remained untouched by modernization:

Thus, the picture of relations between social classes and racial groups which emerges from our studies of these rural communities is on the whole pre- industrial and pre-urban (in the sense of the twentieth century urban complex). The patterns of class and race relations in these communities approximate to those which had taken form in Brazil in the last century out of the unique Brazilian past.263

Although Wagley asserted that Bahia was largely shaped by practices and traditions stemming from the nineteenth century and argued that many of these traditions should be preserved and strengthened, he also suggested that “social barriers are likewise uncovered which prevent the full utilization of the human resources of these rural communities and which must be erased if Brazil is to become the great democracy it promises to be.”264

Wagley’s studies thus situated Bahia’s affable race relations within an anticipatory narrative suggesting that Brazilian prosperity rested on its ability to preserve its traditional culture whilst undergoing technological and industrial change. Indeed in his concluding remarks in

Race and Class in Rural Brazil, Wagley augured that Brazil will continue to develop economically and to expand its educational system thus allowing “the people of darker skin colour” to improve their economic situation and assume their rightful place amongst a

263 Ibid., 9. 264 Ibid., 14.

196 growing middle class. For Wagley, the notion that Brazil was free from racial prejudice, and lacked a caste-like system like the US led him to believe that “there are no serious racial barriers to social and economic advancement, and as opportunities increase, large numbers of people will rise in the social system.”265 Given the meritocratic and democratic nature of

Brazilian society, Wagley explained that Brazilians should have no reason to fear change or make a connection between modernization, industrialization, and racism:

Both Brazilians and foreign observers have the impression that Western attitudes and concepts of racism are entering Brazil along with industrial and technological improvements. But there is no inherent relationship between Western industrialism and technology and Western racism, no necessary connexion [sic] between the widespread improvement of social conditions and the development, through competition, of tensions and discrimination between racial or minority groups. Aware of the dangers and pitfalls and taking care to avoid them, Brazil may enjoy the benefits of technological change, and of greater rewards for its underdeveloped potentialities, without losing its rich heritage of racial democracy.266

Wagley and his research team thus saw Bahia as rife with economic and cultural potential.

Like the discourses of cultural change that were discussed in Chapter 2, Wagley suggested that the best way forward for Bahia would be to establish a careful equilibrium between

‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. Indeed, for Wagley, Bahia’s potential lay in the fact that its

‘traditional’ culture was already characterized by democratic and prejudice-free relations and

265 Ibid., 154-5. 266 Ibid., 155.

197 could thus be easily grafted onto a more competitive and industrialized way of life. Wagley’s optimistic assessment of Bahia’s future is thus emblematic of the kinds of redemptive aspirations that provoked the interest of UNESCO and the international social science community. As described by Wagley, Bahian society represented an ideal blend of tradition and modernity wherein colonial-era social relations were redeemed as a social order that could serve as a template for industrialized nations whose race relations were comparatively less democratic.

Thus, by downplaying the significance of ‘race’ within Bahia’s race relations, and by denying any necessary link between racism and modernization, Wagley’s UNESCO- supported studies furthered the race-as-caste analogy that had become central to the

American interpretation of the function of racial ideology. Based on an implicit and at times explicit contrast with the race relations of the US, Wagley and his team of researchers concluded that there was little evidence of race prejudice and that ‘race’ in fact had little significance in Bahian society. However, there is a notable tension in Wagley’s conclusions.

On the one hand, his research team argued for the minimal relevance of race within Bahia society while on the other hand his research team introduced extensive evidence suggesting that Bahian social relations were racially coded and that Bahians possessed intricate and elaborate racial classifications that often furthered racial stereotypes. However, because these

198 ways of conceiving ‘race’ did not conform to the segregationist model of the US South that had been established as a paradigm of antagonistic and problematic racial relations, Wagley’s research team attached little significance to the palpable racial ideologies that they observed in Bahia. Because racial tensions tended to align with class divisions, and because Wagley and his colleagues tended to believe that class-differences could be overcome through modernization, they arrived at the conclusion that ‘race’ did not appear to pose a major social problem. Thus, whereas the race-as-caste metaphor proved useful in the American context for describing the US system of race relations, in Bahia it had the effect of obscuring North

American researchers’ understanding of the ways that ‘race’ continued to inform and shape

Bahian society and Brazilian society more broadly.

5 Beyond the Race-As-Caste Analogy?: UNESCO’s Urban

Studies

In contrast to the image of racial democracy that emerged from Bahia and Brazil’s rural regions, the portrait of race relations that emerged from the studies of the industrial centres of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo painted a portrait of much greater racial strife and tension. While the Bahian portrait focused on the long history of miscegenation and the

199 observably amicable relations between blacks and whites, the empirical evidence from

Brazil’s urban centres in the southeast suggested that race relations were marked by a deeper seated prejudice that had its origins in slavery and imposed a glass ceiling on blacks economic advancement and also caused them to interiorize feelings of inferiority. Further, whereas the Bahian studies were carried out by primarily American researchers, the

UNESCO sponsored studies of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were conducted by mostly

Brazilian and French social scientists (led by Florestan Fernandes and including Luiz-Aguiar

Costa-Pinto, Oracy Nogueira, René Ribeiro, Guerreiro Ramos, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Otávio Ianni) and has been interpreted by some as the beginnings of a uniquely Brazilian analysis of race relations.267

One of the most influential scholars in this emerging field of race relations in Brazil’s industrials centres was the French sociologist Roger Bastide. Bastide first came to Brazil from in 1938 when he was appointed professor of sociology at the University of Sao Paulo to replace the departed Claude Lévi-Strauss. From the outset of his career, Bastide developed an interest in processes of acculturation, migration, and interethnic relations. As Denys Cuche has pointed out, Bastide was influenced by many of the German sociologists including

267 For this interpretation see: Ibid.; António Sérgio A Guimarães, “El Mito Del Anti-racismo En Brasil ,” Nueva Sociedad 144, no. Julio-Agosto (1996): 32–45.

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George Simmel and Max Weber that influenced the founding figures of the Chicago School of Sociology. Before coming to Brazil, Bastide had also been one of the first French sociologists to study and write about the sociology of immigration. Thus, the first article that

Bastide published was based on a study of the acculturation of Armenian immigrants in the southern French town of Valence.268

When Bastide arrived in São Paulo, the University of São Paolo (USP) was in the process of building its reputation and had sought out a team of foreign professors from

France, Germany, and the US to build up its department of Philosophy and Social Science.269

When Bastide joined the USP’s Social Science section as Lévi-Strauss’ replacement he joined a faculty that included Donald Pierson. In his first years in São Paolo, Bastide also befriended several prominent modernist painters and authors and became an active student and critic of Brazilian literature and art, wrote newspaper articles and scholarly articles on the historical origins of Brazilian culture, and on the relationships between mysticism, art, and religion. During his early years at the USP, Bastide also developed an interest in the African influence on Brazilian culture and began studying the classic anthropological works on Afro-

268 Denys Cuche, “Roger Bastide, Le ‘Fait Individuel’ et L’école de Chicago ,” Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 1, no. 24 (2008): 41–59. 269 Andrew R. Dausch, “A Transnational Cultural Politics: The French University Mission to Brazil, Racial Theory and the Formation of a New Social Science Paradigm” (Unplublished paper, 2012).

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Brazilian culture by Nina Rodrigues and Arthur Ramos. He also became familiar with

Pierson’s interpretation of Brazilian race relations and the methodological approach he had inherited from the Chicago school. Eventually in 1944, Bastide conducted his first field trip to the Northeast and was granted permission to attend the ceremonies of practicioners of the

Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé thanks to the efforts of the Bahian writer Jorge

Amado. During this period of research where he sought to trace the African roots of Brazilian culture, Bastide became familiar with North American research on acculturation and especially the work of Melville Herksovits, Ralph Linton, and Robert Park.270

As Bastide’s interest in Candomblé and the African roots of Brazilian culture deepened, he came to the conclusion that in order to truly understand Brazilian culture he would have to learn to think outside of the systems of thought that he had inherited as a result of his European upbringing. This sentiment stemmed from his early criticism of Durkheimian sociology and its exclusion of subjective experience as important for understanding social

270 For discussions of Bastide’s years in Brazil and his fascination with Afro-Brazilian culture see Stefania Capone, “Roger Bastide or the ‘Darkness of Alterity’,” in Out of the Study and into the Field : Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology, ed. Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), xii, 294 p.; Stefania Capone, “Transatlantic Dialogue: Roger Bastide and the African American Religions,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37, no. 3 (July 01, 2007): 336–370; M.i. Pereira De Queiroz, “Les Années Brésiliennes de Roger Bastide,” Archives Des Sciences Sociales Des Religions. 40, no. JUILLET DECEMBRE (1975); Cuche, “Roger Bastide, Le ‘Fait Individuel’ et L’école de Chicago .”

202 phenomena. In his early writings on the sociology of religion, Bastide emphasized the importance of experience for a sociological understanding of religion. For Bastide, it was not enough to simply observe religious phenomena, instead Bastide insisted that it was also important to have some personal experience of the phenomena in question and the attendant emotions and sentiments in order to understand it fully.271 Bastide’s first years in Brazil and his first contact with Candomblé rituals, provoked what he described as a prise de conscience

-- an intellectual and spiritual crisis that brought him to realize that he would never fully understand the Candomblé religion if he approached it from and ethnocentric mode of thought shaped by three centuries of Cartesianism. Thus, he concluded that if he was going to truly understand Candomblé and Brazilian culture more broadly he would have to ‘convert’ to a new way of thinking and learn to step out of the Cartesian framework that he had inherited as a product of his upbringing in the French university system.272

Whether it was this attempt to understand Brazilian culture from a perspective of radical alterity that led Bastide to develop a distinctive analysis of Brazil’s race relations is beyond the scope of this chapter; nevertheless, there are noticeable methodological differences from that of his North American colleagues. Although Bastide had been an active

271 Capone, “Roger Bastide or the ‘Darkness of Alterity’,” 172–3. 272 Capone, “Roger Bastide or the ‘Darkness of Alterity’.”

203 follower of the literature on the emerging tensions between blacks and whites in São Paulo, it was not until Alfred Métraux approached him with an opportunity to conduct research for

UNESCO’s project that he began to conduct research of his own on race relations. After agreeing with Métraux that the subsequent research on race relations in Brazil’s southern regions would be organized around the theme of the effects of industrialization and urbanization on ‘earlier’ patterns of ethnic relations, Bastide put together a team of researchers including his male Brazilian Graduate student Florestan Fernandes who conducted research based on historical documents, and demographic statistics, and the

Brazilian psychologists Aniela Meyer Ginsberg, Virginia Bicudo, and Lucila Hermann who independently performed doll, picture interpretation, and sociometric tests on children to determine their prejudices and attitudes concerning members of other racial groups. In addition, Bastide and his colleagues were assisted by a team of white students from the

Faculty Philosophy each of which underwent “a kind of psychoanalytic confession” on the racial problem. 273 Leaders of associations of coloured Brazilians also assisted the research project.274

273 Bastide, “Race Relations in Brazil,” 504. 274 Ibid.

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During the course of their research on the effects of industrialization and urbanization on race relations in São Paulo, Bastide and Fernandes drew on a variety of methods from urban sociology to determine the basic features of racial relations. However, unlike their

North American colleagues they did not conduct a typical ‘community study’ involving participant observation and immersion in a target community. Rather they studied historical documents as well as demographic and economic data in order to describe how race relations were impacted by historical changes to Brazil’s economic and social structure. In addition, the team conducted a set of interviews and ‘life histories’ of São Paulo inhabitants from different racial, social, and economic backgrounds; made several visits to “slums and factories” to observe race relations in daily life; administered a questionnaire on black attitudes concerning barriers to social ascension, the results of which were classified on a continuum ranging from conformist to revolt, as well as questionnaire on peoples preferred occupations which Bastide claimed made it possible to define the ‘modern Negro’ as

“realistic and fully aware of what capitalistic society can offer in terms of social advancement.”275 Further setting their approach apart from that of Pierson and Wagley, was their effort to include Afro-Brazilians in the work done at all levels of the research (save writing the final results). As part of this effort the research team organized three discussion

275 Ibid., 503.

205 groups, which met either once a week or once every two weeks. One of these groups consisted of Afro-Brazilians from every economic stratum, a second consisted of leaders delegated by associations of coloured people and a third was made up of coloured women.276

In an article titled “São Paulo: the Octopus Town” written by Roger Bastide for the

UNESCO courier, the French sociologist gave a summary of the main conclusions from the studies he conducted with Florestan Fernandes.277 In this article, Bastide described São Paulo as a rapidly growing industrial and cosmopolitan centre that housed a great diversity of peoples and races and where “Negroes” from north and central Brazil came in search of opportunity. But whereas in the past only a select number of black people were able to climb their way up the social ladder and mostly through white patronage, Bastide argued that São

Paulo was currently benefiting from a process of rapid industrialization and urbanization that was opening up plenty of opportunities for employment and social mobility. However, despite the promises held by the city’s economic transformation, Bastide explained that it was not free of racism and that racism in fact functioned as an obstalce to the economic and social advancement of “Negroes”. In particular, Bastide described the existence of latent stereotypes and prejudices that acted as social barriers such as the negative attitudes of

276 Ibid., 503. 277 Roger Bastide, “Sao Paulo: The Octopus Town,” Unesco Courier V, no. 8–9 (1952): 9.

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“traditional families” who see the new generation of “Negroes” as arrogant and aggressive because they fail to follow the submissive behaviour traditionally expected of them. Further,

Bastide argued that although whites had learned to accept blacks as their equal in the workplace, they were still reluctant to invite blacks to their home or into their private spaces such as swimming pools and social parties.278

Interestingly, Bastide explained the persistence of these forms of discrimination preventing blacks from enjoying the full privileges enjoyed by whites as the by-product of a society undergoing a rapid transition from a traditional rural economy towards a modern industrial one. Indeed, Bastide described the society he observed in São Paulo during the early 1950s as a “transition society” and argued that the racial tensions that could be observed could be characerized as a transformation from the forms of colour prejudice that used to justify slavery into a kind of class prejudice which had the function of justifying the retention of economic control by a white elite. However, Bastide’s concluding thoughts in this article were optimistic one and he augured that “the democratic laws of Brazil and the development of industrialization, with the accompanying demand for more labour” were factors that were “helping to improve the position of the coloured people as a whole.”279

278 Ibid. 279 Ibid.

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In contrast to Bastide’s rather sanguine view concerning the process of modernization, L.A. Costa-Pinto, a sociologist based out of Rio de Janeiro who was given the task of conducting a study on race relations in the Brazilian capital in conjunction with the

UNESCO project, presented a less cheerful picture. In an article titled “Rio de Janeiro:

Melting-pot of peoples” from the UNESCO courier, L.A.Costa-Pinto described a similar situation to that of São Paulo but was less optimistic about the ability of industrialization and modernization to spell an end to racial prejudice.280 The article summarized the main conclusions from Costa-Pinto’s book O Negro no Rio de Janeiro that was the end result of the studies he conducted in Rio de Janeiro thanks to UNESCO’s sponsorship.281 Unlike some of the other scientists who were involved in the UNESCO cycle of studies, Costa-Pinto was far less willing to celebrate the ‘racial democracy thesis’. In the article from the Courier,

Costa-Pinto described the idea of ‘racial democracy’ as a “piece of dogma” and argued that there were festering feelings of bitterness and uneasiness that lie behind the veneer of racial democracy. Further, Costa-Pinto introduced the term “cryptomelanism” as a more apt label

280 Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto, “Rio de Janeiro: Melting-Pot of Peoples,” Unesco Courier V, no. 8–9 (1952): 10. 281 See Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto, O Negro No Rio de Janeiro : Relações de Raças Numa Sociedade Em Mudança (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1953).

208 for the Brazilian situation and defined cryptomelanism as “the fear to admit, or the desire to hide the importance which is, in fact, attached to the question of race and of colour.”282

Despite this relatively less optimistic assessment of Brazil’s situation, Costa-Pinto admitted that by comparison to other countries (such as the US) the Brazilian situation could be seen as a model of tolerance and harmony. What was characteristic of the Brazilian situation, according to Costa-Pinto, was “not the complete lack of prejudice, but the absence of violence in the forms of discrimination shown to the Negro.”283 Similarly, Costa-Pinto argued that the kind of race prejudice that existed in Brazil did not rely on a coherent

“racialist philosophy” for its justification. Rather, it exists as a manifestation of class anxieties perpetuated by whites who feel uncomfortable sharing their class privilege with an ascendant Negro elite. The Negro elite on the other hand, could be divided into those who adopt the lifestyles and values of the white elite and are accepted by whites as a symbol of their own liberal outlook and those who wish to progress economically while not renouncing their “negro consciousness.” According to Costa-Pinto, this latter group encounters prejudices in the form of racial stereotypes, far more often than the blacks that choose to assimilate.

282 Costa Pinto, “Rio de Janeiro: Melting-Pot of Peoples,” 10. 283 Ibid.

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In his concluding analysis, Costa-Pinto argued that the existing racial tensions are reflections of a society undergoing a rapid transition and are connected to broader tensions produced by the relatively rapid transition towards an industrialised economy. However, the outcome of this social and economic transformation was far less certain for Costa-Pinto than it was for Bastide. Indeed, Costa-Pinto argued that the processes of industrialisation and modernisation would not necessarily promise any sort of redemption from the problems of

Brazil’s past, and suggested that societal changes taking place “can result in a crisis or a solution according to the nature of Brazil’s social evolution in the coming years.”284

Furthering this kind of analysis was Florestan Fernandes. Initially involved with the

UNESCO studies through his collaboration with Bastide, Fernandes would go on to become one of the main reference points in Brazilian sociology and one of the strongest critics of the racial democracy thesis. The views that he developed based on his research for the UNESCO project are summarized in a 1969 article “Beyond Poverty: the Negro and the Mulatto in

Brazil”.285 In this article Fernandes argued that two different levels of reality perception and action are at play when it comes to notions of ‘race’ and “colour” in Brazilian society. On the one hand, there is an overt level where racial equality and democracy are assumed and

284 Ibid. 285 Florestan Fernandes, “Beyond Poverty: the Negro and the Mulatto in Brazil,” Journal de La Société Des Américanistes 58 (1969): 121–137.

210 proclaimed, while on the other hand there is a covert level, where race and colour have collateral functions which are performed “through, below, and beyond the social stratification.”286 Fernandes argued that the roots of this dualism lie in a moral conflict in

Portuguese culture: during the reign of the Portuguese empire slavery was sanctioned by

Roman Law but in conflict with religion and the mores of the Catholic church. For Fernandes this moral conflict did not result in better treatment for slaves as some historians had claimed, but rather a tendency to disguise the oppressive nature of the relations that developed between masters and slaves.287

Fernandes argued that at the core of Brazil’s present racial problem was the persistence of an asymmetrical pattern of race relations that had been built to regulate relations between “master”, “slave” and “freedman” so as to maintain a social order necessary for the political economy of a plantation system.288 “As happened in the South of the United States,” Fernandes argued, race relations during Brazil’s slavery era where highly ritualized so as to ensure the Master’s domination and the slave/freedman’s subordination.

This ritualization of conduct had the effect of masking emotions and feelings and was re- enforced by Catholic pressure. Further the asymmetrical pattern was reinforced by arguments

286 Ibid., 121. 287 Ibid., 122. 288 Ibid., 128.

211 about the “natural inferiority” of blacks. Fernandes argued that this asymmetrical pattern was able to persist into the present era because the class structure that Brazil developed after its abolition of slavery did not succeed in destroying all of the social structures of the ancien regime and the structure of race relations was especially allowed to persist.289 The abolition of slavery occurred in a very sudden way and little effort was made by the newly formed republican state to integrate freed blacks into the “competitive order.”290 The lack of mechanisms for the integration of freed slaves, coupled with the policy adopted of importing

Japanese, German, Italian, and Polish immigrants to take on newly created jobs, meant that blacks were effectively excluded from the work force and maintained in a state of poverty.

As a result, a system of white privilege and white supremacy became firmly entrenched in

Brazilian society where whites developed a monopoly on the best opportunities for social advancement.291

Crucially, Fernandes was emphatic that this persistence of slavery-era race relations was not due to a “cultural lag” but rather a by-product of Brazil’s dependent role within the world economy. “Under dependant capitalism” Fernandes claimed, “the class system is unable to perform all the destructive or constructive functions it has had in the developed

289 Ibid. 290 Ibid. 291 Ibid.

212 capitalist countries.”292 Simply put, because of its dependent role within the world economy

Brazil’s modernization was stalled and its economy was incapable of absorbing the marginalized parts of its population into a class system. Further, Fernandes argue that because blacks and mulattoes were marginalized and disenfranchised after the abolition of slavery they also did not develop the capacities, as a group, to engage in aggressive resistance against the racial inequality perpetuated by white elites. As a result, whites rarely felt their privilege challenged and developed little in the way of a racial consciousness or racial perception, allowing for the perpetuation of the racial democracy myth. “In this context,” Fernandes argued, “it is very clear that the price of race tolerance and race accommodation is paid for by the Negro and the Mulatto.”293

The work of scholars like Fernandes, Bastide, and Costa-Pinto in the 1950s thus acted as a counterpoint to the interpretation that ‘race’, in the sociological sense, could be understood as analogous to caste formations. In Brazil, a country with extensive miscegenation, whose African heritage had come to be celebrated as part of the national identity and where the relations between individuals of different racial groups appeared to be amicable and harmonious, race relations clearly did not correspond to the caste model.

292 Ibid., 129. 293 Ibid., 129.

213

However, what the generation of researchers conducting research on race relations in Brazil’s industrial centres showed was that racism, or ‘race prejudice’ as was the preferred term at the time, was nevertheless present and thriving despite the ideal of racial democracy and harmonious race relations that many Brazilians believed to be an intrinsic feature of their national culture. By introducing evidence to suggest that race prejudice existed independently from class prejudice and by showing that race prejudice played a functional role in maintaining social order during the plantation economy of Brazil’s imperial era, researchers from the 1950s re-interpreted ‘race’ as a historical artefact whose effects could persist even when the social order and political economy it was created for was no longer in place.

6 Conclusion

Analogies between race and caste have a long history dating back to the eighteenth century. However, during the early twentieth century the language of caste became American social scientists’ preferred idiom for studying ‘race’ from a sociological perspective and for describing static systems of race relations that were based on oppression. When the first

American sociologists came to study Bahian race relations, they explicitly invoked a comparison between the social structure of Bahia and the social structure of the American

214 south. Donald Pierson, in particular, interpreted Bahia’s race relations from the vantage point of the race-as-caste analogy and concluded that because Bahia did not have the same system of segregation as the American south, it could not be deemed a caste-based (i.e. ‘racist’) society. Charles Wagley and his team’s research in the late 1940s, furthered the thesis that

Bahia is free from racial prejudice. Like Pierson’s studies, Wagley’s conclusion was based on a comparison to the US caste system; however, Wagley’s studies also approached Bahia with a heightened sense of possibility and augured a prosperous industrial future for Bahia because of its lack of prejudice.

The original idea for UNESCO’s studies of Brazilian race relations were intended to provide “positive examples” of race relations from which important lessons could be drawn for the rest of the world. In 1950 when Alfred Métraux visited Brazil in preparation for the

UNESCO studies, the country was in the midst of a process of rapid industrialization. The

Brazilian researchers that Métraux met suggested that this rapid industrialization was, despite

UNESCO’s assumptions, breeding racial antagonism in the major city centres and Métraux made the decision to expand the UNESCO studies beyond the state of Bahia. The studies of race relations in Brazil’s industrial south introduced an analysis of racism that broke from the patterns introduced by the race-as-caste school of thought. Brazilian sociologists began to insist that there were ideological and structural forces at play that perpetuated a system of

215 white privilege and that forms of racial exclusion persisted and co-existed with harmony and tolerance at the interpersonal level. Racism, these scholars argued, could manifest itself in forms not captured by the concept of ‘caste’.

Interestingly, several of Florestan Fernandes’ students who participated in the original

UNESCO study in São Paulo would go on to conduct research projects on race relations inspired by the original UNESCO sponsored studies and become influential social scientists in their own right. Notable among these was Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who would go on to formulate what is now referred to as “dependency theory”, which emphasized how local elites in “underdeveloped” nations often act against the interests of national development because of their economic and cultural dependence on industrialised nations. Cardoso would also go on to serve an eight-year term as President from 1995-2003 and would preside over the countries first affirmative action policies, which were criticized in some sectors as an affront to Brazilian racial democracy.

Thus, although they did not successfully materialize UNESCO’s ambitions of providing a model of race relations that could be exported throughout the world, the cycle of studies of race relations did act as a catalyst for the growth of the social sciences in Brazil and for a distinctive Brazilian reflection on the processes of modernization and development.

The UNESCO cycle of studies also complicated the analogy that race and caste were

216 analogous social formations. Because of the various forms of both individual and structural racism that the UNESCO studies uncovered and because of Brazil’s long history of racial mixing, the notion that ‘race’ existed primarily as an ideological belief which served the primary purpose of establishing segregationist social structures could not be upheld so easily.

Brazil provided evidence for the ways that racism could continue to operate even when beliefs about ‘race’ were not fixed, where tensions between racial groups were not evident and where ideas about race did not lead to a segregationist social structure.

Although the initial aspirations for the UNESCO studies can be described as somewhat simplistic and naïve, the research that was produced has had a profound impact in defining the field of race relations research in Brazil, in sedimenting the place of the social sciences in Brazil and in encouraging the rise of a much more complex portrait of racism within Brazilian society. Thus, although the UNESCO studies did not answer UNESCO’s initial anti-racist aspirations, they did nevertheless spark a much more complex picture of the challenges that anti-racism in Brazil would have to face. In so doing the UNESCO cycle of studies, and the Afro-Brazilian movements that they were influenced by, altered the very ontology of anti-racism. By documenting the persistence of economic inequality along racial lines despite a long history of miscegenation and cultural syncretism, race relations research

217 in Brazil has shown that producing harmonious interpersonal relationships is a necessary but insufficient element for the practice of anti-racism

218

Chapter 3

Observation Beyond ‘Race’?

This chapter examines the ethnographic practices that informed anthropologists’ anti- racist projects. Whereas the previous chapters examined some of the key concepts and objects of study (such as ‘culture’, ‘cultural change’, and ‘race relations’) that were central to

UNESCO’s anti-racist investigations and projects, and how they were understood in relation to narratives of modernization and of redemption (the two were often related) in postcolonial sites like Brazil, this chapter focuses on how European anthropologists’ experiences in the field prompted them to examine the historical and epistemological foundations of their discipline and inaugurated a shift towards a more reflexive conception of ethnographic observation. Thus, whereas the previous chapters focused on the ontological question of how notions of ‘race’ and human difference were re-imagined and re-cast in ways that suited the conceptions of social change and internationalism that informed UNESCO’s projects, this chapter instead shifts to the epistemological register by examining how anthropologists wrestled with the question of the colonial complicity of the methods they used to observe and thus to know and speak on behalf of non-European cultures. As such, this chapter examines

219 the ways European ethnographers sought to re-invent the project of observing so-called primitive peoples that had developed as part of the colonial enterprise and how this project of reforming notions of ethnographic objectivity was simultaneously entangled with the project of repudiating politically untenable conceptions of ‘race’.

My aim in this chapter is thus to historically contextualise the relationship between ethnographic observation and anti-racism so as to better understand the epistemological and moral valence of both of these practices. In France, as many historians of French colonialism and French anthropology have shown, the birth of ‘ethnologie’ (the French equivalent of cultural anthropology) during the interwar period was entangled with the colonial interests of imperial France and mid-century ethnographers who participated in UNESCO’s anti-racist initiatives grappled with the question of how to reconcile the colonial legacy of French ethnography, with their repudiation of race science and their methods for observing others.

Given that French anthropologists played an important role in UNESCO’s anti-racist initiatives, the methods by which French ethnologists studied human diversity offers a window into how social scientists sought to manifest anti-racist commitments within their own scientific practices and thus how they sought to distance their discipline from the legacy of colonial violence and scientific racism. Ethnographic observation is thus a crucial site for examining how the methods for producing knowledge about human difference were

220 mobilized for anti-racist ends and thus for examining the epistemological orientations underpinning mid-century anti-racist discourse.

More narrowly, this chapter engages with the attitudes towards observation and anti- racism in the work of Michel Leiris, Alfred Métraux, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, three mid- century French anthropologists who played important roles in UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives, who shared overlapping research interests, and whose careers and lives often intersected. All three anthropologists had their first ethnographic experiences during the interwar period and were influenced by Marcel Mauss and the creation of ‘ethnologie’ as a distinct academic discipline based upon ethnographic fieldwork and sociological analysis of so-called ‘primitive societies’. All three anthropologists retrospectively described their decision to pursue ethnography as stemming from a desire to escape the constraints of

European culture and engaged with the ideas of important figures from the surrealist movement.294

However, despite the similarities in their personal and professional itineraries, this chapter draws out the different ways they came to interpret ethnographic observation. Leiris rejected the premise that ethnographic observation provides anthropologists with an objective

294 See Sally Price and Jean Jamin, “A Conversation with Michel Leiris,” Current Anthropology 29, no. 1 (1988): 157–174, doi:10.2307/2743329; Bing, “Entretiens Avec Alfred Métraux”; Claude Lévi- Strauss et al., Tristes Tropiques, Penguin Classics (New York: Penguin Books, 2012).

221 method for studying societies, and sought to blur the lines between ethnography, autobiography and literature in his own work. Métraux, on the other hand, strove for a kind of ethnographic observation and description that sought to avoid theoretical or subjective preconceptions. Similar to and different from Leiris and Métraux, Lévi-Strauss developed a theoretical and methodological approach that involved going beyond empirical observation

(which he deemed unreliable on its own) in order to produce a synthetic and objective interpretation of cultures from-a-distance.

The different epistemic commitments that these three figures developed with respect to the role of ethnographic observation are also reflected in their approaches to anti-racism and in their views concerning the social and political function of anthropology. Métraux saw self-effacement as a necessary condition for rigorous ethnographic observation, for speaking on behalf of the communities that he encountered, and for political and social intervention.

From this vantage point, ‘race’ acted as a perturbation and unwelcome conceptual filter that stood in the way of proper observation. For Leiris, the inescapable colonial legacy of anthropology acted as an insurmountable barrier to ethnographic objectivity and his response to this problem was to turn the ethnographic gaze upon himself while becoming an outspoken anti-colonial critic. Similarly, in his analyses concerning the origins of racism and the means by which it is perpetuated, Leiris emphasized the history of European colonialism, the

222 economic dimensions of racial systems and the ways in which racial prejudice can perturb observation.

For Lévi-Strauss, in comparison, his commitment to structural analyses and methods implied that self-effacement was also a condition for anthropological objectivity in conjunction with ultimate explanations of cultural phenomena. From this vantage point,

Lévi-Strauss sought out abstract explanations to racism and how to oppose it. Early in his career, he emphasized the idea of racism as an intellectual error within European culture and sought out theoretical explanations for cultural diversity that were non-hierarchical and non- judgemental. Later in his career, however, his ideas shifted towards an account of racism that tied racist acts and attitudes to pressures stemming from unchecked demographic growth and he became increasingly pessimistic about the possibility for redemption from racism. The methodological concerns of these three scholars demonstrates how the ethical and the epistemic were linked for those French ethnologists committed to fashioning antiracist methods for their fields.

Despite the different epistemic commitments they developed towards observation and race, I argue that the work of these ethnographers indexes a common problem space: how to produce objective ethnographic knowledge while recognizing the complicity of one’s disciplinary orientation with colonial violence and racism? By attending to the linkages

223 between French anthropologists’ attitudes towards observation and anti-racism, this chapter thus highlights the ways in which this generation of anthropologists involved in UNESCO were engaged in a redemptive project that sought to reconcile the hopes initially promised by ethnographic observation with the destructive legacy of Western imperialism and with scientific ideals of objectivity.

There are parallels between the trajectory of observation within French anthropology

I am tracing here, and contemporaneous arguments against “neutral observation” made by mid-twentieth century Western philosophers of science. However, whereas such philosophers of science questioned ideals of neutral observation by showing how observations are embedded in historically contingent conceptual schemes, French anthropologists, in contrast, challenged ideals of detached observation by interrogating the specific ways ethnographic observation is shaped by the colonial legacy. French anthropologists’ anxieties about their observational practices is thus an important site for examining how colonialism shaped anthropological knowledge as well as how and why anthropologists constituted themselves as anti-racists.295

295By tracing the trajectory of observation within the context of French anthropology, this chapter also hints at a genealogy to the analytic of ‘situated knowledge’ and thus suggests how the rise of science studies is also tied to the mid-century retreat from race, see Haraway, Donna. "Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective." Feminist studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-599.

224

1 ‘Ethnologie’: Between Empire and Surrealism

In their recent account concerning the history of observation in science, historians of science Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck argue that there was a major shift concerning philosophical understandings of scientific observation in the post-WWII period.296 Whereas for most of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Western philosophers and scientists interpreted observation as a passive practice concerned with the mere registration of data and often contrasted observation with the more active practice of experimentation, in the 1960s, philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn began questioning the supposed neutrality of observation and instead argued that scientific observation was inevitably

“theory-laden”, and shaped by the observer’s historical paradigm. This challenge to the neutrality of scientific observation was also part of a broader agenda which sought to question positivist visions of science and which gave rise to the fields of history and philosophy of science and science and technology studies in the West.

A similar trajectory concerning the status of scientific observation took place within the context of French anthropology in the twentieth century. Whereas during the interwar

296 Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Histories of Scientific Observation (Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 5–6.

225 period Marcel Mauss -- one of the founding figures of French cultural anthropology -- argued that ‘ethnologie’ could function as a positivist science strictly concerned with the social facts of so-called primitive societies and based upon rigorous and objective ethnographic observation, the generation of students that followed him increasingly questioned the political, moral, and epistemological dimensions of ethnographic observation.297 For the generation of ethnographers who followed Mauss, the influence of surrealism as well as their experiences in the field where they were confronted by the violent legacies of colonialism and racism and where the so-called primitive cultures they sought to study variously appeared as impenetrable, inauthentic, or rapidly vanishing, brought them to question the degree to which they could remain neutral and impartial observers. Instead of a site for the accumulation of social facts, “the field” became a site where ethnographers experienced a sense of displacement and were brought to experiment with and confront their own subjectivity. In this section, I trace the rise of ‘ethnologie’ as a discipline and show how it was entangled with the French imperial state and surrealism.

297 On Mauss’ approach to ethnography see Marcel Mauss, Manual of Ethnography (New York ; Oxford: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, 2007). For a discussion of ethnographers’ disillusionment with ethnology as a positivist science and turn to literary forms see Vincent Debaene, L’adieu Au Voyage : L'ethnologie Française Entre Science et Littérature, Bibliothèque Des Sciences Humaines ([Paris]: Gallimard, 2010).

226

The discipline of ‘ethnologie’ arose during the interwar period in response to

‘anthropologie’ — the dominant approach in French anthropology up until the First World

War, which was concerned with the establishment of racial taxonomies based on anthropometric measurements. ‘Anthropologie’ arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century, under the leadership of Paul Broca, a Parisian anatomist who created the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris in 1859 and the École d'Anthropologie de Paris in 1876.298 Broca and his followers envisaged ‘anthropologie’ as the natural history of man, and sought to understand the place of humans within the natural world and to contribute to on-going debates surrounding the origins of humans and their evolutionary history. For practitioners of anthropologie classifying human diversity into distinct races through anthropometric measurement and comparative anatomy was one of their central tasks. Further, practitioners of anthropologie assumed that races could be thought of as discrete biological entities and that physical, mental, and cultural traits were subject to the laws of biological inheritance. In order to devise racial taxonomies and make general claims about the traits and characters of different racial groups, metropolitan anthropologists relied on the transnational networks of

298 Carole Reynaud Paligot, La République Raciale : Paradigme Racial et Idéologie Républicaine, 1860-1930, Sciences, Histoire et Société, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2006).

227 the French Empire and the work of colonial missions and explorers for their materials (i.e. bones and skulls).

However, as Emmanuelle Sibeud has shown, although anthropologie’s racial theories’ could be used to justify colonial projects, and although anthropologie was reliant upon colonial missions to collect data, anthropologie’s connections with the colonial infrastructure were often tenuous and anthropologists often failed to fully exploit the opportunities for fieldwork and collection provided by France’s colonial expansion. In fact, in most colonial missions of the late nineteenth century, anthropology was accorded a secondary status and it was often physicians with little to no anthropological training who carried out the work of collecting skulls, and other skeletal remains. The absence of anthropologists in colonial missions was partly due to the prohibitive costs of embarking on colonial missions and partly due to the influence of Broca who was distrustful of field observations, and argued that reliable anthropological observations were best made in the laboratory where anthropologists could carefully order their samples and cross-check observations in order to produce reliable data.299 Subsequent anthropologists such as Paul

Topinard and Hamy sought to bridge the divide between the field and the lab by producing

299 Emmanuelle Sibeud, “A Useless Colonial Science? Practicing Anthropology in the French Colonial Empire, Circa 1880–1960,” Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (2012): 86.

228 anthropological kits, manuals, and questionnaires designed for colonial investigators that were meant to simplify and standardize the collection of data and materials. However, during most scientific missions of the late nineteenth century, anthropology was a secondary concern and the samples and collections that were sent back to the metropole were random, incomplete, poorly organized and collected by people with no anthropological training.

But whereas anthropologie’s connections to the colonial infrastructure were often tenuous during the height of French imperialism during the Third Republic (1870-1910), the emergent discipline of colonial ethnography enjoyed much greater success. During this period, the notion of a unique and superior French civilization was widely accepted and the idea that it was France’s duty to civilize its colonial subjects and to systematically develop and improve its colonies (a policy referred to as mise en valeur) became an official part of imperial doctrine known as the mission civilisatrice.300 As documented by Alice Conklin,

300 Studies of imperial France’s official civilizing mission ideology and how it was intertwined with and carried out through medicine, psychiatry, archictecture, anthropology and urban planning are now numerous. For some representative examples of the ways science and medicine were implicated in France’s civilizing mission see Alice L Conklin, A Mission to Civilize : the Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895-1930 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); Eric Thomas Jennings, Imperial Heights : Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina, From Indochina to Vietnam : Revolution and War in a Global Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Eric Thomas Jennings, Curing the Colonizers : Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Eric Thomas Jennings, Vichy in the Tropics : Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001); Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills : Colonial

229 the civilizing mission ideology implied that France’s colonial subjects were unfit to rule themselves and that France thus had a duty to re-make so-called primitive cultures in its own image. Within this particular imperial context, colonial administrators began to forge careers for themselves as ethnographers. Colonial ethnographers were often stationed in France’s colonies in West Africa, and sought to apply scientific methods to make colonial rule more efficient and humane. As part of their administrative duties, many of these figures were required to write political reports on the customs and traditions of indigenous populations, and sought to learn about native customs so as to avoid unnecessary conflict. Colonial ethnographers also published scientific reports of their observations in the specialized scientific journals of academic societies in metropolitan France, but remained at the margins of academic institutions and were often considered amateurs by comparison to physical anthropologists in the metropole.

However, during the 1910s, colonial ethnographers began to express dissatisfaction with the methods and theoretical approach of Broca’s physical anthropology and began advocating for the creation of independent ethnographic institutions where students could be

Power and African Illness (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); Paul Rabinow, French Modern : Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Richard C Keller, Colonial Madness : Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State : Negritude & Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

230 trained in fieldwork methods, learn indigenous languages and take courses on native religions and practices. By 1911, colonial ethnographers had successfully created the Institut

Français d’Anthropologie as well as the Institut Ethnographique International de Paris.

Thanks to their dissenting views and institution-building initiatives, colonial ethnographers provoked a series of paradigmatic changes that were pivotal in the formation of a new discipline: ‘ethnologie’.301

A pivotal figure in the ascendancy of cultural and ethnographic approaches in French anthropology was Maurice Delafosse, a colonial administrator and ethnographer of African civilizations. Delafosse studied anthropology at the Musée d’Ethnographie de Trocadero in the 1890s, but went on to pursue a career as an administrator because of the opportunities it would offer to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. After securing a position as a colonial administrator in West Africa in 1894, Delafosse began to carve out a scientific career and went on to regularly publish papers and books based on his ethnographic studies of African

“civilizations”. Eventually Delafosse morphed his career from colonial administrator into an academic instructor. The transition began in 1901 when he took a year leave from his colonial duties to teach Sudanese languages at the School for Oriental Studies in Paris, and

301 See Emmanuelle Sibeud, “A Crucial Experiment: Ethnographic Fieldwork in French Africa, c. 1900-1930,” in Science Across the European Empires, 1800-1950, ed. Benedikt Stuchtey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 289–306.

231 from 1909 until his death Delafosse taught ethnographic fieldwork methods at various academic institutes including the School for Oriental Studies, the École Coloniale, and the

Institut d’Ethnologie. His lessons on fieldwork methods had a major influence on ethnologists trained in the 1920s, including Alfred Métraux.302

Academic sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers in Paris also shared colonial ethnographers’ dissatisfaction with the state of anthropology. Chief among these was Marcel

Mauss, a sociologist and the well-connected nephew of Émile Durkheim. In an oft-cited article published in 1913, Mauss deplored the state of ethnography in France, arguing that the discipline had stagnated due to a general lack of interest that was manifest in the absence of research and teaching institutions and good museums. Mauss described the stagnation of ethnography as an embarrassment for a scientific and colonial power as prestigious as France and begrudgingly pointed out that France was lagging behind the ethnographic advancements of the English and the Germans and that even smaller nations like Switzerland and Sweden had developed more advanced ethnographic traditions. In order to move ethnography forward, Mauss argued that institutions would have to be built allowing for the three basic types of ethnographic research to take place: fieldwork concerned with the collection of ethnographic facts and objects, museum-based work involving the classification and study of

302 Ibid., 292–6.

232 ethnographic objects and data, and the transmission of ethnographic knowledge via publication and teaching targeted at specialists, students, and the broader public.303 Further,

Mauss argued that ethnography could make a significant contribution to colonial methods by revealing to administrators “… the uses, beliefs, laws, and technologies of indigenous populations, allowing for a more fecund and humane collaboration with the aforementioned.”304

As the First World War came to a close, Mauss’ vision of state-backed anthropological discipline of ethnography came to fruition, thanks to strategic appeals to politicians within France’s colonial infrastructure and his collaboration with academics sharing similar socialist inclinations. In collaboration with the physician and anthropologist

Paul Rivet and the professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Mauss rallied political support for the creation of an ethnographic institute, which eventually led to the formation of a new discipline in the human sciences: ‘ethnologie’. Ethnology’s emergence as an independent academic discipline was made manifest in 1925 when the

303 Alice L Conklin, “The New ‘Ethnology’ and ‘La Situation Coloniale’ in Interwar France,” French Politics, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (2002): 33. 304 Quoted in Christine Laurière, Paul Rivet, Le Savant & Le Politique, (Paris: Publications scientifiques du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 2008), 342. [… les usages, croyances, lois et techniques des populations indigènes, rendant possible avec ces dernières une collaboration plus féconde et plus humaine.]

233

Institut d’Ethnologie (IE) opened its doors at the Sorbonne University. The foundation of the

IE was possible thanks to Mauss, Rivet, and Levy-Bruhl’s efforts to secure financial and political support from France’s colonial administrators. Levy-Bruhl, in particular, spent a year convincing Édouard Daladier, a radical socialist and newly elected minister of the

Colonies, of ethnology’s instrumental value for solving the problems of the colonial administration.305 Levy-Bruhl argued that in order to best exploit France’s colonies, with inferior civilizations, well-trained ethnologists would be just as necessary as engineers or physicians.

Levy-Bruhl’s efforts proved successful and when the IE opened its doors, its budget was entirely comprised of funds from colonial governments allocated to the IE through the office of the minister of the Colonies. In fact for the years of 1926 and 1927, half of the IE’s budget was provided by the generous contributions of the governor general of Indochine.306In addition, the IE established strong links with the École Coloniale, a training ground for colonial administrators, whose students were encouraged to complete the requirements for a certificate in ethnology as a way of advancing their careers as colonial administrators.307

305 See Laurière, Paul Rivet, Le Savant & Le Politique. 306 Ibid., 348. 307 See Conklin, “The New ‘Ethnology’ and ‘La Situation Coloniale’ in Interwar France.”

234

Once the IE opened its doors for instruction, its founders set in motion a program of scientific training and research that fit with both the practical interests of France’s colonial administrations and the scientific interests of aspiring ethnologists. Students at the IE were offered courses in ethnographic and linguistic methods, as well as on the ethnography and linguistics of Africa as well as East Asia and Oceania. Further, thanks to Paul Rivet’s connections to Natural History Museum, students were also offered instruction in physical anthropology and the physiology of human races. The IE’s founders were careful to distinguish their scientific vision from that of the ‘anthropologie’ which preceded them.

Whereas ‘anthropologie’ focused narrowly on the natural history of man and on embodied racial differences and racial classifications, the founding figures of ‘ethnologie’ proclaimed to take a more expansive approach to the study of human diversity, which studied humans as products of both nature and society, through a diversity of methods from both the human and the natural sciences.

For Mauss and the founding figures of ‘ethnologie’ epistemological concerns concerning the objectivity of ethnographic observation were central to their vision for the discipline. Thus in his Manual of Ethnography, Mauss outlined the importance of observation and firmly stated that “objectivity is the goal in the written account as well as in

235 observation.”308 To achieve objectivity, Mauss recommended that fieldworkers have no preconceptions or hypotheses before their first fieldwork experience. Further, Mauss suggested that fieldworkers adopt an exhaustive approach to gathering ethnographic data meaning that no detail should be neglected and that all things should be described and followed by in-depth analysis. Mauss’ methodological recommendations included use of what he called “the philological method”, which involved collecting the stories and myths of a region as well as their variants as well as the traditions of each clan and family in the area of study. Writing should proceed only after in-depth analysis of the data and observations gathered. “In the account of the observations one strives for clarity and sobriety,” Mauss explained and recommended using plans, diagrams, and statistics as alternatives to pages of text, suggesting that one should write at length only to provide evidence.309

As we can see, Mauss advocated for the epistemic virtue of objectivity in his methodological recommendations for ethnographers. His recommendations to avoid hypothesis and his advocacy for exhaustiveness and rigour in ethnographic observation fixed the epistemic attitude that would define the disciplinary identity of ethnologists. In an effort to transmit the phenomenon observed with as much sobriety and clarity as possible,

308 Mauss, Manual of Ethnography, 9. 309 Ibid.

236 ethnologists should strive to be modest witnesses of primitive cultures, and observe their objects of study with as little theoretical preconception as possible. Mauss’ adherence to the virtue of objectivity and his concern to establish a rigorous methodological foundation for ethnology parallel the prescriptions of his famous uncle, Emile Durkheim. Like Mauss,

Durkheim sought to place the discipline of sociology on a firm scientific foundation by exhorting sociologists to sweep away all preconceptions, make their minds like tabula rasa, and adopt an attitude of independence and serenity.310

However, unlike Mauss and Durkheim, the generation of students that followed would increasingly question the political, moral, and epistemological dimensions of ethnographic observation. Further, as Alice Conklin argues, because of their sociological training and because of the subsequent generation of students had been trained to “respect basic human rights”, they were also better equipped to address some of “…the hard questions about science, democracy, and empire that had eluded their ‘chers maîtres.’”311

The generation of students from the interwar period who would raise some of these hard questions about science, democracy, and empire were also affected by the sense of

310 See Mike Gane, The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss (London ; New York: Routledge, 1992), 1–9. 311 Alice L. Conklin, “Civil Society, Science and Empire in Late Republican France : The Foundation of Paris’s Museum of Man,” Osiris 17 (2002): 288.

237 cultural malaise that arose after WWI when notions of Western superiority and the West’s

‘civilizing mission’ was increasingly contested. WWI was a crucial turning point for the

‘civilizing mission ideology’, which acted as a justification for European colonialism.

Whereas at the height of European imperialism before WWI, the notion that Europeans were racially and culturally superior and thus held the responsibility of civilizing those under their colonial rule was widely accepted, WWI served to undermine this faith in Western superiority. The contestation of European hegemony, as Michael Adas describes it, was due to a set of interrelated factors. For one, the very objects that had been upheld as evidence of

Western superiority — science and technology — were enlisted for a conflict that Europeans would describe as savage, irrational, and barbaric. Colonial subjects, on the other hand, who had been taught to see Europe as the source of civilization and learning and who were recruited to fight in the war, witnessed the atrocities of the war first-hand. Witnessing the atrocities of WWI, led colonial subjects to reject the notion that European civilization was superior and provoked a re-affirmation of their own cultural values and beliefs. Similarly,

European intellectual themselves began to question the foundations of their own culture, and the notion that the scientific and technological achievements of European culture could be upheld as evidence of superiority.312

312 Michael Adas, “Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the

238

In addition to the rejection of the civilizing mission ideology precipitated by the Great

War, the assimilation of concepts emanating from both modern physics and psychoanalysis by avant-garde artists, writers, and philosophers in interwar Paris provoked a philosophical interrogation and experimentation with the limits of rationality and representation. This form of experimentation was embodied in the Surrealist movement. As Gavin Parkinson has shown, surrealists, dissident surrealists, and people closely associated with the surrealist movement closely studied and took inspiration from the concepts and ideas emerging in quantum mechanics and the confirmation of Einstein’s relativity theory in the 1920s.

Parkinson has shown how key figures within the surrealist movement such as André Breton,

Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Joan Miro assimilated ideas from quantum mechanics and relativity theory as theories, which disrupted some of the basic philosophical ideas about representation and empirical reality that had reigned since the Enlightenment. As a result of their assimilation of theories and concepts from modern physics and the perceived collapse of European culture during the war, surrealists developed an attitude of ironic detachment to the common sense truths of everyday life and came to believe that truth and reality were not

Civilizing Mission Ideology,” Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (2004): 31–63.

239 to be found in the sense impressions of day-to-day life but rather in subjective experiences which lay beyond the realm of rationality.313

Surrealism can thus be defined as a project that sought out forms of consciousness and cultural expression distinct from the mainstream bourgeois culture of interwar Europe.

André Breton, the chief catalyst of the surrealist movement and author of the Surrealist

Manifesto, also assimilated Freud’s scientific ideas about the unconscious and sought to apply Freud’s method of ‘free association’ to poetry and writing by developing the technique of ‘automatic writing’ — a method involving stream-of-consciousness writing which aimed to bypass logical and rational modes of thought in an attempt to represent the subjective reality of the unconscious.314 Breton named Freud as a major influence on the surrealist movement and described the surrealist project in quasi-scientific terms as a project consisting of explorations and investigations into the human psyche and its irrational and unconscious elements. Surrealists thus turned to phenomena such as dreams, myths, and erotic fantasies as privileged objects for exploring the human psyche and also experimented with techniques such as ‘séances’ where group members would respond bizarrely to questions while in self-

313 See Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science : Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 314 David Hopkins, Dada and Surrealism : a Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 17.

240 induced trances.315 In the first years of the surrealist movement, following Breton’s 1924 publication of the first Manifeste de Surréalisme, surrealism took shape as primarily a literary movement which united several poets and writers who published poems and short stories.

As well as an artistic movement, which sought to unleash the creative potential of the unconscious, surrealism was a movement with political aspirations. Indeed, the artistic and the political were very much connected for surrealists. As a political movement, the overriding value that surrealists embraced was individual freedom. Their attempts to access and unchain the irrational elements of the psyche were viewed as politically subversive actions, which freed individuals from the constraints of bourgeois culture. However, although there politics often took the form of a concern with individual liberty, surrealists also embraced forms of politics predicated on solidarity with marginalized and oppressed others.

As early as 1925, the same year that the Institut d’Ethnologie was founded, members of

Breton’s surrealist group participated in political campaigns against the French colonial war in Morocco and many later joined the French Communist Party in 1927. By the 1930s, however, members of the original surrealist group had split into various factions with different political allegiances. During WWII, Andre Breton fled the German-occupied Paris and travelled to the French Caribbean where he met and befriended Aimé Cesaire. Breton’s

315 Ibid., 16.

241 writing techniques became a source of inspiration for Aimé Cesaire and the establishment of

‘négritude’ ideologies that sought to affirm black consciousness.316 Indeed, by the 1940s and

1950s several Caribbean artists and writers such as Aimé Cesaire and Wilfredo Lam adopted many of the forms of expression and representation of the surrealist movement as means of giving voice to anti-colonial sentiments and as a means of critiquing and subverting

Eurocentric representations of their own culture.317

In the early stages of the surrealist movement, their ties to anti-colonial politics were also coupled with a fascination with the so-called primitive and exotic, which was fuelled by an assimilation of ideas from the burgeoning science of ethnology. Surrealists closely followed ethnological research and became well versed in the writings of prominent ethnologists such as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Marcel Mauss, and James Frazer. Their interest in ethnology also coincided with a broader interest in African art and primitive art, which swept metropolitan centres during the First World War and the years following the great conflict, and was embodied in Pablo Picasso’s fascination with African masks and the popularity of

Josephine Baker and jazz in 1920s Paris. The close entanglement between ethnology and surrealism can be best observed in the pages of the dissident surrealist journal Documents.

316 Ibid. 317 Ibid., 133-138.

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The journal was founded and edited by the writer Georges Bataille, after he split from

Breton’s surrealist group over philosophical differences and established the journal in order to provide a forum for dissident surrealists. Ethnography’s place within the journals intellectual vision was made clear by the journal’s subtitle: Doctrines, Archéologie, Beaux-

Arts, Ethnographie. Included among Document’s list of “collaborators” were various dissident surrealists, musicologists, orientalists, and writers as well as group of ethnologists including: Marcel Cohen, Marcel Griaule, Leo Frobenius, Michel Leiris, Paul Rivet, Marcel

Mauss, and Alfred Métraux.

In the two years of its existence, Documents acted as an outpost for Bataille’s distinct brand of surrealism which focused on the crude and material aspects of human existence and which sought to parody and contest the common sense attitudes and values of European culture, often through appeals to ethnographic artifacts and documents. Typical of surrealist aesthetics the journal’s contents consisted of fragments, bizarre objects and curiosities, and the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated things. The journal blended writings on archeology, non-Western art and customs, modern art, music, European folklore and popular culture, and for Bataille and for many of those who contributed to the journal, artifacts and descriptions of so-called primitive societies were deployed as symbolic of non-European modes of existence and as critiques of European mores. As James Clifford has argued, in Documents

243 ethnography was associated with cultural subversion and “the currency of the “other”

(exotic, forgotten, excluded, devalued, ugly, bestial, excessive, occult)” was one of the journal’s constant themes, which contributed to a “relentless criticism of European

“civilization”.318 For Clifford, the subversive attitude which was found in the journal’s pages is an example of what he refers to as “ethnographic surrealism” and which he describes as an attitude which took “the sort of normality or common sense that can amass empires… or wander routinely into world wars” as a “contested reality, to be subverted, parodied, and transgressed.”319

Interwar scholars and artists thus came to see ‘culture’ and European culture in particular with a heightened sense of possibility. Interwar surrealists struggled to come to terms with a complex set of conceptual and social developments: on the one hand the concepts and empirical realities introduced by developments in physics, psychoanalysis, and ethnology shattered some of the basic truths which had been upheld as part of the scientific worldview stemming from the enlightenment and inspired artists and authors to experiment with notions of time, perspective, and subjectivity. On the other hand, the experience of the

First World War prompted a generation of scholars and artists to question the supposed

318 James Clifford, “Documents: A Decomposition,” Visual Anthropology Review 7, no. 1 (1991): 67. 319 James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4 (1981): 539.

244 superiority of European civilization and to seek an escape from its cultural and social constraints. Ethnologists as well as surrealist authors and artists thus came to see the historical and cultural contingency of their own lifeworld and actively sought out experiences that opened up new possibilities for consciousness.

2 The Colonial Politics of Observation and Michel Leiris

A stark example of French anthropologists’ interrogation of the neutrality of ethnographic observation lies in the work of Michel Leiris. Originally a surrealist poet who was a member of Andre Breton’s group in the 1920s, Leiris shifted into ethnography in the late 1920s when he acted as “secretary-archivist” on the Dakar to Djibouti expedition, a colonial mission led by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule. During the mission Leiris’ official duties were to keep an ethnographic journal documenting the activities of the mission and recording ethnographic observations of the societies they encountered. However, instead of the “objective” mode of detached observation advocated by Marcel Mauss, Leiris’ journal became more of a personal diary where he interspersed ethnographic observations with his personal thoughts as well as observations on the brutal methods that the mission resorted to in order to “collect” the ethnographic objects that were the purpose of their mission. In 1934, upon his return from the mission Leiris published his diary under the title of Afrique Fantôme

245

(Phantom Africa), a title that was meant to evoke a sense of being possessed by Africa, and of encountering not an authentic Africa but rather a phantom.

Literary scholar Irene Albers offers one of the most engaging interpretations of

Afrique Fantôme. Albers argues that the title ‘Afrique Fantôme’ refers to Michel Leiris’ stay in Gondar, Ethiopia where he was able to spend several months studying the ‘Zar’: a popular religious cult whose members engaged in rituals involving spirit possession which were seen as having therapeutic qualities.320 Before the Dakar to Djibouti mission, during his days as a member of Paris’ surrealist movement Leiris had already acquired an interest in so-called primitive phenomena such as trance rituals and ecstatic cults. Indeed prior to 1930 Leiris published several articles for the interdisciplinary journal Documents where he outlined his views on ecstatic cults. 321 In these articles, Leiris developed an interpretation of spirit possession which was partly based on Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas about the mentality of ‘primitive’ groups, which for Leiris and other surrealist authors offered an appealing alternative to the strictures of modern “Cartesian” forms of rationality, and which they viewed as offering an alternative worldview where the distinctions between self and other, reality and dream

320 I. Albers, “Mimesis and Alterity: Michel Leiris’s Ethnography and Poetics of Spirit Possession,” French Studies 62, no. 3 (July 01, 2008): 271–289. 321 Bataille maintained a close connection to an interest in french ethnology. He studied with Alfred Métraux and maintained a lifelong friendhsip, and he also maintained a friendship with Michel Leiris, see Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism.”

246 worlds were not made so firmly. Based upon these primitivist ideas, Leiris developed an interpretation of spirit possession as an experience of absolute identification between the individual and the spirit with which they are possessed. Leiris was fascinated by both the theatricality of spirit possession and the way in which the subject becomes something other than itself and experiences a radical transformation during possession. At the same time,

Leiris argued that the ability to become immersed in a trance as during spirit possession was a phenomenon characteristic of ‘black culture’ and wrote enthusiastically about jazz as a form of possession and of the black female dancers that toured Paris as part of the ‘Revue nègre’ of the 1930s. Thus, when Leiris set out on his first ethnographic voyage during the

Dakar to Djibouti mission, he was not entirely without hypothesis with regards to spirit possession and in fact imagined Africa to represent an alternative civilization to Europe which might offer him some kind of healing and redemption.322

However, after the Second World War Leiris changed his stance concerning his relation towards Africa and the ethnographic encounter. Unlike Métraux and Claude Lévi-

Strauss, Michel Leiris was not forced to abandon France during the Vichy era and in fact stayed in France and joined the resistance movement. In 1945 he travelled to Sub-Saharan

Africa for a second time, as part of the “Mission Lucas” which was commissioned as part of

322 Leiris had previously undergone psychoanalysis.

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France’s attempts to stem the worst of its colonial abuses. The delegates of the mission were given the task of investigating labour problems in the Cote d’Ivoire, where unsanctioned forms of forced labour, harsh conditions, and low wages had provoked a mass migration of workers to the Gold Coast — the neighbouring English colony.323 As French historian Ruth

Larson has shown, Leiris’ experiences during this mission were a pivotal moment in the evolution of his antiracist and anticolonial stances. During his previous trip to Africa as part of the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, Leiris developed an anticolonial critique that denounced the use violence in the capture of ethnographic artefacts. However, Leiris’ anticolonial critique in this time period was also accompanied by a nostalgic longing to commune with the exotic and the primitive other and subsequently transcend his own European upbringing. During the

“Lucas Mission” in the Ivory Coast, on the other hand, Leiris confronted some of the brutal realities of life in the colonies and strengthened his anticolonial convictions while shedding some of the romantic ideas he had cultivated about non-European peoples.

One of the incidents that challenged his romanticized view of Africa and of himself as explorer of exotic lands was a disastrous logging accident in Côte d’Ivoire which took the lives of six African workers and wounded several others. The accident was the result of some

323 Ruth Larson, “Michel Leiris: Race, Poetry, Politics: Rereading the Mission Lucas,” SubStance 32, no. 3 (2003): 133.

248 heavy rains that caused a large tree to fall in the middle of the logging camp. Leiris recorded the accident in his travel journal on April 17, 1945 and would reflect on it 30 years later in his autobiography as an example of how his way of seeing the world, which stemmed from his artistic and intellectual upbringing in Paris, blinded him to the reality before his eyes.

Crucially, Leiris recounts how he failed to be disturbed by the corpses of the black loggers or even to identify them as such. Instead of seeing them as the bodies of black loggers, Leiris’ encounter with the bodies remind him of the ethnographic mannequins from the Trocadero museum:

When I think about them today, they make me contemplate not so much dead bodies as scattered mannequins, like the ones that could have been seen in the corners of the old Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro when it was being renovated and its directors were keen to purge the museum of these simulacra of the diverse races who were so outdated and conventional that they were almost comical. 324

Leiris’ experience and attempts to come to terms with it through writing and memory thus describe a moment of epistemological reflexivity where Leiris is able to identify the ways his

324 Ibid., 136. [Quand j’y pense aujourd’hui, c’est bien moins à des morts qu’il me font songer qu’a des mannequins, jetés en vrac, tels qu’on pouvait en voir dans des recoins, lors de la réflection du vieux Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, que ses directeurs avaient tenu à purger de ces simulacres de représentants des diverses races, figures si désuètement conventionnelles qu’elles en étaient presque comiques.] Larson suggests that the mannequins that Leiris describes are likely the same ones depicted in a photograph for an article titled “Poussière” which George Bataille published in the dissident surrealist journal Documents. This quote is taken from the fourth volume of Leiris’ autobiographic writings. See Michel Leiris, Denis Hollier, and Nathalie Barberger, La Régle Du Jeu, Bibliothéque de La Plèiade ([Paris]: Gallimard, 2003).

249 ethnographic training and aesthetic sensibilities structured his observations and also acted as an impediment to seeing the work of colonialism and racism. In fact Leiris, went further, and described himself as sullied and stained by the tint of racism for failing to see things as they properly were:

It comes terribly close to the ignoble stain of racism and appears to me, when I think about it, the task by which I stained myself, at the level of basic reactions, by being so little horrified by those dead workers whose colour, in a sense, masked their reality.325

Within Leiris’ personal narrative, and within the broader history of anti-racism that this dissertation seeks to trace, Leiris’ experiences in the Ivory Coast, just as the Second World

War came to a close, represent a significant turning point in how human scientists came to terms with the legacies of colonialism and racism. As a result of his close association with the surrealist movement in the 1930s, Leiris had already developed somewhat of an anti- colonial critique and a critique of the possibility of objectivity in ethnography. Stemming from his experiences in the Ivory Coast, however, we can see Leiris develop a different sort of critique, which recognizes the cultural specificity and limitations of his own ethnographic interest in and desire to make contact with the so-called primitive world and begins to describe ethnology’s material and symbolic entanglements with colonialism. In Leiris’

325 Ibid., [Terriblement voisine de l’ignoble soillure raciste m’apparaît — quand j’y réfléchis — la tache dont je me suis sali, au niveau des réactions primaires, en étant si peu horrifié par la vue de ces travailluers morts, dont la couleur masquait en quelque sorte la réalité.]

250 retrospective narration of the events during the Lucas Mission, race figures as a filter which colours and taints his view of reality.

By 1950 when he wrote the preface to the second edition of Afrique Fantôme, Leiris described how he originally turned to ethnography as a way of escaping the intellectual habits he had cultivated as a writer, and as a way of breaking out of his own self-imposed boundaries by making contact with men from another culture and race. Further, Leiris explained how he was inevitably disappointed by the detached observation that ethnography relied upon, because instead of bringing him into contact with others, it required him to remain distant and adopt an attitude of “impartial objectivity at odds with all effusion.”326

Similarly, in the same year that he wrote the new preface for Afrique Fantôme, Leiris published an article titled “L’ethnographie devant le colonialisme” where he argued that the science of anthropology arose hand in hand with European colonialism, and that the so-called primitive societies that the ethnographer encounters are often already tainted by previous colonial encounters. Further, Leiris argued that unlike the physical sciences where scientists can observe their objects of study with a certain degree of detachment and indifference, in the

326 Michel Leiris, L’Afrique Fantôme, Bibliothéque Des Sciences Humaines. (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 8 [my translation]. For more on Leiris experiences in Africa see Albers, “Mimesis and Alterity: Michel Leiris’s Ethnography and Poetics of Spirit Possession”; Ruth Larson, “Ethnography, Thievery, and Cultural Identity: A Rereading of Michel Leiris’s L'Afrique Fantôme,” PMLA 112, no. 2 (1997): 229–242.

251 human sciences and in anthropology in particular the practise of observation constitutes a form of intervention that alters the very object of study. Leiris concluded that ethnographic activity could never be purely scientific, and that anthropologists had a moral obligation to bring public awareness to the destructive effects of colonialism as well as to assist “non- mechanical” societies maintain their cultural integrity in the face of modernization.327 By the

1950s, then, Leiris’ critique of detached observation was increasingly couched in anti- colonialist terms.

In practice, however, Leiris’ proclaimed anti-colonial and anti-racist politics proved to be a work-in-progress not without some significant hiccups along the way. For example, upon return from his first trip to the French Antilles in 1948 which was funded by the CNRS

(France’s main governmental funding body for scientific research) and meant to be a mission to study the folklore of the islands in an attempt to identify the African influences on the local culture, Leiris’ provoked the ire of one of his main informants after publishing an extract from his ethnographic journal in the French journal Présence Africaine. The article in question was titled “Sacrifice d'un taureau chez le Houngan Jo Pierre-Gilles” and was published in a special edition of Présence Africaine dedicated to Haiti and black poets, edited

327 Michel Leiris, “L’ethnographie Devant Le Colonialisme,” in Cinq Études D’ethnologie (Paris: Gonthier, 1969), 83–112.

252 by Alfred Métraux. The article documents Leiris’ visit to a Vodou séance involving the ritual sacrifice of a bull. At the time of his visit, the Haitian state and Catholic Church were engaged in an intense persecution of Vodou religion that was justified as a measure that would accelerate the modernization of Haitian society.328 Due to these circumstances, Vodou ceremonies and rituals were held in a clandestine manner to avoid attracting the attention of the relevant authorities. Leiris attended the ceremony along with Alfred Métraux who was in

Haiti as part of UNESCO’s fundamental education project in the Marbial Valley, and with

Odette Mennesson-Rigaud who was Métraux’s main informant and guide to the Vodou rituals. As a result of this visit, Leiris befriended Mennesson-Rigaud and maintained a rich correspondence with her until the 1960s.

Throughout their correspondence, Mennesson-Rigaud generally addressed Leiris in an amicable and friendly manner. However, in her letter written in response to the publication of “Sacrifice d'un taureau chez le Houngan Jo Pierre-Gilles”, Mennesson-Rigaud suspended her habitual tone and expressed indignation and frustration at Leiris’ lack of discretion. In particular, she reproached Leiris for mentioning the name of the houngan

(Haitian priest) who conducted the ceremony and for implicating her in this potentially

328 See Jean Jamin, “Rendez-vous Manqué Avec Le Vodou,” Gradhiva no. 1 (May 01, 2005): 225– 231; Kate Ramsey, “Prohibition, Persecution, Performance,” Gradhiva no. 1 (May 01, 2005): 165– 179.

253 incriminating revelation. As Jean Jamin has noted, Menesson-Rigaud’s opposition to the article was not due to any disputes about the accuracy of the observations, or Leiris’ ethnographic rigour. Rather her main concern was his lack of discretion and the potentially harmful consequences it could have for her and the Vodou adepts. Her position is nicely captured in the following passage:

Have you forgotten the nature of your milieu? The poor houngan will pay a steep price for the honour of hosting you and accepting you openly during his service. You can’t pretend to ignore the fact that Vodou is outlawed in Haïti and that thousands of barriers interfere in the lives of these poor people. They are always at the mercy of the authorities who often turn a blind eye but will open their eyes abruptly when proof is provided by a “white” that vodou really exists in Haïti, not as a dance fest but as a ritual service. It becomes impossible in these cases to pretend that the “white” imagined the alleged scene. Too many names and details support the indictment.329

As we can see, Mennesson-Rigaud’s reproach here does not concern the quality or veracity of Leiris’ ethnographic observations, but rather his failures to take into account the broader context or ‘milieu’ that his research was situated in. Among the relevant aspects of the

329 “Lettre d’Odette Menesson-Rigaud a Michel Leiris, 16 Février 1952, fr/cdf/las/FML.D.S04.01.10.048” (Paris: Archives des ethnologues, Biblothèque d’anthropologie sociale, Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale, Collège de France, 1952). [Avez-vous oublié le caractère de notre milieu? Le pauvre houngan paiera bien cher l’honneur de vous avoir reçu, et accepté librement durant son service. Vous ne pouvez pas prétendre que vous ignoriez que le vodou est interdit en Haïti, et que mille entraves viennent gêner ces pauvres gens. Ils sont toujours à la merci des autorités qui ferment souvent les yeux, mais les ouvrent brutalement lorsqu’une preuve est apportée par un “Blanc” que le vodou existe réellement en Haïti, non pas comme réunion de danse, mais comme services rituels. Impossible cette fois de prétendre que le “Blanc” a imaginé la scène rapportée. Trop de noms et de précisions viennent à l’appui du réquisitoire.]

254 milieu, Mennesson-Rigaud points out the prohibition against Vodou and the precarious position of Vodou adepts, as well as the epistemic authority that Leiris holds by virtue of being “Blanc”. Under these circumstances, the precision and rigour of his observations and his failure to occlude the identity of those involved, threaten to act as an indubitable testimonial to the existence of Haitian cults. From Mennesson-Rigaud’s standpoint Leiris’ scientific and literary ambitions constitute a danger to the cultural sustainability of Vodou.

Despite Leiris’ occasional missteps and his own admonitions of the ways his observations and actions were tainted by racism, the candour and reflexivity in his writings was met with praise by prominent figures in the anti-colonial and negritude movement in the

French Caribbean. During his ethnographic voyages in Martinique and Guadeloupe, Leiris became acquainted with some of the more influential writers and anti-colonial theorists including Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and Edouard Glissant, who also acted as his informants while he conducted ethnographic research on race relations for the UNECO booklet Contacts des Civilisations.330 Indeed, Edouard Glissant, the Martinican poet, writer, and literary critic, would later praise Leiris’ ethnographic work for breaking with the ethnological concern with objectivity and not succumbing to “the temptation of the

330 See Michel Leiris, Contacts de Civilisations En Martinique et En Guadeloupe (Paris: UNESCO/Gallimard, 1971).

255 generalizing universal.”331 According to Glissant, Leiris adopted three “distinct orientations” in his ethnographic work: the intrusion of subjectivity, a relationship to the other which implied modesty, and a suspense of “the desire not to conclude with a generalizing theory.”

These orientations distinguished Leiris from the tenets of “pure” ethnology which, in

Glissant’s view, was based on attempt to know other cultures through a detached observation that aspires to objectivity, but also negates the possibility of entering into relation with the other or grant its subjects the possibility of ‘looking back’.332 In contrast, for Glissant,

Leiris’ anthropological work stood as an example of an ethnology of relation, where the ethnographer is not a passive observer but rather a player in a drama unfolding in the present.333 For Glissant, the subjective aspects of Leiris’ work constitute an acknowledgement of the partiality and limitations of the ethnographic standpoint and a willingness to interrogate his own culture as he seeks to know and describe the other’s culture.

331 Edouard Glissant and Cynthia Mesh, “Michel Leiris: The Repli and the Dépli,” Yale French Studies no. 81 (1992): 21–27. 332 This is a point emphasized by Celia Britton, see C. Britton, “Ethnography as Relation: The Significance of the French Caribbean in the Ethnographic Writing of Michel Leiris,” French Studies 66, no. 1 (December 26, 2011): 47. 333 Ibid., 42.

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3 Self-Effacement and Observation: Alfred Métraux

But whereas Leiris critiqued the idea of the ethnographer as a detached and impartial observer, Alfred Métraux, his friend and colleague who recruited him to participate in

UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives in the 1950s, developed an ethnographic approach that eschewed all subjective and theoretical intrusions and strove for a kind of pure observation.

Indeed, as the anthropologist Pierre Riviere has recently argued, Métraux’s body of ethnographic work is highly idiosyncratic insofar as it is almost completely devoid of any theoretical or interpretive insights despite the fact that it covers a vast ethnographic terrain including the Gran Chaco and Amazon regions in South America, Easter Island in the South

Pacific, and Haiti.334 Indeed, Métraux argued that the ethnographers’ most basic and fundamental task was the accumulation of precise, accurate, and indisputable observations.

Thus, in an article on ethnographic method Métraux wrote:

The task of the ethnographer must be to succeed in assembling a collection of information and data whose value and precision place them beyond all criticism. The facts must dictate the hypotheses and not submit to them. It is on greater rigour in observation that the progress of sociology will depend, and it will only become a science of societies under this sole condition.335

334 See Peter Rivière, “Alfred Métraux: Empiricist and Romanticist.,” in Out of the Study and into the Field : Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology, ed. Robert Parkin and Anne de Sales (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 151. 335 Alfred Métraux, “De La Méthode Dans Les Recherches Ethnographiques,” Revue D’ Ethnographie et Des Traditions Populaires 6 (1925): 289–90. [translation by Peter Rivière]

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Although Métraux’s stance concerning the importance of rigorous and impartial observation as the foundation of a “science of societies” suggests an epistemological position, his students and contemporaries characterized his dedication to empiricism as an ethical stance.

For instance the anthropologist Claude Tardits, who was one of Alfred Métraux’s students, argued that Métraux’s body of work suggests an inversion of the relation that typically

“…unites the observer and the observed in the human sciences.” Instead of the usual relation where the observed is constituted as object, Tardits argued that in Métraux’s work:

…it is not so much the society under study that is constituted as an object but the ethnographer who makes himself object by becoming the "porte-parole" of a group where the members, eventually, describe themselves, express themselves and make themselves known through him.336

On this view, the self-restraint habitually associated with detached observation and with

“mechanical objectivity” is both a form of relating to others and acting upon oneself.

Thus, Métraux shared a similar sensibility to Leiris, insofar as he viewed ethnography as a means of escaping one’s own culture and as an act of self-defacement.

336 “Allocution de M.Claude Tardits” in Alfred Métraux et al., “Hommage à Alfred Métraux,” L’Homme 4, no. 2 (1964): 17. [Ce que l’oeuvre de Métraux me suggère, c’est l’établissement d’une relation inverse de celle qui, croit-on, unit habituellement l’observateur et l’observé dans les sciences humaines : c’est moins la société étudiée qui est constituée en objet que l’ethnographe lui-même qui se fait objet en devenant le porte-parole du groupe dont les membres, éventuellement, se décrivent, s’experiment et s’explicitent à travers lui.]

258

However, whereas Métraux’s ethnographic writing and reflections on ethnographic method suggested the need for self-restraint, his writings on “applied anthropology” insisted upon the anthropologist’s moral responsibility to intervene on behalf of the societies they study and thus on the anthropologist as an active social and political agent.337 For example, in an unpublished 1956 essay titled “Le problème de la responsabilité de l’anthropologue qui met sa science au service de l’action,” Métraux argued that anthropologists’ need to be aware of their social and ethical responsibilities because anthropological knowledge can be enlisted for destructive ends such as warfare and colonialism.338 In particular, Métraux argued that ethnographic knowledge provides a functional and relativistic understanding of cultures and their value systems, and that this functional understanding provides anthropologists’ with objective criteria for their moral choices. Thus, Métraux argued that anthropologists bear a moral responsibility to protect local cultures from interventions that could prove harmful to their existence and to speak out on their behalf. In particular, Métraux argued that

337 For Métraux, questions about the social responsibilities of anthropologists and about the ethical and political ramifications of applied anthropological projects assumed greater importance in the decade and a half following WWII when he worked for the UN and UNESCO, where his expertise became important to these institutions’ anti-racism and modernization projects, see Krebs, “Vers Un Monde Sans Mal : Alred Métraux, Un Anthropologue à l’UNESCO (1946-1962).” 338 Alfred Métraux, “Le Problème de La Responsabilité de L’anthropologue Qui Met Sa Science Au Service de L’action, Fonds Alfred Métraux, Anthropologie Appliqué (1947-1962), FAM.G.AA.01.22” (Paris, n.d.).

259 anthropologists could advocate on behalf of indigenous societies by showing colonial administrations that so-called primitives in fact possess a “complex civilization, political and juridical systems with some merit, and by underlining the unpredictable and often catastrophic consequences that any brutally introduced cultural change can produce.”339

3.1 Self-Effacement and Observation: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Over the course of his scientific career, Claude Lévi-Strauss addressed similar questions concerning the significance of ethnographic observation, the objectivity of anthropology as a human science, and the moral lessons that can be derived from an anthropological worldview. However, unlike Métraux who maintained a strictly empirical approach to ethnography, and unlike Leiris who abandoned the notion that anthropology could aspire to the same degree of objectivity as the physical sciences, Lévi-Strauss sought to give anthropology a theoretical and methodological foundation that would bolster its claims to objectivity by bringing it into closer alignment with the natural sciences. Through the ambitious research program of structural anthropology, the approach that became synonymous with his name, Lévi-Strauss not only addressed epistemological questions concerning anthropology’s place within the human sciences but also normative issues

339 Ibid.

260 concerning the ills afflicting contemporary humanity, including racism. From this vantage point, Lévi-Strauss developed an anti-racist outlook in texts like “Race et Histoire” (1950) and “Race et Culture” (1971) that sought to apply the same sort of methodological rigour and scientific detachment to questions of ‘race’ as his better known works like the Elementary

Structures of Kinship. Further, Lévi-Strauss argued throughout his career that by offering up many examples of societies where humans were not considered to stand apart from nature, an anthropological perspective could correct some of the ills that stemmed from Western humanism. Thus, by offering an objective perspective on cultural diversity and a de-centred humanism, Lévi-Strauss writings sought to redeem anthropology from its inglorious past.340

The most striking examples of Lévi-Strauss’ redemptive aspirations, and the most relevant for the context of this study, come from the anti-racist texts he published with

UNESCO: “Race et Histoire” (1952) and “Race et Culture” (1971). Although the reaction that these texts elicited from UNESCO officials was wildly different (the former was met with almost universal praise while the latter provoked what Lévi-Strauss called un “assez joli scandale”), recent historical analyses of these texts have shown how they were linked by a

340 On the redemptive aspects of Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology see W Stoczkowski, “Racisme, Antiracisme et Cosmologie Lévi-Straussienne. Un Essai D’anthropologie Réflexive,” L’Homme. Revue Française D'anthropologie (2007); Wiktor Stoczkowski, “L’anthropologie Rédemptrice de Claude Lévi-Strauss,” Études (S.E.R., March 30, 2010).

261 common thesis emphasizing the need to maintain and promote the cultural and genetic diversity of humanity, as well as a conception of historical evolution as a stochastic process which he advanced as a critique of models of evolution emphasizing linear progress.341

In spite of the considerable thematic unity of these texts, there were also significant differences in emphasis between them. Whereas in “Race et Histoire” Lévi-Strauss emphasized international co-operation and openness as defining features of innovative societies, in “Race et Culture” he emphasized the importance of cultural preservation and cultural autonomy as a principle of innovation and argued that cultures are sometimes better served by remaining closed to the influence of others. What is striking about these texts, and his analyses of racism, is Lévi-Strauss’ epistemic commitment to a detached mode of analysis, by which he sought to provide explanations for racism and racial formation in ultimate processes such as demographic patterns and genetic histories, as opposed to more proximate ones such as European colonialism. In this way, Levi Strauss differed from Leiris who turned to economic and historical explanations that highlighted his own complicity with colonial violence.

341 See Staffan Müeller-Wille, “Claude Lévi-Strauss on Race, History and Genetics,” BioSocieties 5, no. 3 (2010): 330–347; Stoczkowski, “Racisme, Antiracisme et Cosmologie Lévi-Straussienne. Un Essai D’anthropologie Réflexive”; Visweswaran, ““The Interventions of Culture: Claude Levi Strauss and the Internationalization of the Modern Concept of Race.”

262

The redemptive aspirations informing Lévi-Strauss’ anti-racist texts are evident in his opening remarks to “Race et Histoire”. Explaining the historical rise of racial thought, Lévi-

Strauss argued that:

The original sin of anthropology, however, consists in its confusion of the idea of race, in the purely biological sense (assuming that there is any factual basis for the idea, even in this limited field which is disputed by modern genetics), with the sociological and psychological productions of human civilisations. Once he had made this mistake, Gobineau was inevitably committed to the path leading from an honest intellectual error to the unintentional justification of all forms of discrimination and exploitation.342

On this view, racial discrimination is the unintended consequence of an intellectual confusion between the domains of nature and culture and the remedy is to correct any intellectual errors that circulate about human diversity and inadvertently serve to legitimate discriminatory practices. Thus, in “Race and History” Lévi-Strauss seeks an explanation to the question of cultural diversity that is non-biological and also free from the hierarchical thinking associated with racial thought. Even more narrowly, Lévi-Strauss argues that in order to combat racism it is not sufficient to argue negatively against a biological basis for the observable cultural diversity of humanity, and that anthropologists also need to articulate convincing explanations of ‘cultural difference’. Thus, Lévi-Strauss suggested that:

…it would be useless to argue the man in the street out of attaching an intellectual or moral significance to the fact of having a black or white skin, straight or frizzy hair, unless we had an answer which, as experience proves

342 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History. (Paris: Unesco, 1952), 5.

263

he will immediately ask: if there are no innate racial aptitudes, how can we explain the fact that the white man’s civilisation has made the tremendous advances with which we are all familiar while the civilisations of the coloured peoples have lagged behind, some of the having come only half way along the road, and others being still thousands or tens of thousands of years behind the times?343

Framed in this way, the goal of Lévi-Strauss’ anti-racist text is to develop a theoretical framework that can account for cultural differences without appeal to innate aptitudes. The explanation for the differing levels of achievement and technological advancement that Lévi-

Strauss proposed in “Race and History” appealed to the degree which a given culture or society exchanged with other societies. On this view, technological and social innovations have a greater chance of being cumulative in circumstances where a culture maintains relations of co-operation and exchange with other cultures. Conversely, societies that are isolated either by circumstance or by choice tend to accumulate fewer innovations. Thus, this argument sought to oppose the evolutionist idea that technological and scientific accomplishments index an innate racial superiority by instead proposing a model attributing these accomplishments to the degree to which cultures develop relations of exchange. In so doing, Lévi-Strauss’s text thus sought to emphasize the malleability of cultures and the degree to which they are shaped by contingent historical events and in emphasizing

343 Ibid., 6.

264 international exchange and co-operation as a pre-condition for technological progress he advanced a model in sync with UNESCO’s general programme in the 1950s.

In 1971 Lévi-Strauss was invited by UNESCO to deliver a public lecture as part of the week commemorating the International Year to Combat Racism and Discrimination.

Although it advanced similar arguments to “Race and History” and advanced many of the same themes, Lévi-Strauss’ lecture, which was later published as “Race et Culture” in the

International Social Science Journal, was met with disappointment from many UNESCO officials who saw it as departing from UNESCO’s core message of international co-operation and exchange as a means to peace. In “Race et Culture”, instead of emphasizing the importance of cultural exchange for technological progress and innovation, Lévi-Strauss argued that both the biological and cultural diversity of the human species was under threat by unchecked demographic growth, and by an impending ecological crisis.344 Further, Lévi-

Strauss argued that UNESCO’s initial approach towards combating racism – attempting to dispel racial ‘myths’ by publishing educational pamphlets – was ineffective and that there was in fact evidence that racial prejudice was on the rise throughout the world. Instead of adopting the view that racial prejudice stemmed from mistaken beliefs which could be

344 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “‘Race and Culture’,” International Scoial Science Journal XXIII, no. 4 (1971): 608–625.

265 corrected, in “Race et Culture” Lévi-Strauss adopted the view that racial prejudice was an ideological cover for the fact that humanity was “…beginning to hate itself, warned by a mysterious prescience that its numbers are becoming too great for all its members to enjoy freely open space and pure, non-polluted air, which is of the utmost importance to it.”345

Whereas in 1952, when UNESCO published Lévi-Strauss’ “Race et Histoire”, the aspiration towards a more integrated world and towards greater international co-operation struck scientific experts and UN officials as a necessary tonic to the Second World War, by

1971 international circumstances had changed enough for Lévi-Strauss to embrace a much less optimistic outlook. Thus, in “Race et Culture” Lévi-Strauss stressed that although relations of communication and exchange were important to cultural creativity and innovation, he also stressed the need for cultural autonomy and independence and thus for the need for cultures to maintain a certain distance from each other. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss argued that anthropologists had good reasons to be sceptical of the view that the

“dissemination of knowledge and development of communications” would necessarily lead people to live and harmony and respect diversity.346 For Lévi-Strauss, “the expansion of industrial civilization and the increasing rapidity of transport and communications” had the

345 Ibid., 122. 346 Ibid., 624.

266 effect of bringing down the barriers that kept populations and cultures separate but also the effect of limiting the possibility “…that new genetic combinations or cultural experiments could develop and prove themselves.”347 Thus, Lévi-Strauss augured that if “…humanity is not to resign itself to becoming a sterile consumer of the values it created in the past and of those alone, capable only of producing hybrid works and clumsy and puerile inventions, it will have to relearn the fact that all true creation implies a certain deafness to outside values, even to the extent of rejecting or denying them.”348

Although there are several complex issues at play in Lévi-Strauss’ anti-racist texts, what I’d like to highlight here are the epistemological commitments that underpin them.

What is notable about the development of Lévi-Strauss’ anti-racist thought, is the transition from an understanding of racism that locates the rise of racist ideologies in the mistaken beliefs of nineteenth century evolutionists to an account that links racism to population pressures that bring people into conflict. “Race et Histoire” is informed by the view that racism is the product of a knowledge-deficit and stems from the circulation and acceptance of erroneous and pseudo-scientific beliefs. The logical anti-racist response to this problem is one that fit perfectly well with UNESCO’s mid-century aspirations: to disseminate scientific

347 Ibid. 348 Ibid.

267 knowledge about race and show that scientists are in agreement that there is no scientific evidence for the view that intellectual and material progress is the result of biological differences between races. By contrast, “Race et Culture” gives evidence to a different epistemological commitment – instead of assuming the primacy of racist beliefs and expressions, Lévi-Strauss treats these as epiphenomenal; that is he suggests that the racist ideologies that individuals adopt are reflective of less easily observed but ultimately more significant demographic forces that have the effect of forcing different populations to compete for the same resources and territory. “Race et Culture” is arguably the more structuralist of the two texts and the one that reflects Lévi-Strauss epistemological commitment to analyses that go beyond the observable data and posit abstract and often synthetic models as explanations.

4 Conclusion

By studying Leiris, Métraux, and Lévi-Strauss’ views on observation and race this chapter draws out how social scientist’s commitments to anti-racism went beyond distinguishing between race and culture and extended to revising the very methods for producing knowledge within their fields. As anthropologists came to terms with the colonial

268 legacy of their discipline, the very method of observation and its relation to objectivity had to be rethought. However, although anthropologists raised similar questions pertaining to the practice of observation and the meanings of race and racism, they crafted different answers to these questions. How to perform anti-racism while remaining an objective observer and how to redeem anthropology from its colonial entanglements were thus problems that produced a multiplicity of methodological commitments and which illustrate some of the tensions animating anti-racist science.

By examining the divergent epistemological attitudes of Leiris, Métraux, and Lévi-

Strauss this chapter showed how French anthropologists responded differently to French anthropology’s colonial legacy and the political implications of this legacy for ethnographers.

Arguably, Leiris developed the most radical political stance that identified anthropological complicity with colonialism as an insurmountable barrier to objectivity and called for greater reflexivity and anti-colonial solidarity. In line with his anti-colonial commitments, Leiris developed an analysis of racism that traced its origins to the history of Europe colonization and characterized racism as socio-economic project of domination and exclusion. Métraux, on the other hand wrote very little concerning racism, but spent most of the 1950s working with UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences where he acted as the spearhead for its various anti-racism initiatives. However, Métraux’s writings concerning the social

269 responsibility of anthropologists suggest a connection between his anti-racist work and his commitment to ethnographic objectivity. The self-effacement that Métraux viewed as necessary for rigorous observation was also a pre-condition for social and political intervention for Métraux. Thus for Métraux, a circumscribed subjectivity was necessary for both ethnographic observation and political agency while for Leiris a reflexive and anti- colonial politics of subjectivity became an inevitable outcome of the ethnographic encounter.

For Lévi-Strauss, on the other hand, questions concerning subjectivity and its relation to science and culture were also a central preoccupation throughout his career. Indeed, Lévi-

Strauss questioned the prominence given to the subject in Western philosophy and advanced a re-fashioned humanism that deflated the prominence of the subject and sought to expand conceptions of humanity by drawing lessons from the ethnographic record. Although he did not adopt overtly political and anti-colonial stances like Leiris, Lévi-Strauss tended to view humanity in pessimistic terms and suggested that many of humanity’s contemporary issues including racism and ecological devastation stemmed from the pernicious influence of

Western humanism and its privileging of the individual. For Lévi-Strauss, then, developing an anti-racist orientation involved not only the redemption of anthropology but also the redemption of ‘Western’, or what he often referred to as ‘mechanical’ civilization.

270

The positions that these anthropologists adopted with respect to the objectivity of anthropology and its colonial entanglements shed light on some of the unresolved dilemmas that animate anti-racist science. For mid-century social scientists the critique of racial science concerned the objectivity of science itself. The racist ideologies that UNESCO and anti- racists scientists sought to oppose were critiqued as lacking in objectivity and as the product of ‘pseudo-science’. The response favoured by UNESCO was to produce better and more objective science. However, the reflections of Leiris, Métraux, and Lévi-Strauss show that in the field of anthropology the question of how to remain objective given the discipline’s colonial legacy was perhaps easier in theory than it was in practice. Anthropological knowledge suggested that individuals were irrevocably bound to their culture of origin, and that their ways of seeing and experiencing the world were necessarily tainted by their culture of origin. In the case of mid-century French anthropologists, their culture was one whose history was fraught with imperialism and colonial violence and this legacy figured as an indelible filter that inevitably tainted the ways they observed reality. Although they were taught to approach the field as neutral and impartial observers, mid-century anthropologists were prompted to scrutinize the moral and epistemic underpinnings of the relations between themselves as observing subjects and potential agents of Western imperialism, and their racialised objects of study. Try as they might to move beyond racially patterned ways of

271 seeing, mid-century anthropologists found that ‘race’ was an inexorable object whose presence was never too distant and which was not so easily discarded.

272

Chapter 4

Moral Economies And Anti-Racism

As we saw in the last chapter, for mid-century anthropologists the development of an anti-racist orientation and approach to observing others brought up complex questions concerning the colonial complicity of their discipline as well as the degree to which notions of ‘race’ continued to taint their scientific projects. As we saw in the cases of Leiris,

Métraux, and Lévi-Strauss developing anti-racist approaches to ethnographic observation and anthropological discourse required working through issues concerning the observing anthropological subject and what grounds its authority to describe and speak on behalf of others in contexts shaped by colonial relations of power. After WWII, ethnographic encounters increasingly raised questions about anthropologist’s social and moral responsibility to their research subjects and thus brought issues about the epistemological foundations of observation and the ethical duties of social scientists into close relation. In this chapter, I continue to explore the relationship between epistemology and morality within mid-century anti-racist science by examining how differing conceptions of ‘race’ and

‘racism’ perturbed UNESCO’s ambitions to establish harmonious international and interpersonal relations amongst scientific experts and in civil society.

273

Beginning in 1953, UNESCO’s Department of Social Science (DSS) embarked on what its officials described as “the fourth stage” of its anti-racism campaigns. Unlike previous stages focusing on the production of scientific statements and pamphlets about race or sociological studies of race relations, this phase of UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns focused on eradicating prejudices among children, whose minds UNESCO experts saw as highly flexible and thus as strategic sites for confronting racial prejudices before they harden.

To accomplish this goal, UNESCO officials sought to produce scientific booklets that would enable teachers to design anti-racist lessons with the aim of inoculating children against racial prejudice. UNESCO experts hoped the handbooks would provide teachers with the scientific information necessary for clarifying the meaning and appropriate use of the term

‘race’ and argued that by teaching the scientific facts of ‘race’ educators could cultivate the sorts of attitudes in children that would be congenial to harmonious race relations.

The four phases of UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns were best described by Alva

Myrdal, director of the DSS, during her welcoming remarks to a 1955 meeting of experts on

“racial prejudice and education”. The first stage of UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns, explained Myrdal, consisted of documenting leading scientists’ views on the meaning of

‘race’ and racial differences and then circulating these views in the form of expert statements and pamphlets so as to dispel racial myths. During its second stage UNESCO published a

274 series of booklets addressing “the views of the main religions of the world on questions of race toleration,” and for the third stage UNESCO produced a series of publications on

“positive examples” of race relations as analysed by social scientists. Now that UNESCO had completed this work showing that racism is not justified by science and analysing societies where racism did not pose a major issue, UNESCO was “now about to embark upon the fourth stage [of is antiracism campaign], in which it hopes to promote the teaching of race questions in schools with a view to removing the false stereotypes which the various races hold about each other.”349

As UNESCO embarked upon this so-called fourth stage of its anti-racism initiatives, race relations researchers from throughout the North Atlantic proposed the creation of an international society for the scientific study of race relations. By the mid 1950s, the field of race relations research had grown into a dynamic and interdisciplinary field of inquiry that attracted scholars from various disciplines including sociology, social anthropology, political science, and social psychology and which had an institutional presence in many countries including Brazil, France, the US, and the UK. Encouraged by the growth of the field, race relations researchers proposed the creation of an international organization that would

349 Anthony H. Richmond, “Report, SS/Race/Conf.3/10-11; SS/Race/Conf.3/1-2; WS/085.61,” in Expert Meeting on the Promotion of Teaching of Race Questions in Primary and Secondary School, 7. Nov. 1955 (Paris: UNESCO, 1955), 2.

275 promote the study of race relations throughout the world, facilitate the collection and dissemination of data and information on race relations, and allow researchers to fashion a

“world perspective” on race relations that they felt was sorely lacking. For some of the researchers interested in creating this organization, the creation of a world perspective on race relations was necessary because the immense transformations taking place as a result of decolonization and the Cold War were casting a new light on the relations between racial groups in many parts of the globe. Because UNESCO had played a prominent role in the creation of many other international social science associations, DSS officials hoped that

UNESCO would also play an important role in the creation of the envisioned international society for race relations.

The concurrence of these two projects (the creation of anti-racist handbooks and the attempt to create an international organization for race relations research) represents the growing confidence and transnational acceptance of the anti-racist human sciences of the post-war era. By the mid 1950s, anti-racist researchers were optimistic that their knowledge could be applied for the purpose of fashioning a more peaceful and cosmopolitan world and for identifying and managing sources of future conflict. Indeed, UNESCO social scientists involved in these two projects shared the belief that scientific knowledge of race relations could be put to use for managing and preventing intergroup and interpersonal tensions and,

276 further, that children could be taught to avoid racial tension and prejudice by being instructed on the scientific facts about racial difference.

UNESCO’s aspirations, however, were only partially fulfilled. The attempt to create an international society for the study of race relations was marred by internal disputes and misunderstandings and the society was ultimately never formed. In lieu of creating an international society, UNESCO published a series of articles summarizing the state of race relations studies in different parts of the world. Similarly, UNESCO’s pedagogical initiatives failed to materialize in the way that they had originally envisioned. UNESCO’s first attempt to publish and distribute a handbook for teachers on the question of race provoked fierce disagreements between its Department of Social Science and its Education Department, as well as prompting significant resistance from the US National Commission. Members from the Department of Education and from the US National Commission raised concerns over the handbook (written by the British biologist and sex educator Dr. Cyril Bibby) and cited the handbook’s lack of objectivity, overly polemical tone, and disproportionate criticism of US race relations as reasons why it was not in keeping with UNESCO’s spirit of impartiality.

The resistance to the publication of Bibby’s handbook was severe enough to prompt the

Department of Social Science to publish the manual through an independent publisher, which meant that it would not be considered an official UNESCO publication. Thus, despite the

277 growing prominence of race relations as a field of scientific study and the growing acceptance of the anti-racist perspective stemming from the human sciences, attempts to institutionalize and take what UNESCO officials imagined as more concrete and direct action against racism were frequently thwarted as UNESCO representatives found themselves advancing conflicting interpretations of UNESCO’s mandate.

This chapter examines these instances of institutional and transnational failure as examples of mismatch between the moral agenda of UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives and the broader political agendas that shaped and traversed international discussions of race in the 1950s.350 In its early years, UNESCO’s broader mandate of establishing worldwide solidarity was framed in the moral and psychological language of changing people’s attitudes and of promoting cosmopolitan values and beliefs. It was a mandate that was interpreted as applying to both UNESCO experts and the broader civil society, which UNESCO’s programs sought to intervene upon. UNESCO’s mandate was thus concerned with re-aligning the constellation of moral, emotional, and social attitudes and values that governed the relations between individuals, and with instilling a new equilibrium geared towards international co- operation and solidarity. UNESCO’s mandate, in other words, was concerned with producing

350 By “moral agenda”, I mean UNESCO’s broader project of establishing a peace founded upon “an intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind” that was written into UNESCO’s constitution.

278 an anti-racist moral economy that was fit for the geopolitical demands of the post-war era.

My interest is thus in examining how these two episodes reflect UNESCO officials attempts to produce an antiracist moral economy and the forms of resistance they ran up against in doing so.

This chapter deploys the notion of a moral economy in the way it has been used by historians of science to study the culture of scientific experts, as well as in the manner of social historians to interpret collective behaviour. Historians of science have adopted the term of moral economy to describe the patterns of exchange, unstated normative codes, and modes of self-discipline that scientists embrace in spaces of knowledge production such as the laboratory or the field. In social studies of science, moral economy thus refers to the social and moral conventions that scientific experts adopt as a necessary part of co-ordinating research and that serve the purpose of building an maintaining scientific cultures and communities. Lorraine Daston, for example, defines a moral economy as both a “web of affect-saturated values that stand and function in well-defined relationship to one another” and as “a balanced system of emotional forces, with equilibrium points and constraints.”351

For Daston, moral economies are not a by-product of scientific ways of knowing but are in fact constitutive of and required by some of the most emblematic elements of scientific

351 L Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 4.

279 epistemologies, namely certain kinds of empiricism, quantification, and objectivity.352 In a similar but more sociological vein, Robert Kohler has used the concept of a moral economy for describing the culture and way of life adopted by scientists working in early genetics laboratories. For Kohler, the term moral economy refers to the unstated moral rules that govern the conduct and expectations of laboratory scientists, particularly as they pertain to the sharing of information and material resources.353

Crucially, both Kohler and Daston’s use of the term moral economy is derived from

E.P. Thompson’s original articulation of the concept, which was based on his analysis of eighteenth century bread riots in Britain. Thompson argued that these riots were more than the spontaneous outburst of an angry and reactive mob. Rather, Thompson argued, bread riots arose as a result of a crowd’s collective sense of injustice and betrayal and thus stemmed from a shared but unstated set of norms and attitudes about the morality of raising prices. Thompson’s moral economy thus refers to a set of ingrained attitudes and beliefs about economic justice, and moral obligation, and also that the shared set of attitudes and

352 Ibid., 3. 353 R E Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11–13.

280 beliefs that constitute a group’s moral economy and act as a catalyst for collective action and revolt when the group feels these values are betrayed.354

In this chapter, I use the concept of a moral economy to examine two distinct yet interrelated phenomena: 1) UNESCO experts’ attempts to establish moral norms of conduct amongst themselves and 2) UNESCO experts’ attempts to instil a set of attitudes and norms amongst teachers and schoolchildren. However, unlike the communities described by Daston,

Kohler, and Thompson, which tend to be locally bounded communities with well-established borders and histories, the communities I engage with here are tenuous, geographically disperse and in the process of formation. Thus, this chapter focuses on the much more tenuous and uncertain task of attempting to build moral economies (a common set of attitudes and moral norms) amongst people from disparate geographical, national, and epistemic communities.

My central argument is that UNESCO’s concern with anti-racist pedagogy and its participation in the attempt to create an international society for the study of race relations reflect an attempt to fashion a moral economy in two distinct domains. On the one hand, as I described in my discussion of scientific internationalism in Chapter 1, many of UNESCO’s

354 E P Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present no. 50 (1971): 76–136.

281 projects in the 1950s targeted the transnational domain of international scientific relations through initiatives like the creation of international laboratories. In this domain, UNESCO sought to re-establish and strengthen the communication and collaboration between scientists from different nations in the wake of the severing of international scientific communication that took place during WWII. In the case of the social sciences, as historian of science Perrin

Selcer has argued, UNESCO officials’ efforts to create international associations represent an attempt to unite the diverse national traditions of social science disciplines under a common rubric. For Selcer, the creation of international social science associations thus represents an attempt at “coordinating multiple subjectivities to produce objectivity,” a project that he describes as an attempt to produce a “view from everywhere.”355 However, whereas Selcer’s account focuses primarily on how notions of objectivity where negotiated in the context of international disciplinary associations, in this chapter I highlight the affective and moral dimensions of this attempt to produce objectivity at a transnational scale and in particular how attempts to produce international objectivity and scientific neutrality were particularly fraught projects within the highly charged domain of anti-racism and race relations research.

355 Perrin Selcer, “The View from Everywhere: Disciplining Diversity in Post-World War II International Social Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 45, no. 4 (2009): 309–329.

282

On the other hand, in addition to attempting to unify to social science experts internationally, UNESCO officials sought to transform the attitudes and beliefs of schoolteachers and students, and thus targeted the school system as a key domain for the cultivation of a moral economy at the level of civil society and as a key site for anti-racist intervention. Here, UNESCO officials sought to instil moral beliefs and interpersonal practices among educators and schoolchildren in the hopes of creating a moral economy oriented towards collaboration and cosmopolitan sensitivity. UNESCO experts thus sought to fashion a dual moral economy, one among an intellectual elite comprised by the international social science community and the other amongst teachers and schoolchildren, which represented the future and the promise of a cosmopolitan global society. In this respect, the efforts of UNESCO experts reflect a broader pattern in the post-war era where social scientists prescriptions for society were often modelled on the forms of conduct they developed and valued in their professional lives.356

A distinguishing feature of the moral economies that UNESCO representatives sought to fashion was the liberal aspiration that intergroup, interpersonal, and international relations

356 For further examples of this phenomenon see Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Creative American Cold War Salons, Social Science, and the Cure for Modern Society,” Isis 100, no. 2 (2009): 219–262; Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Reflexivity of Cognitive Science: The Scientist as Model of Human Nature,” History of the Human Sciences 18, no. 4 (2005): 107–139.

283 be free of animosity and tension. This aspiration informed several UNESCO social science projects in the post-war era, including the international tensions project and the creation of international societies and reflects the mood of optimism and confidence of the organization’s early years as officials strove to distance themselves from the destructive legacy of WWII. In the context of this ideal of interpersonal and intergroup harmony, ‘race’ often figured as an affectively charged and hence problematic object and UNESCO’s anti- racist efforts often took the form of attempts to render ‘race’ affectively neutral through the tempering force of science.357 By having teachers provide “factual instruction” about race to their students and by promoting the scientific study of race relations, UNESCO experts hoped to instantiate a moral economy where ‘race’ would not act as a barrier to co-operation and social cohesion and where biological racial differences would be seen as a trivial form of difference, a mere evolutionary quirk.

However, as I will show in this chapter, the concern with harmonious interpersonal relationships and attempts to neutralize ‘race’ through factual instruction precluded forms of anti-racist critique that linked racism and racial prejudice with structural inequalities and with

357 UNESCO’s attempts to neutralize the affective valence of ‘race’ are reflected in an argument that was as important to the burgeoning field of race relations as it was to UNESCO’s anti-racist handbooks: that biological race differences are insignificant for politics and morality. In other words, for anti-racist scientists any natural differences between so-called ‘races’ did not have any social or political implications and should thus be observed without any emotional or political attachments.

284 capitalism. Further, this narrowed scope of anti-racist critique did not always reflect a transnational consensus but rather the disproportionate influence of the US and the kinds of anti-racism and social science that were sanctioned by the US state at the apex of anti- communist sentiment during the Cold War. The case studies in this chapter thus show how the anti-Communist sentiments of the Cold War served to constrain anti-racism to the liberal domain of interpersonal relations.358

1 Building A Transnational Moral Economy

UNESCO’s desire to fashion a dual moral economy, among scientific experts and among civil society stemmed from the severing of international collaborations between scientists relations that occurred during WWII and the desire to re-establish lines of communication between scientists. During the war and continuing through to the Cold War, the militarization of scientific research meant that scientists were discouraged from

358 In a sense then this liberal form of antiracism can be genealogically linked to contemporary forms of anti-racism that emphasize concepts such as diversity, which have been shown to project an appearance of institutional harmony while simultaneously obscuring the existence of institutional racism. For an incisive philosophical analysis of the limitations of contemporary forms of institutional anti-racism see Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham ; London: Duke University Press, 2012); Sara Ahmed, “‘You End up Doing the Document Rather Than Doing the Doing’: Diversity, Race Equality and the Politics of Documentation,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 4 (July 2007): 590–609.

285 communicating and collaborating with scientists from rival nations.359 In response to this severing of international scientific networks, UNESCO’s Social Science Department sought to create international social science organizations, to increase the level of social science research done throughout the world, and to promote research conducive to establishing a peaceful world order.360

Indeed, between 1948 and 1950 UNESCO played a key role in the formation of various international human science associations including the World Federation of Mental

Health, the International Sociological Association (ISA), the International Political Science

Association (IPSA), and the International Economic Association (IEA), and also initiated the creation and publication of international science journals.361 From the late 1940s to the late

1950s, UNESCO published prominent international social science journals such as the

International Social Science Bulletin, (which later became International Social Science

Journal), Current Sociology, and International Political Science Abstracts.362 UNESCO’s

359 On US led attempts to reconstruct European science and thus establish a trans-Atlantic scientific community and how this was entangled with Cold War politics see John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, Transformations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). 360 Robert C Angell, “UNESCO and Social Science Research,” American Sociological Review 15, no. 2 (1950): 282. 361 Peter Lengyel, International Social Science, the UNESCO Experience (New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Books, 1986), 20. 362 Ibid., 21.

286 response to the fracturing of international relations was thus characterized by an attempt to re-create transnational scientific networks and build transnational forums for scientific exchange and communication and social scientists affiliated with UNESCO often lauded the organization’s achievements in this area. For example, the Swedish sociologist Alva Myrdal

(who acted as Director of the DSS from 1951 to 1955) argued that the creation of these international societies served to sediment the social sciences place in global society by giving social scientists “a more prominent platform from which to be heard, for academic recognition as a profession and for meeting places to share their ideas.”363 Further, Myrdal asserted that the social sciences’ rise to prominence in the post-war period and the growing recognition of their value amongst politicians and decision makers bode well for the future insofar as they helped “to combat mystical and demagogic conceptions of society” and to instead replace these conceptions with the premise that “societies function according to certain discernible laws.”364

Amidst the optimistic mood that pervaded UNESCO’s initiatives during its early years, social science figured as both a means to international co-operation and understanding as well as an end in itself insofar as it served as model for the kind of culture UNESCO hoped

363 Alva Myrdal, “Two Decades in the World of Social Science,” Unesco Courier XIX, no. 7/8 (1966): 40–44. 364 Ibid., 43.

287 to instantiate worldwide. The notion that strengthening scientific culture internationally could serve to improve international relations was aptly illustrated in a UNESCO memorandum from 1950 that was intended to provide American social scientists with a summary of UNESCO’s social science initiatives. Robert C. Angell an American sociologist whose research focused on the theme of the social and moral integration of communities (and who also acted as Director of UNESCO’s DSS in the early 50s) wrote the memo.

Summarizing the main goals of UNESCO’s social science research, Angell explained that the

DSS programme had three main objectives: “(1) to knit together social science scholars of the world, both within disciplines and between disciplines, with the expectation that this will increase international understanding; (2) to raise the level of social science research throughout the world in the belief that greater knowledge in these fields will benefit mankind; and (3) to promote research in fields crucial to the establishment of a peaceful world order.”365

DSS officials’ concern with establishing a peaceful world order was also reflected in the department’s research projects during its first years. Indeed, during UNESCO’s first decade, one of the organization’s most ambitious and far reaching social science projects was

365 Robert C Angell, “UNESCO and Social Science Research, SS/TAIU/19, Feb. 17, 1950” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1950).

288 the International Tensions Project, which arose from discussions held during UNESCO’s first few General Conferences where UNESCO representatives recognized that the social sciences could play an important role in creating international understanding through the “removal of tensions arising from preconceived, stereotyped ideas about foreign countries and their inhabitants.”366

As the Tensions project took shape between the years of 1947-1955, UNESCO’s social science experts defined and operationalized the project’s key concepts (such as ‘tensions’ and

‘understanding’) in affective and relational terms. Thus, Robert Angell described the “root idea” of social tension as that of a “physical tightening” which is applied in biology as “the contraction of muscles.”367 In the domain of human relations, Angell suggested, tension

“testifies to some blocking, either internal such as conscience, or external such as power” and is released only through action.368 Concerning the notion of ‘understanding’, the Canadian social psychologist Otto Klineberg who was a member of UNESCO’s DSS, suggested that for the purposes of the Tensions project, “understanding” could not be understood simply as

366International Sociological Association, The Nature of Conflict; Studies on the Sociological Aspects of International Tensions (Paris: UNESCO, 1957), 9. 367 Angell, “UNESCO and Social Science Research, SS/TAIU/19, Feb. 17, 1950,” 2. 368 Ibid.

289 an “intellectual comprehension” and in fact had to be understood in its “emotional or affective sense” as the kind of understanding that “leads to an attitude of friendliness.”369

In 1948, as part of the international tensions project, the DSS brought together eight

“distinguished” social scientists in order to “consider the causes of nationalistic aggression and the conditions necessary for international understanding.”370 The social scientists met in

Paris over a two-week period and drafted a statement titled “the causes of tension which make for war.”371 As written in the statement, the social scientists felt optimistic that “Man” had “reached a stage in his history where he can study scientifically the causes of tension which make for war.”372 Speaking of behalf of this abstract conception of humanity reflected

369 Otto Klineberg, “International Tensions: A Challenge to the Sciences of Man,” The Lancet 254, no. 6584 (1949): 851. 370 Hadley Cantril and Unesco., Tensions That Cause Wars; Common Statement and Individual Papers by a Group of Social Scientists Brought Together by UNESCO (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 10. 371 The collective statement drafted by the eight scientists was titled “Causes of Tensions Which Make for War” and was published along with separate essays from the eight participants. The collective statement was meant to reflect a consensus-view while the individual statements were meant to show the individual differences among the scientists. The eight scientists invited were: Gordon Allport (US), Gilberto Freyre (Brazil), Georges Gurvitch (Austria), Max Horkheimer, Arne Naess (Norway), John Rickman (UK), Harry S. Sullivan (US), and Alexander Szalai (Hungary). According to Cantril, the American social psychologist who acted as the conference coordinator, the eight scientists selected were “people who were not only knowledgeable but who had gained some wisdom from experience. Four of them had been in jail sometime during their lives for sticking to their point of view, two had to leave their mother country, two had been physically tortured.” Hadley Cantril, “Psychology Working for Peace,” American Psychologist 4, no. 3 (1949): 71. 372 Ibid.

290 in the term “Man,” the statement further explained “that the meeting of this little group is itself symptomatic [of this stage in history], representing as it does the first time the people of many lands, through an international organization of their own creation, have asked social scientists to apply their knowledge to some of the major problems of our time.”373

Over the course of the two-weeks during which this group applied their knowledge to the pressing global issues of their time, the social scientists adopted specific practices that were meant to establish an awareness of each other’s differences and to create spaces where they could think reflexively about the affective dimensions of their experience. According to

Hadley Cantril, the first session of the conference was dedicated to getting to know the other participants and in particular their life stories, their intellectual influences, and their insights as to why they considered themselves qualified to form part of the group. For Cantril, this session proved to be “a tremendous time-saver” because it provided the conference’s participants with the information necessary to have “enough insight into the other fellow to have a fair idea of why he was saying the things he was.”374 At the end of their two weeks together the participants also made a concerted effort to air any lingering grievances.

According to Cantril, two hours before the end of the closing session, the participants

373 Ibid., 71-2. 374 Cantril and Unesco., Tensions That Cause Wars; Common Statement and Individual Papers by a Group of Social Scientists Brought Together by UNESCO, 10.

291 decided that they should spend their final moments discussing the tensions they experienced during their two weeks together and agreed to voice the things “they had wanted to say but didn’t for fear of offending someone, the irritations we had experienced from another’s remark, [and] the inadequacies of the discussion.”375

Cantril’s description of the group’s activities suggests that the project embraced by

UNESCO’s social scientists was indeed an attempt to “coordinate multiple subjectivities,” to use Selcer’s phrase.376 However, it also suggests that the project’s scope went beyond the epistemological project of fashioning a new form of objectivity and also included the attempt to instil forms of conduct and working practices that would be the basis of a moral economy fit for international anti-racist understanding. Further reflecting on his experiences during the drafting of the “Causes of Tensions Which Make for War” statement and his experience working with social scientists from the Soviet Bloc, Cantril mused that both science and humanity required tools for cooperation and free exchange if they were to make progress:

the language of science including the language of the best social science is, like music, a universal one and that if artificial barriers are set up in conformity with geographical boundaries to prevent mutual stimulation and exchange of information, then all science will suffer and it will take the world just that much longer to creep along the road of progress.377

375 Ibid., 11. 376 Selcer, “The View from Everywhere: Disciplining Diversity in Post-World War II International Social Science.” 377 Cantril, “Psychology Working for Peace,” 70.

292

Cantril’s descriptions of the practices leading up to the Tensions Statement, thus reveal the moral and affective dimensions of UNESCO’s transnational initiatives in the realm of the social sciences. UNESCO’s social scientists valorised an ethical ideal of free and transparent communication across linguistic and national borders and sought to produce specific modes of conduct that would embody and model what international understanding mean. Indeed,

Cantril was firmly convinced that “social scientists have something to contribute toward developing a scientific morality.”378 The zeal for transnational communication and for studying the causes of social tension and developing insights on international understanding was thus a moral project inasmuch as an epistemological one. It was a project that was often explicitly framed in moral and affective terms and targeted the modes of conduct that scientific experts would have to adopt amongst themselves if they were to see it realized in the lives of others.

Furthermore, the moral economy predicated on interpersonal harmony that UNESCO’s social scientists sought to instantiate amongst themselves (and which they imagined as a promising template for international relations more broadly) was one that was also concerned with the elimination of racial prejudice and with the modification of racial attitudes and

378 Ibid., 71.

293 stereotypes. In their descriptions of DSS activities relating to the Tensions project, social scientists often mentioned UNESCO’s anti-racism publications and race relations studies as important steps towards global co-operation and peaceful relations. For example, in a summary of the main studies that were part of the Tensions project, Robert Angell described a social psychology experiment conducted at a British school by social scientists working under UNESCO’s auspices as an example of how racial prejudices can be modified through education and racial contact.379 The experiment consisted of bringing two female schoolteachers from the Gold Coast (which was renamed Ghana after independence) to a

British school where students had very little previous contact with black people. Through individual interviews and surveys with the students before and after the teachers’ visit, the researchers assessed the degree to which the schoolchildren’s attitudes towards black people changed from the experience of being taught by and working closely with two black teachers.

According to Angell, the results of the experiment showed that the schoolchildren were particularly “propitious to a favourable change in attitude, as the spontaneous reactions of the children… were not generally distorted by preconceived notions, and as they had had

379 The study was carried out by British psychologists H.E.O. James and Cora Tenen and the results were later published in a book titled The Teacher Was Black. For Angell’s description of this experiment see Association, The Nature of Conflict; Studies on the Sociological Aspects of International Tensions, 17.

294 several contacts, during or immediately after the war, with a large number of allied soldiers from a great variety of countries.”380

Similarly, in an article describing the first twenty years of social science research at

UNESCO, Alva Myrdal suggested that some of the most substantial achievements of the

DSS took place in the field of race prejudice and came as result of collaborating with colleagues in other fields such as biology and genetics. Indeed, Myrdal suggested that by helping to undermine theories of “genetic racial superiority” by keeping abreast of the latest developments in biology and by disseminating this information extensively, social scientists had made an important contribution towards educating the public about race prejudice, to a degree where it was “now considered “backward” and “uneducated” in most countries and societies to hold beliefs of racial superiority and inferiority.”381

What is thus evident from the ways UNESCO officials described the projects of the

DSS in its early years is that they saw the formation of international social science organizations and the construction of interdisciplinary projects between social scientists worldwide not only as a project of bringing together diverse perspectives but also as a means of modelling the sort of behaviour deemed necessary for establishing peaceful relations

380 Aron, Raymond, Jessie Shirley Bernard, and Tom Hatherley Pear. The Nature of conflict: Studies on the Sociological Aspects of International tensions., p.17. 381 Alva Myrdal, “Two Decades in the World of Social Science”, p.42.

295 worldwide. For UNESCO’s social science experts, the commitments to rationality, objectivity, and impartiality that formed part of scientific culture and scientific ways of life were also an aspirational model that could serve as a template for the creation of peaceful interpersonal and international relations worldwide. Not surprisingly, given the growth of the

US social sciences in this period and the disproportionate influence that the US exerted on

UNESCO in this time period, the conceptions of a peaceful world order that UNESCO’s DSS promoted in this time period were often concerned with the domain of ‘interpersonal relations’ and ‘human relations’ which characterized much of the psychologically-inflected behavioural sciences of the US in post-war period. Within the context of this model of peaceful interpersonal and international relations, ‘race’ figured as a source of uneducated and hostile attitudes and prejudices that could be modified and deflated through appropriate education and tutelage. In much the same way that UNESCO scientists imagined scientific knowledge as a civilizing and emancipating force when applied to so-called primitive societies (as seen in the previous chapters), they also imagined science as a civilizing force that would counter the ignorant and uninformed attitudes that sustain racial prejudice. As such, irrational and uneducated conceptions of ‘race’ and racial difference figured as an obstacle to the sort of international moral economy that UNESCO sought to cultivate.

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2 Race Relations: a Challenge to UNESCO’s Internationalist

Moral Economy

Although Cantril’s ideal of open and transparent scientific relations at the international level and of the development of a scientific morality based upon a shared scientific language yielded important results in most social science disciplines, in the field of race relations research it proved to be much more difficult to align researchers along common lines. In some ways, the field of race relations research typified the kind of moral economy that UNESCO sought to cultivate given the broad spectrum of disciplines, nationalities, and research sites it encompassed. However, because the issues that race relations researchers investigated dealt closely with questions of how society ought to be ordered and with issues relating to decolonization and the Cold War, it also proved to be a field with highly contentious and affectively charged stakes. As several scholars have pointed out, the political discourse that emerged in the US during the Cold War had the paradoxical effect of pressuring the US to address racial issues at home while also simultaneously narrowing the available scope of racial critique to a liberal framework emphasizing interpersonal relations.382 On the one hand, the US was increasingly vulnerable to international criticism

382 See Mary L Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000).

297 for its racial policies, because it had fought a war against a racist regime and because it sought to project an international image of itself as a leader of democracy and the “free world”. On the other hand, because of the centrality of anticommunism in postwar American politics the boundaries of Cold-War era civil rights politics were narrowly defined to exclude discussions of social change at the structural level or discussions linking issues of race with issues of class and anticolonialism.383

Given the heightened stakes of the field, race relations scholars both in US and in the

UK and continental Europe sought to distinguish their efforts from political activism and emphasized the objectivity and impartiality of their studies. But despite their efforts to eschew politics and remain detached, race relations researchers found it impossible to align themselves under a single framework. Unlike other social science disciplines, race relations researchers failed to create an international association that would align the various research projects in the field. Further, the UNESCO ideal of a moral economy based upon co- operation, transparency, and exchange proved much more difficult to realize in a field where some researchers had often been subject to institutional processes of marginalization and exclusion and where anti-colonial critique was stifled.

383 See P M Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Cornell University Press, 1997).

298

By the mid 1950s, the field of race relations looked to be a promising field for the development of an international association like the discipline-specific associations that had been created with UNESCO’s help in the recent years. The field had grown into a vibrant, transnational, and multi-sited field of inquiry, which brought together researchers from various disciplines in the social sciences. Much of the field’s growth can be attributed to a large and influential cohort of graduates from the University of Chicago’s sociology department, who were introduced to race relations research during the interwar period and went on to circulate “race relations” methods to other universities. Despite the predominance of “Chicago school” scholars and methods, the field of race relations was also comprised of other national and linguistic approaches and grew to encompass researchers hailing from all continents and including countries such as Brazil, New Zealand, France, the UK, and South

Africa. Race relations researchers were aware of the potential for comparative and transnational research in their field and began planning towards the creation of an international association that would allow them to cultivate a “world perspective” on racial issues.

A watershed moment in the rise of race relations research as a transnational field of scientific inquiry was the “Race Relations in World Perspective” conference held in

Honolulu, Hawaii in June 1954. The conference was the initiative of sociologists from the

299

University of Hawaii and in particular the Chicago-trained sociologist Andrew Lind, who sought to capitalize on the symbolic significance that Hawaii held for race relations researchers as a meeting point between East and West. The conference received support from the University of Chicago and the University of California, which acted as co-sponsors, and received funding from the Ford Foundation.

The location of the meeting was meant to reflect both the history and future aspirations of the field. Over the course of the interwar period, Hawaii came to be seen as a unique site for race relations research. Beginning in the 1920s, when American sociologists and Protestant missionaries first developed an interest to the Hawaiian Islands as a result of the University of Chicago led “Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast” Hawaii came to be seen as a tropical paradise and racial democracy. Because of its interracial makeup and unique geographical location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, social scientists and reformist missionaries came to imagine the Hawaiian Islands as a location that promised an auspicious future for the relations between races and between East and West. As Henry Yu points out, Protestant missionaries sought to capitalize on Hawaii’s unique location in the middle of the Pacific and mobilized to create non-governmental organizations where experts

300 from both sides of the Pacific would gather and discuss the common concerns of the Pacific rim: the Institute of Pacific Relations and the East-West Institute.384

Like their missionary counterparts, Chicago-trained sociologists developed a fascination with Hawaii during the interwar period. Sociologists imagined the Hawaiian

Islands as a sort of natural laboratory akin to the Galapagos Islands and believed they provided a unique site for observing the processes of racial and cultural assimilation at work.

As a result, Hawaii became a preferred research site for Chicago sociologists and graduate students who flocked to the islands in order to study what they referred to as “the Oriental

Problem” often with the aid of local students of Asian background.385 Although sociologists identified persistent structures of racial hierarchy stemming from Hawaii’s plantation economy and the racialised labour practices that fed it, they nevertheless maintained the optimistic view that Hawaiian race relations were comparatively more harmonious than the rest of the US and that the islands could thus serve as a model for race relations policy.

This interpretation of Hawaii as a tropical and racial paradise was incorporated into the prospectus for the 1954 Honolulu meeting. Describing the advantages for holding the conference in Hawaii, sociologist Andrew Lind wrote “by virtue of its mid-oceanic

384 Yu, Thinking Orientals : Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America, 84. 385 Ibid., 80-84.

301 detachment from the major points of racial tension and its well established tradition of tolerance and objectivity on such matters, Hawaii is ideally situated to sponsor a new, bold venture in interracial understanding.”386 Indeed, in the prospectus for the Honolulu conference prospectus, Lind explained that the need for new research ventures in “interracial understanding” stemmed from the growing influence of anti-colonial movements worldwide as well as the growing influence of Soviet Russia in Africa and Asia.387

Lind interpreted the incipient decolonization movements and the growing reach of

Cold War politics as historical processes with racial contours. Describing the emerging nationalistic aspirations of much of the colonial world, Lind argued that anti-colonial movements were almost invariably accompanied by “a rising flood of anti-white antagonism and a corresponding suspicion of the intentions of American and western European powers.”388 Given this growing antagonism towards former colonial powers and the US, Lind argued that the “security of the emerging world may well depend upon the skill and perspicacity in dealing with the complicated problems of race relations in so-called

“backward areas” of the world.”389 In addition to the potential impact of race relations issues

386 Andrew Lind, “Prospectus: Race Relations in World Perspective” (Honolulu, Hawaii, 1954), 3. 387 Ibid. 388 Ibid., 1. 389 Ibid.

302 on the “security of the emerging world,” Lind argued that questions of race relations were gaining prominence due to the “increasing participation in international decision-making by

“colored” peoples in underdeveloped areas” and the rise of new international policies recognizing “the necessity of aiding “backward peoples” to become active and voluntary participants in the evolving world economy and world society.”390

Lind’s prospectus for the conference also suggested that racial tensions were being flamed by the spread of Communism in the so-called developing world, thus raising the stakes for race relations research. “The problems of race relations have become interwoven with international politics,” Lind wrote and explained that this was due to Soviet Russia’s

“extensive exploitation of racial resentments” in parts of Asia and Africa where communists had fostered the view that racial discrimination is “inevitable and ineradicable under capitalism” and had also succeeded in identifying “communism in the minds of many

“colored” inhabitants of those areas with nationalism and with the movement for political independence from “white oppressors”.391

Lind feared that this confluence of anti-colonial nationalism and the stoking of racial resentment by Soviet Russia were generating race relations problems of a heightened

390 Ibid. 391 Ibid., 2.

303 complexity and scope, and worried that the existing approaches to race relations were woefully inadequate for the enormity of these issues. Indeed, Lind suggested that the lack of an adequate “international” perspective on race relations issues was due to “the narrow and provincial character of most existing knowledge in this field”, which tended to focus almost exclusively on the problems of “minorities” within national borders. Instead of this narrowly construed approach focusing on minority-issues within national borders, Lind argued that “a systematic and scientific approach to the world problems of race relations should be initiated” and that the Honolulu conference represented an excellent opportunity “to develop a world perspective on race relations” which would contribute directly to “meeting more effectively our crucial problems of race relations at the international level.”392

Although Lind recognized that the emergent racial problems were the result of political and ideological conflicts and disagreements, he also insisted that race relations research could provide non-ideological solutions based in facts and not values. Indeed, in the published collection of the conference papers, Lind sought to differentiate the goals of the

Honolulu conference from the Bandung conference that was held ten months after.393 Lind

392 Ibid. 393 The Bandung conference marked the begninng of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was the initiative of a collection of ‘third world’ states who sought to assert their indenpendence by refusing to align themselves as either for or against the two Cold War rivals (Russia and the US). As Akhil Gupta has persuasively argued, the Non-Aligned Movement represents and attempt to build a

304 criticized the participants of Bandung for failing to reach consensus on key issues and in particular for failing to issue “a common note of protest against colonialism in any form” and suggested that this purported lack of unity reflected “both the fatuousness of political pronouncements in the absence of adequate social knowledge and the seriousness of our present lack of knowledge with regard to the relations between the races of man.”394 In contrast to the supposedly fatuous approach of the Bandung meeting, Lind described the

Honolulu meeting as “far less pretentious in its claims to the attention of the world” and that its participants merely sought to “lay the groundwork of social knowledge such as the

Bandung conference probably lacked.” Indeed, Lind insisted that the Honolulu conference’s participants had the much more modest aim of insisting that “any sound social planning – of the type contemplated at Bandung or in any other political gathering – is obviously impossible without the kind of knowledge and understanding which they were seeking to assemble.”395

transnational imagined community built upon shared ‘structures of feeling’ and forms of solidarity, see Akhil Gupta, “The Song of the Nonaligned World : Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1, Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference (1992): 63–79. 394 Andrew William Lind, Race Relations in World Perspective; Papers Read at the Conference on Race Relations in World Perspective, Honolulu, 1954 (Honolulu,: University of Hawaii Press, 1955). 395 Ibid.

305

However, in enacting Lind’s aspiration to assemble fact-based and value free knowledge that could be the basis of “sound social planning” researchers faced the obstacle of developing a shared technical language and set of meanings. In the field of race relations research, producing universal meaning and agreement on how to define ‘race’ and of the kinds of methodologies to use to study race relations was complicated by the diversity of the researchers engaging in race relations research and the differences between the sites they studied. Although the participants of the meeting mostly came from the fields of sociology and social anthropology and were predominantly from the Anglo-American world, the papers presented covered diverse areas of the world including: Central and West Africa, South

Africa, the South Pacific, California, Southeast Asia, India, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and

Japan.396 Given the variety of field sites that were discussed and the various disciplinary and national traditions that were represented, the conference participants agreed to forego attempting to reach consensus on how to define important terms. Indeed, in the summary report of the conference the author emphasizes that the majority of researchers present agreed that consensus on how to define ‘race’ was both impractical and unnecessary. In fact, researchers worried that “…. no narrow concept of ‘race’ would meet the problem of analysing the complex phenomena represented in race situations” and agreed from the outset

396 Ibid.

306 to place “little limit” on the definition of ‘race’.397 In fact, the conference report described an atmosphere where “there was a broad hospitality to all methodologies” and explained that instead of a unifying methodology, researchers share a concern with describing “…the effects that industrialization, urbanization, improved communications, and political consciousness have had on a number of race situations in many areas.”398

The Honolulu meeting also provided social science experts with an opportunity to begin discussing the creation of an international society for the study of race relations. Indeed, even before the meeting took place, UNESCO officials and members from the International Social

Sciences Council (ISSC) advanced a proposal for the creation of an international organization for race relations. According to the proposal, the goal of such an organization would be to bring international researchers closer together, to facilitate the exchange and circulation of ideas, and to aid researchers in securing funding. The proposal also suggested that although the organization would maintain complete autonomy and independence, it would work closely with UNESCO. Above all though, the proposal placed emphasis on the scientific and scholarly character of the proposed institution, and stated that the organization

397 M Conant, Race Issues on the World Scene: A Report on the Conference on Race Relations in World Perspective, Honolulu, 1954 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1955), xii. 398 Ibid.

307 should be concerned with the “objective study of race relations” and that it would have “no political aims but would be strictly scientific.”399

During the Honolulu conference, the conference participants discussed the gaps in existing knowledge concerning race relations and many members emphasized the need for the comparative study of race relations. As a result, the conference participants decided that the best way to address the gaps in knowledge and to cultivate a world perspective on race relations research would be to create an international body dedicated to the study of race relations. According to Melvin Conant (an American journalist who acted as a conference rapporteur) there were several participants who hoped that an “action” organization would be formed but the majority were primarily concerned with having the society exclusively focused on research of contemporary problems and felt confident “that if the studies were

399 “Proposal for an International Organization in the Field of Race Relations, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, c.1954), 1. In the same year that the international conference on race relations was held in Honolulu, members of UNESCO’s DSS and the International Social Science Council planned for the creation of an international research office in the field of race relations. In a 1954 UNESCO budget proposal for the DSS, officials cited the need to supplement current research in race relations by “co-ordinating and integrating at the international level the studies of race relations which are now being conducted by many different individuals and institutions in various parts of the world.” DSS officials anticipated that during the Honolulu meeting a recommendation would be made that UNESCO set up an international institute or research office for the co-ordination of research on race relations, and argued that race relations studies would gain “new effectiveness” if they could be “internationally compared and were no longer confined to the country in which they were undertaken.” See “Present Budgetary Level, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, c.1954).

308 sufficiently precise and objective they would be of important aid to other scholars, administrators, observers, and politicians.”400 In the end, the participants agreed to create a nongovernmental and independent body that was given the name International Society for the

Study of Race Relations, and elected the Howard University sociologist E.Franklin Frazier as president as well as the European social scientists Georges Balandier, Albert Hourani, and

John A Barnes to the “Executive Committee”.401 The newly formed executives were given the task of drafting a prospectus for the proposed institute and assuming responsibility for setting up the proposed society.

It is important to note that given both UNESCO and Lind’s concerns with establishing a society with no political aims, the selection of Frazier and Howard University was quite a bold decision. Although Frazier completed his doctorate at the Chicago department of sociology and thus represented the sociological mainstream, he was also known as a social and political activist throughout his life. He was also known to have maintained close ties with members from the American Communist Party such as Paul Robeson. His political activism and ties to the Communist Party brought him under the suspicion of the FBI, who

400 Melvin Conant, Race Issues on the World Scene: A Report on the Conference on Race Relations in World Perspective, Honolulu, 1954 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1955), 141–2. 401 The participants also appointed Quintin A. Whyte (the Director of the South African Institute of Race Relations) as Vice-President and William O. Brown (Director of the African Research and Studies Program at Boston University) as the Secretary Treasurer. See Ibid., 142.

309 investigated his activities on several occasions during the 1950s and who kept close tabs on his scientific and political activities.402 Frazier’s views on the pathological nature of the black family also proved to be highly controversial and his work was often criticized as the intellectual foundation to the Moynihan report.403 Frazier’s appointment as professor of sociology at Howard in the 1940s was also a fitting union between a researcher who had engaged in political activism against racism throughout his career and a historically black institution that played an important role in the Civil Rights movement. Thus, the prospect that Howard would act as headquarters for the proposed society with Frazier as its president represented a major triumph for black American intellectual life and promised to raise the international profile of the institution.

In the months following the Honolulu meeting, Frazier and the executive began seeking out social scientists to become members of the society. Frazier, who had served as the head of UNESCO’s Applied Social Sciences Division in the early 1950s and acquainted with the members of the DSS, was quick to contact Alfred Métraux with an invitation to become a

402 See M F Keen, Stalking Sociologists: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (Transaction Pub, 2004); Saint-Arnaud and Feldstein, African American Pioneers of Sociology: a Critical History. 403 Daryl Scott argues against this interpretation of Frazier’s work, but his work was nevertheless at the centre of controversies surrounding what came to be dubbed the “black pathology thesis”, see Scott, Contempt and Pity : Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880- 1996.

310 founding member the society and to solicit his advice on other potential members.404 Métraux gladly accepted Frazier’s invitation to become a founding member and recommended several scholars associated with the DSS as possible members for the society including: Alva

Myrdal, Otto Klineberg, Roger Bastide, and Henri Vallois (the director of the Musée de l’Homme). In addition, Métraux assured Frazier that he would do “whatever is possible to help you in placing the Society on a firm basis.” 405

Not one to rest on his laurels, Métraux was quick to take initiative in helping create the proposed society. Making use of unspent UNESCO funds left from the 1954 budget, Métraux sent an invitation to Balandier, Hourani, and Barnes (the society’s executive committee who resided in London and Paris), and proposed that they meet in Paris to begin discussions on the Society’s prospectus and goals. Before the meeting took place Métraux sent Frazier a letter explaining that the Executive committee would meet in Paris and insisting on the importance of UNESCO’s role in the creation of the proposed society: “I was right when I

404 “E. Franklin Frazier to Alfred Métraux, October 5, 1954, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1954). 405 “Alfred Métraux to E. Franklin Frazier, October 22 1954, in 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1954).

311 insisted in Honolulu despite strong opposition that UNESCO should be brought in some way otherwise no support could come from the outside.”406

The executive committee met in UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris and soon after

Métraux sent a letter to Alva Myrdal describing the “two very fruitful meetings” which took place under UNESCO auspices.407 Métraux explained that the participants of the meeting

“expressed the view that the International Society for the Scientific Study of Race Relations could not come into existence without the aid of Unesco,” and that their discussions were focused “on ways and means of helping the society get started.”408 Métraux explained that the strongest idea to emerge from the meeting was for the Society to publish an international yearbook on race relations, which would “not be a dull bibliography” but rather “an “exposé” of the trends and ideas that have come forward on the research made during the year. In addition, Métraux explained that the year-book could also include “regional coverings on activities and trends” and that it should be “something interesting and lively, and serve the purpose of advancing science and not only of informing people of what is going on”.409

406 “Alfred Métraux to E. Franklin Frazier, 10 December 1954, 323.12 Race Relations (General Correspondence Files)” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1954). 407 “Alfred Métraux to Alva Myrdal, 20 December 1954, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1954). 408 Ibid. 409 Ibid.

312

As it turns out, E. Franklin Frazier was not as enthused with Métraux’s initiatives. In his response to Métraux’s letter before the meeting, Frazier expressed that he was “surprised and puzzled” by Métraux’s decision to gather the members of the provisional executive committee for a meeting at the UNESCO headquarters.410 Frazier reminded Métraux that “it was the consensus of the Honolulu meeting that the organization of the International Society for the Scientific Study of Race Relations should not be set up within the Unesco framework” and claimed that it was “strange” that Métraux arranged to have the Executive

Committee meet in Paris without “communicating with the officers who were duly elected to assume responsibility together with the Executive Committee for all matters pertaining to the organization of the new society.”411 Frazier, speaking on behalf of the society’s officers, suggested, “we would appreciate an explanation of this extraordinary action on your part.”

Further, Frazier described Métraux’s statement that “no support could come from the outside unless Unesco [sic] was brought in” as “baffling” and suggested that “since it may be interpreted either as a threat or a statement of belief,” Métraux’s formulation might not

“communicate exactly” his intended message.412

410 “E. Franklin Frazier and William O. Brown to Alfred Métraux, January 12, 1955, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, n.d.). 411 Ibid. 412 Ibid. Ibid.

313

Métraux and the executive committee members who met in Paris were both puzzled and offended by Frazier’s letter. In a letter to Métraux, Barnes claimed to be “surprised” by the exchange and offered to send Métraux the report of the meeting that he had written so that he could pass it on to Frazier and “clarify the purpose of our Paris meeting, and of the nature of our discussions.”413 Métraux responded to Barnes’ letter by explaining that he was also puzzled by Frazier’s letter and that he was “so hurt about it” that he had resolved to

“never again have anything to do with the whole business.” 414 Métraux explained that he thought he was doing the society a service by organizing the meeting and that the reactions of

Frazier and Brown were such that he would “not want to deal with the Society any more” and declared that he would only renew contact if “obliged to do so as a Unesco [sic] official.”415

Finally, Métraux expressed regret that an “initiative which was meant in all innocence to be a gesture of good will should have been so maliciously interpreted.”416

In his reply to Frazier, Métraux further amplified his feelings of disappointment. Indeed,

Métraux suggested that he would usually express “surprise” in response to a letter of the sort

413 “J.A. Barnes to Alfred Métraux, 28 January 1955, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1955). 414 “Alfred Métraux to J.A. Barnes, 3 February 1955, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1955). 415 Ibid. 416 Ibid.

314 that Frazier had written, but that on this occasion he preferred to use the term “pained astonishment.” 417 Métraux explained that it was certainly not the first time in his career “that an initiative taken in all good faith and with the desire to be helpful has been misconstrued,” but also that he never expected that his initiative of bringing the Executive Committee together “would result in a letter such as the one you and Dr. Brown have seen fit to write to me.”418 In his defense, Métraux argued that he had “no apology to make,” and that “the facts are simple and clear, no wicked or torturous intentions were meant.”419 Appealing to

Frazier’s experience as a “former Unesco official,” Métraux explained that there is usually some money left over at the end of the budgetary year and that it was the availability of these funds that allowed him to arrange a meeting between with Balandier, Barnes, and Hourani.

Métraux also explained, “Unesco’s cooperation was envisaged” in their discussions but that

“it was purely on a hypothetical basis and would have been subordinated to official action of the Society.”420 Further clarifying his position, Métraux insisted that “there was no intention of controlling the Society or including it within Unesco’s [sic] framework” and explained that he had informed UNESCO’s Director General of “the attitude adopted by the Honolulu

417 “Alfred Métraux to E. Franklin Frazier, 3 February 1955, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1955). 418 Ibid. 419 Ibid. 420 Ibid.

315 conference.”421 Métraux concluded his letter by stating that he found himself “at a loss” to understand how Frazier could have interpreted his “innocuous remark” in his letter as a threat, and that he could no longer co-operate with the Society as a “private person” and would only continue to do so in his capacity as a UNESCO official.422

Following Métraux’s letter, Georges Balandier also sent a letter to Frazier seeking to clarify the Executive Committee’s position, and how they viewed UNESCO’s involvement.

Balandier repeated many of the same arguments as Métraux, and added that “it would be a pity if the Society, hardly formed, should get divided on account of such things” and also explained to Frazier that he considered their actions to have “damaged the Society” and that he felt “certain that I shall have to resign as a member of the Executive Committee of the

Society.”423 Later that year Frazier sent an apologetic letter to Alva Myrdal pledging his loyalty to the Department of Social Science and attempting to clarify the situation. 424 Frazier began his letter by thanking Myrdal for a previous letter where she “gave a clear statement concerning what would be the relationship of a society set up by UNESCO [i.e. the proposed

421 Ibid. 422 Ibid. 423 “Georges Balandier to E. Franklin Frazier, 18 February 1955, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1955). 424 “E. Franklin Frazier to Alva Myrdal, 31 May 1955, 323.12 Race Relations” (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1955).

316 international race relations society] and the UNESCO organization” and then sought to clarify his own position.425 “Let me make it clear,” Frazier explained, “that although my statement of the situation was not true it was nevertheless the way the people who attended the conference at Honolulu felt about such an arrangement with UNESCO.”426 Seeking to mend bridges, Frazier assured Myrdal that he maintained “a deep sense of loyalty to

UNESCO and especially the program of the Division of the Social Sciences.”427 In a further pledge of loyalty, Frazier explained that he had always made an effort to speak about

UNESCO and the “important work which it is doing in the social sciences.”428

In the end, Frazier’s conciliatory efforts proved fruitless, and the proposed society was never formed. The hurt feelings and strained communication which is evident in the correspondence between the European members of the Executive committee and the North

American officers proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to an international society that was supposed to be based on a spirit of neutrality and impartiality. Instead of creating an international society that would offer a “world-perspective” on race relations research,

UNESCO assumed the more limited responsibility of performing some of the “clearing-

425 Ibid. 426 Ibid. 427 Ibid. 428 Ibid.

317 house” functions that had been originally envisioned for the society. As part of this initiative,

DSS representatives solicited research papers summarizing the state of race relations research in Britain, East Africa, Germany, and the US, and published these in a 1958 volume of the

International Social Science Bulletin. In spite of race relations researchers failure to align in the creation of an international society, traces of the ideals that were proposed for the society can be seen in the articles for the 1958 volume. Indeed, the preface to the volume announced that “social scientists, psychologists, and economists have all seen in the study of racial relations an exceptional opportunity of giving practical help towards the solution of an irritating and distressing problem,” and suggested that it was now necessary “to sum up and analyse the general trends to be observed in research methods and in the choice of problems to be studied” and that UNESCO hoped to offer a “kind of bird’s eye view of the present state of scientific research in the field of race relations.”429

However, this epistemological ideal of a “world perspective” or “bird’s eye view” on race relations did not materialize into something more tangible than a few articles and bibliographies published by UNESCO. Unlike the flurry of international disciplinary associations that emerged thanks to UNESCO’s support in the preceding years, an

429 “Foreword: Recent Research on Race Relations,” International Social Science Bulletin x, no. 3 (1958): 343–4.

318 international society for the study of race relations was never formed. Although it is evident that strained communications and relations between Métraux and Frazier played a significant role in the failure of the society, I think it is also important to consider the broader contextual factors that may have limited these actors’ interest in collaborating in the creation of a race relations society. Indeed, by reading the failure of the society as the result of more than just personality differences we gain a broader insight into some of the stakes raised by race relations research.

For Frazier, a politically active sociologist from Howard University who was the target of

FBI surveillance and who was disenchanted by the liberal antiracist stance adopted by the

Black bourgeoisie, the prospect of shaping the direction of race relations research and raising the international profile of Howard University represented an immense opportunity, of the kind not typically afforded to African-American scholars. For Métraux, on the other hand, who often found himself in the unenviable position of having to reconcile the various, conflicting, and passionate sentiments on ‘race’ that were stoked by UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives, the importance of impartiality and objectivity with respect to issues concerning

‘race’ were a significant concern. At stake in the control over race relations research were questions concerning the scope of anti-racist critique and the degree to which scholars would be willing to link analyses of racism with broader structural forces.

319

Like many black sociologists from his era, E. Franklin Frazier held little to no hope of landing a job at one of the white universities in the US. Although he was one of a small number of black scholars who were recruited into graduate programs in white universities during the interwar period, this experience in a non-segregated institution (which lasted three years) was the only time in his academic career that he was not in a segregated school.430

After he took his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1934, Frazier worked at Fisk

University and then spent the rest of his academic career as head of the sociology department at Howard University, which was perhaps the leading black university at the time. During much of the 1950s Frazier was highly critical of the narrowed scope of racial discourse that was the result of anti-communist politics and of the black bourgeoisie for its failure to address fundamental social and economic issues pertaining to race and for its abandonment of an anticolonial critique. Thus, whereas in the 1940s black leaders and the black press frequently engaged in anticolonial criticism and linked racism to historical processes such as colonialism and the slave trade, by the 1950s the black press joined the liberal consensus where racism was construed as an individually held psychological prejudice and a moral

430 Anthony M Platt, “Racism in Academia: Lessons from the Life of E. Franklin Frazier,” Monthly Review 42, no. 4 (1990): 29.

320 dilemma at the heart of American culture.431 Given Frazier’s views on the narrowly construed forms of racial critique that emerged during the anti-communist Cold War era and the anti-colonial politics of pan-African solidarity that he shared with other black sociologists such as W.E.B. Dubois and Clayton Drake, to have been elected as the president of an international society for the study of race relations represented a significant opportunity for

Frazier to shape and expand the scope of race relations research and antiracist critique. Given this context, it is much easier to comprehend why Frazier may have been concerned and alarmed by the prospect of UNESCO assuming control over the direction of the international race relations society.

In addition to the differential stakes that posed a challenge to the construction of a shared moral economy in the field of race relations, issues concerning the epistemological and ontological status of ‘race’ brought researchers into disagreement. Indeed, in an article summarizing the discussions held during the Honolulu conference, Albert Hourani (one of the executive committee members), emphasized that the conference raised more questions

431 On the changing stances in the Black press see Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957. On the rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and their influence in shifting discussions away from the question of the psychologically damaging effects of segregation that prevailed during the 1950s and were most evident in the testimony of social science experts in the Brown vs Education ruling in 1958 see John P Jackson, Science for Segregation : Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown V. Board of Education (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 1–13.

321 than answers. 432 Summarizing the conference discussions, Hourani described the doubts of one participant as emblematic of the conference as a whole. For this participant, the debates at the Honolulu conference raised fundamental questions concerning the boundaries and coherence of the field of race relations: “is there such a subject as “race relations”? Does the concept of 'race' suffice to define an intelligible field of study, divided off from other fields by reasonably clear boundaries, and possessing an essential, not merely accidental unity?”433

In response to these vexing questions, the conference participants developed opposing views.

Whereas some argued that a “science of ‘race relations’ was possible,” particularly if races were thought of as “historic communities,” which “… through long intermarriage and life together in the same environment have come to possess physical as well as cultural attributes in common,” others maintained the view that such a definition of race was arbitrary and insufficient for the development of a distinct science of race relations because it could potentially apply to all communities.434 Thus, according to Hourani, although the

“Conference discussed many interesting things, it was never able to decide what it ought to be discussing.”435

432 Albert Hourani, “The Concept of Race Relations: Thoughts After a Conference,” International Social Science Bulletin VII, no. 2 (1955): 335–40. 433 Ibid. 434 Ibid. 435 Ibid.

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In a sense, then, the challenges that researchers faced in the creation of an international race relations society were particularly fraught with tension and the possibility of failure. In addition to the political differences between the participants, and the differential stakes involved for the various researchers, Hourani’s account of the Honolulu conference reveals a failure to reach agreement on whether ‘race relations’ deserved consideration as an independent field of inquiry and to whether ‘race’ could even be considered an appropriate object of study. However, these disagreements about the scientific status of race and the organization of the society for race relations were not just abstract analytical discussions. As we can see from the exchanges between Métraux and Frazier, what was often at stake in the question of how to define the direction of race relations research was the very professional and scientific identities as well as anti-racist credentials of those involved. In this sense, the field of race relations research was one where the interpersonal ideal of neutral and tension- free scientific collaboration was particularly fraught.

For race relations researchers, the category of ‘race’ both as an object of inquiry and as object experienced in their personal and professional lives, was thus imbued with differing moral attachments and meanings that precluded researchers from coming together and creating a shared moral economy. The challenges social scientists faced were simultaneously of an epistemological, moral, and political order. In other words, in the historical context of

323 the Cold War and decolonization, the field of race relations research was not only fraught with the vexing task of reaching agreement on how to delimit appropriate conceptions of

‘race’ and ‘race relations’ but also with the task of doing so in a political climate where the conceptions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ that one espoused could serve to align you in a particular ideological camp. Thus, although the ideals of a peaceful and tension-free world order where scientific conceptions of neutrality and objectivity could serve to mitigate the intrusion of political ideologies proved fruitful in other social science domains, the field of race relations research proved to be too politically charged for the creation of a shared moral economy.

3 Attacking Racism at its Root: Child Education and Anti-

Racism

The failure to create an international race relation society reflects some of the major schisms within antiracist projects during the Cold War era. Consistent with the narrowed scope of racial critique that was a feature of political discussions of Cold War US,

UNESCO’s approach to antiracism came to primarily focus on the modification of individually held prejudices. After the failure of the international society for the study of race relations, experts from UNESCO’s DSS turned to child education as a domain with the

324 potential for taking more direct action against racism but still within the framework of individual psychology. Within the domain of education, DSS experts saw the opportunity to change attitudes from the ground up and sought to circulate antiracist scientific information with the aim of re-aligning children’s moral sentiments and inoculating them against racial prejudice. However, even this project proved to be too radical for the US government which sought to avoid any criticism of its racial policies and which sought to block UNESCO’s attempts to circulate antiracist handbooks for teachers in the US.

In this fourth phase of anti-racist work, UNESCO officials imagined ant-racist education as a more direct approach in the fight against racism with the potential to inoculate children against racial prejudice. As I will show in the remainder of this chapter, during expert meetings and in the pedagogical materials produced in the 1950s, experts placed special emphasis on the importance of teachers as moral arbiters against the development of racial prejudice in children. Indeed, teachers were described as occupying a unique and privileged position where they could transmit expert knowledge about race to children while at the same time cultivating the moral attitudes, sentiments, and modes of conduct required for the elimination of racial prejudice. In the minds of UNESCO social scientists, teachers were imagined as experts in governing human conduct whose task was to cultivate a

“democratic atmosphere” within the classroom where children feel emotionally accepted and

325 secure, and where ‘race’ is no longer experienced as an affectively charged object. Teachers were thus imagined as bearing the task of fashioning an antiracist moral economy at the grassroots level.

This section examines how UNESCO experts imagined the creation of an antiracist moral economy at the level of children as individual subjects. Whereas the first part of this chapter examined UNESCO’s attempts to create a moral economy among experts, here I examine the moral economy UNESCO officials sought to create in society through children and teachers. In keeping with the liberal antiracist discourse that was a feature of the Cold

War, the project of fashioning a moral economy in society was predicated on changing individual attitudes. By examining the contents of an antiracist handbook written by Cyril

Bibby, a British science teacher and scientific populariser, this section shows that the creation of an antiracist moral economy was envisioned as a process of re-calibrating children’s moral sentiments and cognitive beliefs so as to produce an atmosphere where

‘race’ is not experienced as a politically, morally, or affectively charged object. Ironically, however, in order to assist teachers in producing this moral economy Bibby adopted a polemical and moralizing style of exposition that raised concerns from the Department of

Education who argued it was wanting pedagogically and from representatives of the US

National Commission who deemed it too radical for circulation in the US. Thus, Bibby’s

326 handbook unintentionally served to re-inscribe ‘race’ as an affectively charged object and to narrow the scope of internationalist racial critique.

DSS officials began planning for the production of educational handbooks in 1953.

During this year, UNESCO decided that it would find two educational experts and offer each of them a $400 contract to produce draft handbook on “racial prejudice.” In order to identify appropriate experts, Alfred Métraux solicited the advice of social scientists and international educational organizations in the hopes of finding somebody with the relevant expertise who would also be passionate enough about the subject matter to overlook the limited compensation. Through contacts in Britain, Alfred Métraux identified Cyril Bibby, a British science educator, as the ideal candidate for producing a handbook and thus mediating between the “distinguished scientists” who had produced their race pamphlets and the schoolteachers who would have to face the more daunting task of communicating this expert knowledge to children. Bibby had worked many years as a high school science teacher, sex educator and science writer and was known for having published articles addressing racial myths and for giving talks for the BBC on child rearing and sex education for youth. During the 1940s, Bibby was an active member of Cambridge University’s Socialist Society and

Union Society, and a member of the executive committee of the Eugenics Society as well as a frequent contributor to the Eugenics Review. Further, from 1941 to 1946 he served as

327

Education Officer to the British Society Hygiene Council and then to the Central Council for

Health Education. In the eyes of UNESCO officials, Bibby’s career reflected an ideal blend of political engagement, scientific expertise, and educational experience and his experience as a sex educator and populariser suggested he had an ability to communicate complex and politically charged ideas to a non-expert audience.436

In September of 1953, Métraux sent Bibby a letter requesting his participation in

UNESCO’s antiracism campaigns and praising Bibby for the clarity of his work on sex education. Métraux enclosed a copy of Otto Klineberg’s Race and Psychology (1951) with his letter and communicated his hope that he might be able to synthesize UNESCO’s various publications on race and produce a popular work similar to the scientific pamphlets on sexual health that he had written.437 Bibby agreed to write a manuscript, but predicted it would be met with hostility and explained to Métraux that although he would attempt to be diplomatic, he could not see “how an honest treatment can possibly avoid giving offence to some circles in the USA, South Africa, etc.,” and further explained that he saw the “main problems to be negro- white, especially in USA and Africa; coloured-white in places such as the seaports in

436 For more on Bibby’s background see Daniel McNeil, “Race, Prejudice and UNESCO: The Liberal Discourse of Cyril Bibby and Michael Banton,” History of Education Researcher 85, no. 2 (2010): 74–84. 437 Daniel McNeil, “Race, Prejudice and UNESCO”

328 countries which, like England, do not otherwise have a major race problem.”438 Agreeing to write the pamphlet with these caveats in mind, Bibby followed Métraux’s advice of consulting the Race Question in Modern Science booklets with especial attention to the works of Klineberg and Leiris and completed a draft titled Education in Racial and

Intergroup Relations: A Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers.

One of the most notable aspects of Bibby’s draft is how it attempts to speak directly to the moral conscience of teachers, and thus to produce a specific kind of antiracist subject.

Indeed, in the opening paragraphs of the manuscript, Bibby explains that teachers dealing with questions of race and race relations will often find themselves in situations where their views will clash with the domestic policy of their own state “…in relation to racial discrimination, or the foreign policy of his own country in relation to colonial administration,” and thus risk losing their jobs if they engage in overt criticism of their political situation.439 Given the potential hazard of clashing with the policies of their employers, Bibby advised teachers to be tactful and to assume “…the responsibility of

438 Quoted in Ibid., 77. 439 Harold Cyril Bibby, “Education in Race Relations; a Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers in Secondary Schools, UNESCO/SS/Race/Conf.3/4; WS/045.118,” in Expert Meeting on the Promotion of Teaching of Race Questions in Primary and Secondary School, 29 July 1955 (Paris: Unesco, 1955), 3.

329 making [their] own decisions in the light of local circumstances.”440 However, Bibby also cautions teachers to not be overly compliant and explains, “the teacher must be sure that he does not sell his soul for prospects or promotion, or allow social cowardice to masquerade as professional integrity.”441

The notion that teachers have to cultivate moral virtues in their students and act as exemplary moral subjects in order to be teach antiracist lessons is a theme that pervades

Bibby’s handbook. Indeed, Bibby’s document places a major moral burden on the shoulders of teachers, who he describes as bearing the unique responsibility of having to teach children the scientific facts of race while also monitoring and changing children’s conduct and sentiments where need be:

Yet education is a much more subtle thing than mere factual instruction: it is concerned not only with imparting knowledge but also with influencing behaviour, and human behaviour is motivated at least as much by sentiment as by reason. Thus, apart from the comparatively straightforward job of telling children the elementary facts of race, teachers are faced with the much more subtle task of eroding undesirable racial prejudices and establishing sentiments of human kinship that will transcend all racial boundaries. This task is not to be achieved in a few set lessons: it will be accomplished only by long and patient process of sympathetic guidance. And most powerful of all will be the implicit assumptions and overt actions of the teacher himself, who by one exhibition of colour prejudice will set at nought any number of lessons

440 Ibid. 441 Ibid.

330

on the biology of human variation and by a single anti-semitic sneer will negate innumerable affirmations of human equality.442

Bibby thus characterizes antiracist education as both a moral and epistemological project.

Antiracist educators must not only impart the appropriate scientific facts and communicate scientific knowledge about race; they also have to assume the subtler task of confronting the stubborn, persistent, and undesirable “racial prejudices” that exist in children’s minds.

Because these prejudices are borne from deep-rooted sentiments and not from reason, Bibby argues that “mere factual instruction” is insufficient and that teachers will have to re-calibrate children’s sentiments while simultaneously monitoring and adjusting their own “implicit assumptions and overt actions.” Teachers were thus imagined as carrying the dual burden of monitoring their own behaviour while seeking to alter the behaviour of others.

The dual responsibility that teachers’ bear -- of moulding the attitudes of others while simultaneously monitoring their own -- is a constant theme in Bibby’s handbook. Indeed,

Bibby suggests that in order to effectively carry these burdens, teachers must become exemplary moral subjects. Teachers must extend equal sympathy to all children and be incredibly patient and caring in order to create an environment where children feel safe and where their prejudices and emotional tensions can be safely stripped away:

It must be remembered that the child who exhibits racial prejudice is as much in need of help as the child who is subjected to it, should be treated by the

442 Ibid.

331

teacher with the same sympathy and understanding, and in some cases may actually need protection by the teacher from the indignation of classmates who resent all racial prejudice. The securer the child feels, the less emotional need he will have to indulge in discrimination: and the teacher must therefore take care, while indicating unambiguously his own racial tolerance, not to appear to reject the prejudiced pupil. Each child’s self-respect must be built up in every possible way, and this can only be done if the teacher tries to enter into the mind of his pupil, no matter how much he may disapprove of its distortions and confusions and contradictions. It is a painful process, as any honest teacher will recognise from his own experience, to give up prejudices behind which one has sheltered for years, and we must not be surprised if our pupils offer unconscious resistance to efforts at their enlightenment. Any sudden and ruthless stripping away of a child’s protective covering may in the long run do more harm than good, and the teacher should seek rather to be a ‘lightening conductor’ by which his pupils’ emotional tensions and their accompanying prejudices may safely leak away.443

The very focused scope of UNESCO’s antiracism initiatives in this time period is nicely captured in this passage. Antiracism is imagined here as a process of moral and emotional re- calibration. Bibby’s analysis suggests that racism is primarily a product of deep-seated attitudes and prejudices, almost of an unconscious kind, and that any attempt to alter these prejudices runs the risk of provoking an emotional outburst. Bibby’s understanding of the nature of racism thus suggests that racism operates as a kind of moral economy (in E.P.

Thompson’s sense of tacit and collectively held values and attitudes) and that antiracism consists of re-calibrating this moral economy. This is captured in the metaphor of the

‘lightening conductor’, which suggests that the teacher should be grounded enough to absorb

443 Ibid., 42.

332 the emotional charge of pupil’s prejudices so that their emotional tensions may “safely leak away.”

However, Bibby also suggested that the moral re-calibration of children’s minds and of the moral economies that animate racism would occur once children learned what science says about race. In this vein, one of the core arguments of Bibby’s text concerned the nominalist nature of racial classification systems. Bibby argued that although children can undoubtedly observe significant phenotypic differences between “ethnic groups”, what children and adults often fail to take into account “…is that it is quite impossible to mark off mankind into a few simple and clearly delineated groups on the basis of such physical differences.”444 Indeed, Bibby explained that scientific experts could not come to agreement on how to classify racial groups or even whether the term ‘race’ ought to be used. Given this expert disagreement and confusion about the meaning and use of the term ‘race’, Bibby argued that what the teacher should aspire to is “showing his pupils how to use the word

‘race’ more exactly and to freeing their minds of the prejudices which the word so often carries with it.”445 To this end, Bibby recommended incorporating discussions of race and the

“main divisions of mankind” within biology lessons dealing with species and their varieties,

444 Ibid., 4. 445 Ibid., 5.

333 with the hope that children could be taught that “the native African and the native European, the native of China and the aboriginal native of Australia, differed sufficiently to warrant their being placed in distinguishable sub-groups of the human species.”446

In the same vein, Bibby argued that biology lessons should also address incorrect uses of the term race. Biology teachers should explain “that there is no biological warrant at all for such terms as “the Aryan race”, “the British race”, “the Jewish race”, “the Arab race”, and that these labels in fact refer to cultural, linguistic, or religious groupings. For Bibby this process of clarifying the appropriate uses of racial terms, had a moral as well as didactic function. In fact, Bibby argued that imprecise use of the word ‘race’ opens the doors to

“inexact ideas of all kinds”, and that it was because of this circulation of imprecise concepts that “…knaves and fools and charlatans have been able to lead mankind into racial prejudice and discrimination.”447 Bibby thus argued that by teaching children to correctly use the term

‘race’ teachers perform an important moral and epistemological task – they allow children to

“see the world about them more clearly” and they allow children to gain “some rational control over the emotional feelings which the word so often arouses.”448

446 Ibid. 447 Ibid., 6. 448 Ibid.

334

Bibby’s handbook thus reflects one of the fundamental aspirations informing

UNESCO’s antiracist initiatives. Antiracism is characterized as a process of re-calibrating children’s moral sentiments and cognitive beliefs so as to produce a moral economy where

‘race’ is no longer experienced as a politically, morally, and emotionally charged object.

Antiracism is primarily imagined as a process of eliminating the incorrect attitudes and beliefs that circulate within society and that constitute the moral economy of racism, and instead replacing these attitudes and beliefs with the facts and theories sanctioned by scientific experts. Bibby’s handbook assumes, like many of UNESCO’s antiracist projects, that by fashioning a moral economy committed to precise use of the term ‘race’ and to understanding how ‘race’ has been erroneously construed as an affectively charged object, experts and educators can produce antiracist citizens, ready to embrace the demands of modern cosmopolitan states.

3.1 UNESCO’s 1955 Meeting of Experts on Race Prejudice and Education

The participants of a 1955 expert meeting also recognized the importance of fashioning an antiracist moral economy based upon a scientific understanding of ‘race’ and shared Bibby’s view that science is a sufficient guide to enacting this moral economy and

335 that teachers could act as key catalysts in this transformation.449 However, like many of

UNESCO’s initiatives on the question of race, the meetings participants struggled at times to forge a common language and understanding concerning the concept of race. Nevertheless, the meeting’s participants applauded the fact that Bibby devoted a large portion of his document to defining and explaining the “… race concept as it is now understood and used by scientists”, and also approved of Bibby’s decision to discuss race “…in the strictly biological sense”, as only “one of a number of possible causes of tension in human relations.”450 Thus, the participants praised Bibby’s willingness to address race relations issues from the broader perspective of intergroup relations which included “…problems such as anti-semitism,” and the “…Hindu/Moslem relationships and the tensions generated by

449 In September of 1955 UNESCO’s Department of Social Science held a meeting of experts on “the promotion of teaching of race questions in primary and secondary schools”. During the meeting a group of thirteen “experts” as well as observers from various non-governmental organizations met to discuss ways that teaching of race questions could be promoted within primary and secondary schools. The experts attending the meeting were asked to consider two draft handbooks that had been prepared at the request of the DDS and which were intended for use by teachers who proposed to deal with “race questions” in their schools: “Education in Race Relations” by Dr. Cyril Bibby and “Learning to Live Together without Hate” by Professor Charles Hendry. In addition, several supplementary papers that had been commissioned by the DSS dealing with teaching and race relations or “intergroup” relation in different parts of the world were circulated to the meeting’s participants. See Richmond, “Report, SS/Race/Conf.3/10-11; SS/Race/Conf.3/1-2; WS/085.61”. 450Ibid., 3.

336 caste barriers in India which, although essentially cultural in origin, present similar problems to those which arise from racial differences.”451

Some participants, however, met this decision to discuss the question of race from a broader perspective of “intergroup relations” with some trepidation. Although many of the experts agreed it best if the terms of reference of Bibby’s document “were extended to include the field of intergroup relations as a whole,” some of the French-speaking participants objected to this request. According to the meeting report, several French- speaking participants argued, “the term ‘intergroup’ was not easily translated” and asserted that “they were not quite so sensitive to the limited meaning of the word ‘race’ as understood by English-speaking scientists.”452 Indeed, the meeting report suggests that questions about the translation and appropriate use of the term ‘race’ permeated all of the meeting’s discussions, and that the participants found it necessary to propose a resolution “…that while the term ‘race’ should always be used in its strictly scientific sense, the handbooks for teachers should deal with other ethnic group prejudices as well as those generated by race relations.”453

451 Ibid., 4. 452 Ibid. 453 Ibid.

337

Like Bibby, the experts at the meeting also singled out teachers as key actors for building an antiracist moral economy. Indeed, the experts at the meeting described teachers as the key actors “…in any attempt to modify prejudice among children” and as those best suited to this task of modifying prejudice because “…prejudice had its roots in the social environment in which the child grew up, and that there were emotional as well as purely cognitive aspects of the problem.”454 Like Bibby, the experts insisted that the teachers’ role would need to consist of more than the “mere passing on of information”. Indeed the experts insisted that teachers would also have to adopt an “action research” approach and that teachers would need to be aware of the “…the importance of their own relationships with their pupils, together with the influence of the home and the community.” Further, the participants of the meeting argued, that with expert-assistance teachers “…could be helped to deal with the kind of practical problems of human relations with which they come into contact in the ordinary course of their duties.” Finally, the meeting’s experts also dictated that teachers must make every attempt to “create a “democratic” atmosphere in the classroom, while recognizing that this did not mean any diminution in the proper status and authority of the teacher.”455 In short, the 1955 meeting of experts on education approved the

454 Ibid., 5. 455 Ibid.

338 publication of Bibby’s handbook and endorsed the project of fashioning an antiracist moral economy among children.

4 UNESCO’s Antiracist Moral Economy Meets the Cold War

Even though Bibby’s handbook and the project of building an antiracist moral economy through pedagogical initiatives was endorsed by the group of international experts at the

1955 meeting, officials from UNESCO’s DSS faced much greater challenges pushing their project through to the next stage. Once DSS staff decided that Bibby’s manual should be published, officials circulated copies of Bibby’s draft to other departments that would need to assist in publishing and circulating the document: the Department of Education (DE), the

Department of Mass Communication (DMC), and the office for Documents and Publications

(DP). Officials from these departments responded to Bibby’s manual with great trepidation and concern and characterized the manual as imprecise, overly polemical, and lacking in objectivity and impartiality. Although they did not disagree with the general project of publishing antiracist handbooks for teachers, officials from these departments argued that

Bibby’s handbook would not be useful for this task because of its heavy-handed moralizing

339 and polemical approach. Officials from these departments thus argued that Bibby’s polemical style exceeded the boundaries appropriate to UNESCO’s moral economy.

However, what the criticisms of Bibby’s manual suggest is that officials adopted a very narrow interpretation of the kind of moral economy that UNESCO should reflect in its publications -- an interpretation shaped by Cold War anxieties stemming from the US state’s concerns over how its racial policies were perceived internationally. Thus, in addition to raising concerns about the handbook’s polemical style, DE officials raised concerns about passages linking racism with slavery and capitalism, with positive references to Paul

Robeson and Josephine Baker, and with passages that spoke of the USSR’s more enlightened approach to “ethnic relations”. Further, DMC officials who were in close contact with members from the US National Commission (the organization representing US state interests at UNESCO) raised concerns about the possible anti-UNESCO backlash that the circulation of Bibby’s manual in the US could provoke. The end result of the various criticisms and anxieties raised by Bibby’s handbook is that its publication was delayed by several years; it was eventually published by an independent publisher and not considered an official

UNESCO publication.

The internal disagreements about Bibby’s handbook thus show how the politics of the Cold War shaped and narrowed internationalist antiracist discourse within this period.

340

Even though Bibby’s handbook was primarily in keeping with the liberal approach to antiracism, the occasional passages suggesting a more radical stance linking racism to capitalism and imperialism were enough to have it flagged as veering from the purported impartiality befitting of an organization such as UNESCO. However, what is evident in the correspondence between experts from these different departments is that their disagreements about the scope of racial critique that should be endorsed by UNESCO were often framed as issues of professional duty and integrity and thus reveal contending interpretations concerning UNESCO’s moral and scientific mandate. Thus, whereas those from the SSD

(who tended to be social scientists) were prepared to defend the more radical and polemical stances adopted by Bibby in his manual, those from the other departments were more concerned with maintain UNESCO’s reputation as an impartial organization and were thus very concerned about Bibby’s criticisms of the American education system.

A 1954 letter from Herbert J. Abraham of the DE to Otto Klineberg of the DSS illustrates the sorts of internal tensions provoked by Bibby’s handbook. In his letter, Abraham faintly praised Bibby’s draft, commending the “simplicity of its style,” recognizing that the author seems to have “a knack for explaining things to young teachers in training,” and noting that

341 the scientific information seemed to be “fairly accurate.”456 However, Abraham’s general assessment of Bibby’s manuscript was that it nothing more than a first draft and an exercise

“in setting down ideas quickly as they occurred to him.” Thus, Abraham explained that he expected that Bibby would “start practically afresh” once he had read the feedback and comments from his various reviewers. More specifically, Abraham claimed to have identified five major problems with Bibby’s manuscript:

(1)The purpose and specific objectives of this pamphlet need to be clarified and precisely formulated for the benefit of the reader. (2) The essential substantive conclusions - the key generalizations - about race and race relations (or whatever the subject is) need to be formulated positively and concisely. (3)In tone the pamphlet should be not rhetorical; it should be a piece of objective exposition and analysis. (4) Much use should be made of recorded examples of classroom practice. (5) Opinions, and their mode of expression, should conform to Unesco’s legitimate role as an international Organization and an agency of governments.457

Abraham’s list aptly illustrates the core concerns of the DE that would be repeated over and over in internal correspondence between UNESCO’s various departments. Crucially, the issues that Abraham raised do not concern the scientific content of the handbook but rather the style and form of Bibby’s manual. As such, Abraham’s concerns speak directly to

456 “Herbert J. Abraham to Otto Klineberg, 10 May 1954, EDCI-3/54041,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1954). 457 Ibid.

342 concerns about how a neutral and consensus-driven organization like UNESCO ought to perform anti-racism through the supposedly objective and impartial idioms of science.

Abraham’s concerns thus function as one of many interpretations that proliferated in this time period of what UNESCO’s moral economy should consist of. For Abraham, Bibby’s manual betrayed UNESCO’s moral economy through its excessive rhetoric and failure to perform a sufficiently neutral tone.

Indeed, one of the major concerns raised by Abraham and many other officials was the purported tone of moral indignation which they identified as a pervasive feature of

Bibby’s handbook and which they viewed as compromising the objectivity of the manual.

Thus, in reference to the compromised objectivity of Bibby’s exposition, Abraham argued that Bibby tends to use “many devices of rethoric [sp], which are unappropriate [sp] in a pamphlet published by Unesco, and which tend to defeat its presumed purpose.”458 As an example, Abraham disapprovingly noted Bibby’s tendency to use pejorative phrases and adjectives throughout to describe racist thinking such as “muddled-thinking”, “absurd”,

“meaningless”, “suggestions ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous”, “a mere myth”,

“the bromide of racial myth”.459 For Abraham, this moral overtone compromised the

458 Ibid. 459 Ibid.

343 objectivity that is supposed to inform UNESCO publications and thus constituted a form of moral excess:

A pamphlet published by Unesco to extend knowledge and reason should not be written in a vein of polemic and moral indignation. The moral postulates of this publication have been well stated in official proceedings of Unesco and by the Director-General. It is unnecessary to keep harping on the immorality of all who suffer from prejudice or exploit it (“charlatans and witch-hunters in their neferious designs”, page 109).460

However, what is telling about Abraham’s interpretation of UNESCO’s moral mandate and the standards of objectivity that are meant to inform UNESCO publications, are some of the examples that Abraham flagged as particularly egregious. For example, Abraham specifically cites the manual’s discussion of slavery in the Americas and of the intertwined origins of racial prejudice and modern capitalism as an example of how Bibby’s “tendency to lecture and moralise got in the way of promoting objective understanding.” Indeed, Abraham argued that Bibby’s discussion of slavery was reliant on the “dogmatic” view that “…virulent racial prejudice is a comparatively modern phenomenon, associated with the economic need of cheap and subservient labour,” and that this claim was unnecessarily framed in the moral language of a “…conflict of human decency and human avarice and self-delusion”. Thus,

Abraham concluded that the result of Bibby’s framing of the relation between race, capitalism, and slavery is that “…the reader learns more about the author’s capacity for

460 Ibid.

344 moral indignation than about the complexities of group relationships in the United States.”461

Abraham’s criticisms were echoed three years later by Jean Guiton, another official from the Department of Education. In a February 1957 letter addressed to various members of the Departments of Education and Social Science, Guiton explained that the DE had reached an agreement that the manuscript was not an adequate guide for teachers and that it did not contribute anything different from UNESCO’s previous race pamphlets. Guiton further explained that the manual did not have sufficient pedagogical value and that the

Department of Education could not assume responsibility for its publication. Further, Guiton argued that the manuscript was pedagogically flawed because the author had the troubling tendency of mixing up “historical facts (or, rather, anecdotes) with present phenomena).”462

Echoing Abraham, Guiton also re-iterated the claim that the manual lacked objectivity and added that the author seemed obsessed with black-white relations and narrowly focused on two countries: the US and South Africa. In his concluding assessment, Guiton predicted that educators, who he deemed the manual’s primary audience, would not be satisfied with the manual and that its publication would run the risk of provoking “unfavourable reactions”.463

461 Ibid. 462 “J.Guiton to M.Thomas, 20 Le Février 1957, Memo No. ED/57064,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1957). 463 Ibid.

345

The handbook’s potential for generating “unfavourable reactions” was the source of much consternation for UNESCO officials. Emile Delavenay (the head of UNESCO’s service for Documents and Publications) argued that the manual should be published as part of UNESCO’s “Towards World Understanding: A series of Unesco Publications for

Teachers,” but worried about the potential ramifications if the handbook was distributed in the US. In a memo to the DSS, for example, Delavenay explained that he did not feel comfortable making a definitive recommendation to include Bibby’s manual in the “Towards

World Understanding” series until the Department of Education had fully studied the potential repercussions of this move in the United States where previous publications in the series had already raised some very negative responses.464

The handbook’s potential for provoking political tensions between UNESCO and the

US was also highlighted by officials from UNESCO’s Department of Mass Communication.

In a letter written to the head of the Department of Mass Communication, William Frye (also a member of the Department) explained that he had been in contact with members from the

US National Commission and that it was their understanding that Bibby’s handbook “would

464 “Emile Delavenay to Mr. Marshall, le 18 Janvier 1957, Memo DP/SS/7834,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1957), 2.

346 not be distributed in the U.S.A.”465 Frye explained that “in view of the tension here on integration” it would be highly inadvisable “for UNESCO to be in the position of giving direction to teachers on this subject” and reported that there had been “quite a stir” in the US after the Associated Press carried a story suggesting the book would be distributed in the US.

Frye also suggested that the “Towards World Understanding” series should be withdrawn because of the backlash it was generating in the US:

Also, don’t you think it’s time for us to withdraw from U.S. Circulation the series “Towards World Understanding”, which is outdated, serves no useful purpose here, and continues to get us in trouble with the lunatic fringe?466

Henry Kellerman, the United States Permanent Representative to UNESCO, also expressed concerns over the manual’s potential reception in the US and about how UNESCO would publicize the manual’s publication in the US. In a letter to UNESCO, Kellerman explained that the US does not generally object to the sale of UNESCO publications in the US but urged that “…the publication announcements in connection with this book be prepared with especial care, that is, with due regard for the fact that since the subject matter itself might arouse controversy, the language used in any publicity designed to introduce it should be

465 “William Frye to Tor Gjesdal (Head, Dept. of Mass Communications), 16 January 1957,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1957). 466 Ibid.

347 objective and dispassionate in tone.”467 Kellerman’s concerns stemmed from an Associated

Press report suggesting that Bibby’s book would be distributed in schools, which prompted

Kellerman to insist that UNESCO strictly avoid any “…announcement which might convey this impression, but instead make very clear that this book is available for sale, as in the case of any commercial publication.”468

The various criticisms and worries generated by the handbook’s potential publication, prompted members of UNESCO’s DSS to defend the manual’s scientific content and the values informing the handbook. For example, on March 12, 1957 the director of the DSS

(T.H. Marshall) wrote a letter to UNESCO’s Director General where he explained that the project to publish a handbook for teachers was launched with strong support and co- operation between the Social Sciences and Education departments and that it was the DE who had suggested Bibby as an author for the manual. Marshall further explained that the project was currently overseen by the social psychologist Otto Klineberg who was working closely with Bibby to modify the handbook in light of the various reviews and that Bibby had practically re-written the manuscript after this first round of comments. In addition to highlighting the fact that Bibby had been initially been suggested by the DE and that he was

467 “Henry K. Kellermann to Emile Delavenay, February 14, 1957,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, n.d.), 1957. 468 Ibid.

348 working hard to respond to the criticisms of his manuscript, Marshall addressed some of the specific criticisms made about the manual. Responding to the criticism that Bibby’s handbook was overly concerned with the questions of anti-Semitism and “colour prejudice towards Negroes” Marshall explained that the book was written with the English-speaking context in mind and that examples were chosen from “subjects sufficiently near to the experience of their pupils to be intelligible and effective” and added that “the author has not tried to draw up a moral balance sheet for the world; he is not concerned with distributing praise and blame, but with explaining social processes with the help of suitable illustrations.”469

However, Marshall’s strongest response concerned the criticisms of the scientific quality of Bibby’s work. Here, Marshall was particularly adamant about the misguided nature of the criticisms. Marshall flagged Abraham’s criticism in particular, which suggested that the book was unscientific because it confuses “race relations” with “group relations” and does not give a precise enough definition of ‘race’. Marshall suggested that these criticisms must not be taken seriously because they in fact “betray a lack of familiarity with the subject” and explained that his views were shared by Otto Klineberg, “…one of the leading

469 “T.H. Marshall to the Director General, 12 March 1957, SS/Memo.10.365,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1957).

349 authorities in this field, who not unnaturally was not impressed by them.” Indeed, Marshall argued that the latest social science research pointed to “… the conclusion that race- consciousness and race tensions are special cases of group-consciousness and group tensions.”470 Based on this understanding of the race and group tensions, Marshall concluded,

“the belief that “race”, in the social sense, is something capable of exact definition and that race prejudice is a unique phenomenon are familiar expressions of the very prejudice which this book is attempting to eradicate.”471 Marshall’s response thus affirmed one of the key ontological stakes in many mid-century discussions concerning ‘race’ and anti-racism: that

‘race’, in the social sense, was in fact an object which escaped exact definition because of its dynamic and malleable nature, and that a failure to specify its precise meaning should not preclude anti-racism.

Marshall also addressed the criticism that the handbook’s tone was overly rhetorical and that its moral language might cause offence. Marshall argued that Bibby’s manuscript was very clear about the kinds of value judgments that inform Bibby’s exposition, and that the basic value judgment informing the book was that “…there is a consensus of opinion in the world that discrimination based purely on race is to be condemned.”472 Further, Marshall

470 Ibid. 471 Ibid. 472 Ibid.

350 asserted that the book’s language was actually quite moderate in comparison to much of the literature published in the US and that “... it would be absurd to publish a book designed to improve teaching about race if the author were obliged to take the line that teaching on this subject is already beyond reproach.”473 Indeed, Marshall suggested that the criticisms of

Bibby’s book suggested a refusal to face evident truths about race, and were thus complicit in fuelling racism:

It is impossible to overcome prejudice by placing a general taboo on the subject and passing over unpleasant facts in silence. A refusal to face facts is one of the mechanisms by which prejudice is maintained in its less aggressive forms.474

Like Marshall, Alfred Métraux also expressed serious frustration and concern at the DE and

DMC’s resistance towards publication of the manual and insinuated that the criticisms were unprofessional and that they betrayed his understanding of the moral economy of scientific expertise. Indeed, in a letter to officials from the Department of Social Science, Métraux explained that he considered the critiques of Bibby’s handbook “…a slur on my professional sense of duty” and argued that the full dossier of the affair should be examined “…by somebody else in a spirit of impartiality.”475 Further revealing how he believed the criticisms

473 Ibid. 474 Ibid. 475 “Alfred Métraux to Mr. G de Lacharrière (Assistant Director, SS Department), 19 March 1957, SSMemo/Me.hjl,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1957).

351 of Bibby’s handbook to exceed the bounds of UNESCO’s presumed moral economy of expertise Métraux explained:

I must add that after having served Unesco during seven years in this difficult and ticklish field of race relations, I am irked by the kind of attacks which have come from several officials of other Departments. I have, as a scientist, always been ready to accept criticisms as the whole dossier of the affair will show, but there is, in this particular case, more than criticism and this I resent indeed.476

Officials from the other departments responsible for overseeing UNESCO publications responded to Marshall and Métraux’s letters in kind. Much like the positions taken by officials from the DSS, these officials also appealed to their sense of professional duty and to their understanding of UNESCO’s moral mandate. However, the subsequent responses to the

DSS concerns also suggest that many of the other departments’ worries stemmed from the handbook’s impolitic positions regarding the racial policies of the US and the USSR. For example, Roger Barnes from the Documents and Publications service responded to

Marshall’s letter by insisting that there were still several passages in Bibby’s draft that were far too provocative to be included in a UNESCO publication and which therefore betrayed

UNESCO’s standing as an impartial organization. In particular, Barnes flagged the handbook’s “unnecessary sneers at American schools and textbooks,” as well as the

476 Ibid.

352 handbook’s descriptions of the Cold War’s impact on discussions of race relations in the

USSR as examples of passages that “…will not contribute to Unesco’s reputation for impartiality.”477 According to Barnes, the most serious of the offending passages was the following:

And wherever the creeping paralysis of the cold war has not made it impossible for schools to consider objectively the history and geography of the USSR, teachers have at hand a most striking example of a polyethnic state.478

Barnes’ comments thus show how the far-reaching politics of the Cold War served to constrain and delimit the kinds of antiracist positions and claims that could be adopted and deemed impartial within UNESCO. Whereas UNESCO’s intellectual and moral mandate was to promote peace through science, culture, and education, its further commitment to a politics of non-alignment coupled with the significant influence of US interests on its operations stifled the kinds of antiracist critique that UNESCO officials could endorse. Barnes, like many of his colleagues, chose the conservative strategy of interpreting UNESCO’s moral mandate narrowly and privileging the organization’s alignment with a politics of impartiality over its antiracist commitments. From this vantage point, the kinds of antiracist stances that

477 “Roger Barnes to the Director General (via Mr. E. Delavenay, Head, DP), 14 March 1957, Memo,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1957). 478 Ibid.

353 were deemed acceptable were also those that were least likely to cause offence. In the climate of anticommunism that stemmed from the US, the least likely antiracist claims to cause offence were those that spoke to the fallacies of scientific racism and the need to correct individually held prejudices. On the other hand, structural accounts of racism or claims about the lack of racial prejudice in communist nations were much more likely to cause offence.

Although Bibby’s handbook was scheduled for publication in February of 1957,

UNESCO executives decided not to publish it due to the ongoing disagreements between the

Department of Education and Department of Social Science and the concerns about the handbook’s reception in the U.S. Indeed by May of 1957, DSS officials were still waiting for the U.S. National Commission (a Federal Advisory Committee which provides expert advice to the U.S. Government on matters relating to UNESCO), to pass their verdict on whether the manual should be published by UNESCO. In a letter describing the status of Bibby’s manual,

T.H. Marshall explained that the U.S. National commission had submitted the manuscript for review to a committee of U.S. experts. Although officials from the US National Commission had yet to read the committee’s report, Marshall explained that they nevertheless believed

“…that the criticisms are likely to be of such a fundamental character that they cannot be met

354 by amending the text, but only by a complete re-writing of it.”479 For Marshall and the DSS these measures seemed excessive given that Bibby’s manual had already been reviewed by a panel of experts (many of whom were from the US) in preparation for the 1955 meeting.

Marshall communicated as much in his letter and argued that he did not see any reason why

“…at this stage, we should submit the manuscript as a whole to the judgment of an American committee of experts.”480 In fact, he explained, that all they had expected to receive from the

US National Commission was “comment on passages making direct reference to the United

States.”481 However, officials from the US National Commission reasoned that these measures were necessary because the manuscript affected the United States “more than any other country since so much of it dealt with the negro question.”482 What is clear from the correspondence is that officials from the US National Commission had little interest in publishing Bibby’s handbook and thus having any more scrutiny brought on race relations in the US. As such, the US government’s concerns over its international perception as a democratic and just nation served to stifle antiracist debate if it cast US policies in a negative light and particularly if it cast the policies of the USSR in a more favourable light. At stake

479 “T.H. Marhsall to M. Jean Thomas, 13 May 1957, SS/Memo/10.555,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1957). 480 Ibid. 481 Ibid. 482 Ibid.

355 here was a social issue about what kind of political system is best suited to confronting racial prejudice.

Later that month Marshall sent another letter to the Director General’s office explaining the results of the report solicited by the US National Commission. Marshall explained that the proofs of Bibby’s book had been “circulated widely to Government

Departments in the US, and submitted also to individual experts known to be entirely independent in attitude.”483 According to Marshall the report’s overall verdict was that although the reviewers considered it “…appropriate that Unesco should sponsor a book of this kind” they were nevertheless very critical of “its rather harsh and provocative tone, the tendency of the author to scold his readers, and the lack of balance in the general picture,” and objected to passages implying that “…because communist countries officially ban race discrimination, consequently discrimination on racial and other grounds has ceased to exist.”484

In the end, after several negative reviews from US experts and officials, the DSS decided it could not go ahead and publish Bibby’s handbook as an official UNESCO publication. As a compromise, the DSS resolved to publish Bibby’s text as a UNESCO

483 “T.H. Marhsall to M. Jean Thomas, 21 May 1957,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 1: Up to 31.12.58 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, 1957). 484 Ibid.

356

“document” which was then circulated to UNESCO’s various member states with the request that they distribute it within their countries and attempt to assess its value for schools and teachers. In contrast to the negative responses from the Department of Education and the US

National Commission, Bibby’s handbook was met with great interest from other nations. The

DSS received requests for translations and adaptations of the book from Israel, Germany,

India, Canada, France, and Spain, and the handbook was also endorsed by the UK National

Commission and circulated widely in British schools.

The internal conflicts and disagreements provoked by Bibby’s manual thus reveal the challenges UNESCO faced in attempting to fashion an international moral economy in a world where political alignments were often polarized and volatile. Although the officials from UNESCO’s various departments all tacitly and formally shared the aspirations laid out in UNESCO’s constitution (i.e. ‘to build peace in the minds of men’) their interpretations of how to implement that mandate was evidently shaped by the diplomatic tensions of Cold War politics and by the stifled framework of US approaches to anti-racism. The controversies surrounding Bibby’s manual show how antiracism was a particularly fraught and diplomatically complex domain of intervention. Although the majority of UNESCO officials and UNESCO member states could agree that racism was something to be opposed, the corresponding question of how to define racism and the kind of language, moral tone, and

357 intellectual framework required to oppose it were all sources of disagreement. The reach of the US administration’s anxieties over race, which were exacerbated by the international scrutiny brought on the US as a result of the Cold War, were palpable here. As historians of

Cold War civil rights discourse have shown, the pre-eminence of anti-Communist politics in the US, coupled with the US’ government’s concern regarding negative perceptions of its racial policies, produced a narrowly constrained discourse about the nature and origins of racism. The disagreements over Bibby’s manual show this narrowing of discourse at work.

Further, these internal disagreements between UNESCO officials show that Cold War tensions were often manifested as moral dilemmas where experts struggled to find equilibrium between the contending demands of scientific objectivity, international diplomacy, and antiracist activism.

5 The Moral Burden of Anti-Racist Education

Although the far reach of Cold War politics complicated the task of building a shared moral economy among UNESCO experts, DSS officials nevertheless persisted with the project of trying to build an antiracist moral economy in civil society. Thus, despite the resistance towards circulating Bibby’s handbook in the US and the fact that it was not

358 published as an official UNESCO publication, DSS officials embarked on a project to test the manual’s efficacy in the UK. While the controversy around Bibby’s manual erupted at

UNESCO, race relations researchers and educators in the UK began agitating for greater attention to issues concerning racial prejudice within the national education system. Thus, in

1958 race relations researchers and educators formed a “Working Group on the Diminution of Prejudice” and held a conference on the topic of how to introduce teachers to social science knowledge concerning intergroup relations, race relations, and psychological understandings of prejudice.485 At the same time, UNESCO began sending copies of Bibby’s manual to officials from the UK National Commission and to the Ministry of Education, who reviewed the manual favourably and approved its publication and circulation in the UK. In short, although the subject of antiracist education proved to be highly contentious within the context of Cold War America, in Britain there seemed to be a much greater appetite for curricular reforms with an aim towards the “diminution of prejudice”. Members of

UNESCO’s DSS sought to capitalize on this interest in the UK and chose UK as an ideal

485 See “Working Group on the Dimunition of Prejudice: The Place of Curricula Studies in School and Teacher Training Curricula, Report of the Third Conference, Held at the Royal Commonwealth Society, June 14 and 15, 1958,” in 323.12 A 31 BIBBY PART 2 (Race, Prejudice, and Education) (Paris: Unesco Archives, n.d.).

359 place to conduct experiments on the efficacy of Bibby’s manual in changing attitudes in schoolchildren.

DSS officials identified the sociologist Michael Banton (a rising figure in England’s emerging school of race relations) as the ideal candidate to oversee the experiment on the efficacy of Bibby’s handbook. In order to conduct the study, Banton enlisted a team of students from Edinburgh University who interviewed teachers that had used Bibby’s manual throughout the UK based on a survey designed by Banton. The results of Banton’s survey both re-enforced and undermined UNESCO’s ambition to inoculate children against racial prejudice, and the view that teachers must assume a significant share of the moral burden in this task. Indeed, one of the key findings from Banton’s study was that the likeliness that teachers would teach lessons pertaining to the biological aspects of the race issue was determined by a teacher’s moral qualities, namely their degree of “industry” and ambition.

However, Banton’s study also pointed out the limitations of this teacher-centred approach to antiracism and concluded that because racist attitudes and discourses circulated and thrived beyond the walls of the classroom, there was little teachers could to prevent children from absorbing the prejudices of their social environment. Further, Banton’s study suggested that many teachers were reluctant to incorporate antiracist lessons into their routines because of the extra work that it implies. Thus, whereas Bibby’s handbook and the attempted creation of

360 an international society for the study of race relations reveal the challenges UNESCO faced in attempting to fashion an anti-racist moral economy amongst international scientific experts and state officials, Banton’s study highlights the difficulties UNESCO faced in attempting to build anti-racist moral economy at the level of civil society.

A team of students from Edinburgh University, who recruited teachers from their home districts to participate in the survey study, conducted Banton’s study. Banton sent copies of Bibby’s book to the teachers who agreed to participate in the survey and told them to use the book “… in whatever way they thought fit during the spring term.”486 Over the summer when the Edinburgh students returned home for their break, they got in touch with the teachers who had agreed to use Bibby’s book and interviewed them based on a survey developed by Banton. Of a possible 231 interviews, the students managed to secure and conduct 120 interviews. According to Banton, the interviews were not designed to “assess teachers’ attitudes as individuals” but rather to find out “…if they had read the book, how much they had learned from it, and in what ways the study of such a book might affect their teaching.”487

486 Michael Banton, “Teaching Race Questions in British Schools,” International Scoial Science Journal, XIV, no. 4 (1962): 733. 487 Ibid.

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Banton’s survey results showed that the moral qualities of teachers was one of the main factors determining the extent to which teachers gave lessons about the “biological aspects” of the race issue. The survey results showed that about half of the teachers in grammar and secondary schools discussed the “interrelations of heredity and environment” and “the theory of evolution” whereas only six primary school teachers addressed these topics. However, Banton pointed out that “relatively more primary than grammar school teachers” had explained that “differences in the ways of life and temperament of peoples are independent of racial constitution.” Based on the survey data about the teaching of biological lessons pertaining to race, Banton concluded that the teachers who had tackled the biological aspects could not be differentiated “from the remainder of the sample by region, type of school, level of the class or even… the subject being taught” and that therefore “the limiting factor for the development of teaching on race is not the nature of the topic or the sophistication of the class, but the enterprise of the teacher.”488 However, Banton qualified this conclusion by reporting “…many teachers found they had to concentrate hard to follow the biological passages in Dr. Bibby's book.”489

488 Ibid., 734-5. [emphasis added] 489 Ibid.

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Banton’s survey showed that the majority of the teachers interviewed found Bibby’s manual useful and would consider using it in the future. “Most of the secondary and grammar school teachers who had neglected these topics in the past,” Banton wrote, “would probably deal with them to some extent in the future and many of the remainder would improve their usual teaching.”490 However, Banton’s survey also showed that there was a small minority of respondents who demonstrated a strong resistance to adopting Bibby’s proposed methods —

“apparently less than one in ten.” According to Banton, the majority of teachers who resisted

Bibby’s book, were either not convinced by Bibby’s arguments, or “ …were unwilling to change their present teaching routines unless obliged to do so,” while a few tended “…to think in racist terms.”491

As an example of a teacher who he described as advancing an “argument fundamentally opposed to Bibby’s,” Banton described the views of one teacher who claimed that the goal of Bibby’s book was “…to prove that there is no such thing as race and this is ridiculous.” Instead, this teacher insisted that “...race feelings go very deep and are complex,” and that they are “social rather than biological phenomena.” Given the deep-seated nature of racial feelings, this teacher argued that Bibby’s handbook and its emphasis on a factual

490 Ibid., 736. 491 Ibid.

363 approach concerning the biological aspects of race was not adequate to its desired outcomes.

Indeed, the teacher described Bibby as being “on the wrong tack” and described his book as

“inadequate in dealing with the matter” and as not getting down to “the real problems.”

Indeed, this teacher had strong objections to arguments about the potential benefits of racial intermixing and argued that “…group loyalties and ways of life should not be destroyed” and that “…intermixing is a threat to any way of life and this is how the problem arises.” Further, the teacher argued that “...most of the resentment on the colour issue comes from the coloured people who are most race conscious.”492

Similar to some of the criticisms voiced by UNESCO’s Department of Education, several teachers responded negatively to Bibby’s tone. Banton reported that there was a

“decided feeling” among many of the teachers that Bibby’s book “evinced a sort of high pressure salesmanship.” Many teachers felt that they “were being ‘got at’” because of the way Bibby pressed his case with such warmth and because they felt “he was oversimplifying some of the difficulties and neglecting arguments that might damage his case.”493 The issue of mixed marriages seemed particularly charged for these teachers and according to Banton many “felt that the question of mixed marriages was not always so simple and that

492 Ibid., 736-7. 493 Ibid., 737.

364 differences in social class and culture could complicate interpersonal relations more than he admitted.”494 Similarly, Banton reported that the great majority of teachers considered “the racial issue” to be one of the most important in the world and claimed to be very

“…sympathetic towards the oppressed and undernourished.”495 However, despite this evident concern with racial issues, most teachers suggested that their concern with racial issues was a matter of personal conviction that they “would not press in their official capacity” and that

“many of them avoided trying to prosyletize [sic].”496

In the conclusions to the report on his survey, Banton offered a circumspect assessment of the value of Bibby’s book. On the one hand, Banton suggested that Bibby’s book could be “strongly recommended” as a teaching aid “in association with other measures.” On the other hand, Banton suggested that there were several reasons for why

Bibby’s manual could not be recommended as a means “…of eliminating race prejudice in the schools of the United Kingdom.”497 For Banton, one reason was that “…in districts where racial tension was present racial attitudes were learned outside the school and brought into the classroom.”498 In these sorts of situations where racial attitudes thrive in the broader

494 Ibid. 495 Ibid. 496 Ibid. 497 Ibid., 738. 498 Ibid., 739.

365 community, teachers’ ability to effect change are limited. “Even if he can keep the children tolerant in class and give them good reasons for remaining tolerant” Banton argued, “ a considerable proportion will learn prejudice as soon as they leave school.”499 Indeed, Banton asserted that “as long as there are acute tensions in the community no method of instruction can 'eliminate race prejudice in the schools' to any worthwhile extent.”500

Another reason that Banton raised for why a manual like Bibby’s would not be an effective means of “eliminating racial prejudice” was because of the expectations it put on teachers shoulders. Banton concluded that teachers see “…this topic from an entirely different viewpoint” namely from the perspective of how much more work the adoption of antiracist lessons would constitute. Because teachers already “have a conception of their job, and of what work they have to do” and because they have often held these conceptions for thirty years or more “…they are reluctant to modify them because this implies that their practice has been at fault.”501 In order to adopt the sort of changes demanded by the antiracist approach encapsulated in Bibby’s handbook, most teachers “will need guidance in palatable form if they are to change their routine” and most of them will have to be “convinced that these new concerns do fit within the subject they have been teaching.” Further, Banton

499 Ibid., 740. 500 Ibid. 501 Ibid., 742.

366 suggested that because “most work in any occupation is in a sense routine” the teaching of race topics in the classroom has to be “considered as much a part of the routine as the teaching of Pythagoras' theorem or the history of the Wars of the Roses.”502

Banton’s survey thus sheds further light on the problems UNESCO encountered in its broader project to fashion an anti-racist moral economy among both experts and civil society.

Most notably, Banton’s survey shows that UNESCO’s framing of racism as a question of individually-held prejudices and attitudes placed a highly demanding moral burden on the shoulders of teachers to act as arbiters amongst prejudice in the minds of children. Bibby’s handbook projected an ideal of a strong-willed antiracist educator with impeccable moral and affective sensibilities as well as a strong command on the scientific knowledge pertaining to race. Although this is an admirable ideal, the responses from teachers demonstrate the problems with this approach. Without a corresponding political will to address the existence of racist attitudes in civil society more broadly, the expectation that teachers alone can do the work of inoculating children against racial prejudice placed an unsustainable moral burden on the shoulders of teachers.

At the same time, the results from Banton’s survey highlight educators’ reluctance to incorporate antiracist lessons into their curricula. Evidently, teachers recognized that

502 Ibid.

367 incorporating an anti-racist approach into their curriculum would require a major overhaul of their established patterns and routines. Teachers’ reluctance to make such changes stemmed from pragmatic considerations about the amount work this would require and whether this work would be justified by the dividends. However, Banton’s survey also shows that teachers reluctance to adopt anti-racist lessons also stemmed from a resistance to acknowledging that their profession was culpable for racism in society. Banton’s survey thus highlights the difficult questions of moral culpability that were raised by UNESCO’s anti-racist initiatives in the field of education. Unlike the French anthropologists discussed in Chapter 3, who struggled to come to term with their own complicity in racism, the schoolteachers in

Banton’s survey were much less willing to admit to moral culpability and moral responsibility for the legacy of racism. In sum, for the educators surveyed by Banton’s team, the expectation that they should shoulder a significant portion of the moral burden for anti- racism implied that they were being asked to assume responsibility for a moral issue that was neither of their creation nor of their choosing. For educators in the UK, Bibby and

UNESCO’s expectations appeared as excessive and as a betrayal of the moral economy that they already subscribed to. In this moral economy, teachers did not see themselves as the architects of racial prejudice and also did not see why they should be expected to shoulder the responsibility for inoculating children as racial prejudice.

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6 Conclusion

This chapter sought to reconstruct some of the challenges UNESCO representatives and other concerned actors faced in attempting to build transnational networks of scientific experts in the field of race relations and the political and ideological obstacles UNESCO’s

DSS encountered when trying to publish anti-racist handbooks for teachers. By deploying the concept of a moral economy that historians of science have used as a way of describing how scientific communities are formed and maintained and that social historians have used to highlight the unstated moral rules that prompt collective action in civil society, this chapter illustrated how transnational anti-racist projects in the post-war period were not always amenable to the creation of shared norms for co-operation and engagement. Indeed, whereas

UNESCO’s ambitions with respect to international scientific co-operation relied upon the creation of a moral economy emphasizing interpersonal harmony and friendliness, the vexing and affectively charged issues raised by race relations inquiry and antiracist intervention were not as readily amenable to such a culture of conviviality. Some of the early activities of experts associated with the DSS show that a crucial aspect of the culture of scientific internationalism that UNESCO officials sought to forge was a moral economy predicated on a commitment to scientific detachment and neutrality as well as the eradication of sources of social and psychological tension. However, this way of imagining the immaterial bonds that

369 tie together transnational scientific communities proved to be too fragile to sustain the creation of an international society for the scientific study of race relations. As demonstrated by the strained communications and hurt feelings between Métraux and Frazier, the field of race relations was highly charged both at the political and emotional level.

However, the tensions and emotions that flared up during the attempt to create an international society for the study of race relations cannot be solely attributed to fragile egos or difficult personalities. Although there were evident personality differences and difficulties communicating that factored in the failure of the society, the discussions during the race relations in world perspective conference in Hawaii suggest that the scope and content of race relations research was highly contested by the late 1950s. Indeed, the conference reports suggest that scholars found it difficult to agree upon key questions including: the degree to which the society should be advocacy oriented, what relation such a society should have vis-

à-vis organizations like UNESCO, and how to define seemingly basic notions like ‘race’ and

‘racism’. For Frazier, who was highly critical of the liberal anti-racist discourse and race relations research that proliferated during the 1950s, the opportunity to act as president of the proposed society represented a major opportunity to frame the scope of race relations inquiry and antiracist discourse. It is not surprising that he was upset after being excluded from the executive committee meeting in Paris. Métraux, on the other hand, who was altogether too

370 familiar with the disruptive potential of race issues within UNESCO, faced the unenviable task of trying to assist in the creation of the international society on behalf of UNESCO whilst maintaining the organization’s commitment to neutrality and impartiality. The failed attempt to create an international race relations society, shows that anti-racist social scientists faced a considerable epistemological challenge in producing agreement about the meaning of

‘race’ and how it ought to be studied as a social object as well as the moral and political challenge of agreeing upon the ideological scope of race relations research.

This chapter argued that the difficulties UNESCO faced in fashioning a shared moral economy were due to the different stakes that researchers held in the field of race relations as well as the complexities of Cold War politics. Many UNESCO officials and US-based race relations researchers sought to promote antiracism and simultaneously navigate the politics of the Cold War by fashioning an apolitical and objective perspective on social issues and by promoting “factual instruction” and science-based approaches to questions of race. However, in the highly charged domains of antiracism and race relations research, social science experts attempts to put notions of neutrality, impartiality, and objectivity into practice proved a difficult and fraught project where researchers efforts were often constrained by the anti- communist concerns of the US. For the most part, antiracist scholars and educators opted to tread lightly by subscribing to the models of antiracist critique accepted within the US social

371 sciences that foregrounded individually held racial prejudice as the key target for antiracist intervention and drew their inspiration from psychological research. What is ironic about the controversies concerning the publication of Bibby’s manual is that, for the most part, Bibby’s manual towed the liberal line concerning anti-racism. However, by displaying the occasional communist sympathies and by making direct criticism of American segregation policies,

Bibby’s manual did enough to raise consternation from officials from the US National

Commission. The disputes surrounding the attempted creation of an international society for race relations, and the controversies surrounding UNESCO’s attempts to circulate educational handbooks for teachers thus reveal how questions of epistemology and morality were intimately intertwined with the politics of the Cold War and decolonization.

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Conclusion: Anti-Racism Historicized

“Mankind will not soon forget the injustices and crimes which give such tragic overtones to the word ‘race’.” – UNESCO and its Programme: The Race Question, 1950.503

Broadly speaking, this dissertation has sought to revise historical understandings of the post-WWII career of ‘race’ by situating UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns from the

1950s within the multiple linguistic contexts of the Atlantic world. Within this expanded linguistic and geographical scope, UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives from the 1950s appear less as a decisive point of rupture with the racial ideologies that preceded the Second World

War and more as an attempt to parse the multiple meanings and projects associated with the term ‘race’ and distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate deployments of the term. For

UNESCO, this project of differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate deployments of ‘race’ was dependent upon the cultural authority and prestige of scientific expertise.

Indeed, given that scientists had played a significant role in creating racial conceptions and sanctioning the destructive projects that were previously justified in the name of ‘race’, the responsibility for redeeming the study of human differences and clarifying proper usage of racial language was seen to rest on scientist’s shoulders. In assuming responsibility of caring

503 “The Race Question,” in UNESCO and Its Programme, vol. 3 (Paris: Unesco, 1950), 1.

373 for ‘race’ and redeeming it as an object of study, scientists emphasized objectivity and political neutrality as crucial elements of scientific inquiry and argued that scientific approaches to questions of ‘race’ and racial prejudice could serve to temper the emotionally and politically charged overtones that characterized its existence.

At the same time, in the name of opposing racism, mid-century scientific experts sought to re-define some crucial ontological assumptions concerning scientific understandings of human difference and ‘race’. Indeed, scientists sought to refashion ‘race’ as either referring to real biological differences between populations that were the outcome of contingent evolutionary forces and had little to no relevance to questions pertaining to citizenship and equality, or as a sociological object referring to the ways that people erroneously imagine themselves and others as belonging to a racial group. In this sense,

‘race’ was seen as either having little political import (as a biological category) or as having political significance but only as an erroneous category (i.e. ‘race’ as a societal artifice). In the place of ‘race’ as a comprehensive way of imagining the embodied, psychological and societal differences between human beings and as an overarching narrative for discussing societal changes, mid-century scientists turned to anthropological notions of ‘culture’ as a means of understanding and governing human differences that would evade the fraught legacy of ‘race’. However, as we saw in chapter one, mid-century conceptions of ‘cultural

374 change’ were often inflected with biological concerns concerning how bodies adapt to different climates and were also advanced as a non-violent means to alter so-called primitive societies in the image of the West. In this sense, conceptions of ‘cultural change’ bore notable continuities with some of the racial projects previously carried out in colonial contexts. At the same time, as we saw in chapter three, for French anthropologists ‘culture’ was an object imbued with the promise of escape and renewal. For French anthropologists such as Michel Leiris and Alfred Métraux, ethnographic observation of so-called primitive cultures was seen as a means to escape the destructive legacy of the modern industrial culture of Europe and as an anti-racist approach to the study of human differences. However, ethnographic practice also raised vexing questions for French anthropologists concerning the complicity of their discipline with colonial violence as well as the degree to which their observations continued to be tainted by racial conceptions. ‘Culture’ thus proved to be a scientific domain that was not so easily disentangled from ‘race’.

‘Race relations’ was one important domain where ‘race’ continued to be an important object of inquiry for social scientists. Within the domain of ‘race relations’, ‘race’ was primarily understood as referring to the forms of racial consciousness that individuals adopted and researchers became concerned with mapping how these forms of racial consciousness varied in different countries and in different societies. As we saw in chapter

375 four, producing international agreement on how to define ‘race’ and who should retain control over the scope of race relations research proved to be an emotionally and politically charged project that brought the geopolitical dimensions of the anti-colonial movement and the Cold War rivalry between the US and the USSR into stark relief. Similarly, in chapter two, we saw how race relations researchers in Brazil had to challenge the paradigmatic conceptions of racism that emerged amongst US-based researchers (i.e. the race-as-caste analogy) in order to bring to light the ways that racism operated in Brazilian society. By examining these episodes where scientific experts struggled to reach epistemological consensus on how to study race relations and where they struggled to fashion a common moral economy that would enable an international society for the study of race relations, this study showed that questions of national identity, the economic determinants of racial inequality, academic objectivity and the scope of anti-racist critique were at stake.

1 The UNESCO Statements Re-Visited

Having seen the various ways that UNESCO experts struggled to reach agreement and the different meanings they attached to racism and how it should be opposed, we can now go back and read some of UNESCO’s most iconic anti-racist documents: the 1950 and 1951

Statements on Race. Instead of reading these Statements as marking the beginning of the end

376 to the career of ‘race’ as an object of scientific inquiry, I’d like to suggest that these statements were less concerned with attempting to retire ‘race’ as a legitimate scientific concept and more concerned with attempting to neutralize the affective charge that came to characterize its existence. The affective dimensions of this project are aptly captured in the opening quote to this conclusion, which comes from the preface to a UNESCO pamphlet that sought to popularize the 1950 Race Statement. In this quote, ‘race’ figures as an object imbued with tragic overtones stemming from a career fraught with injustice and as an object that will not easily be redeemed in public consciousness and memory. From this vantage point, the Statements can be seen as a public display of scientific unity against the illegitimate uses of ‘race’ that imbued it with such “tragic overtones” and as a public assurance that scientists could be entrusted with the task of caring for ‘race’ and its legitimate deployment.

Crucial to this task of redeeming the public’s trust in both ‘race’ and scientific experts, was the assurance that the Statements were the result of a rigorous review process and that the judgment and credibility of the scientists involved was of the highest caliber. Indeed, the pamphlet for the 1950 Statement explained that “every word in the declaration was carefully weighed” and that the original declaration agreed upon by the committee of experts was not

377

“the end of the effort to make the statement fully authoritative.”504 In order to make the statement “fully authoritative,” UNESCO officials ensured that it “was submitted to many leading scientists in various countries” who “examined it in detail” and “suggested additions and amendments.”505 Further, the pamphlet explained that this was a highly reliable process insofar as “the competence and objectivity of the scientists who signed the document in its final form cannot be questioned.”506 Thus, UNESCO’s anti-racist task was framed as one of redeeming ‘race’ from its fraught legacy in the eyes of the public and with leaving ‘race’ to the care of competent and objective scientists who would be entrusted to keep it separate from the illiberal political projects that had tarnished its reputation. At this moment,

UNESCO’s anti-racist hopes rested primarily on the reliability of the moral economies that underpin scientific objectivity. The UNESCO Statements can thus be seen as an attempt to remove ‘race’ from the realm of politics and to restrict its deployment to the rarefied and dispassionate world of science.

But what did the Statements claim about ‘race’? Although there were many disagreements leading up to the drafting of both the 1950 and 1951 statements as well as subtle differences between the two Statements, they share five crucial ontological claims that

504 Ibid., 2. 505 Ibid. 506 Ibid.

378 reflect the redemptive aspirations at stake in UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives in the 1950s:

1) that all races belong to the same species (i.e. that “mankind is one”); 2) that race formation is a contingent and dynamic process subject to evolutionary forces that produce biological populations distinguished by shared gene frequencies (and not to be confused with the arbitrary racial classifications that people typically deploy); 3) that the differences in material

‘development’ between so-called civilizations can be attributed to different cultural histories as opposed to inherited genetic traits; 4) that educability and plasticity are the most characteristic mental traits of human beings; 5) that race-mixture and racial intermarriage have no harmful consequences.507

These five claims, I argue, represent both the negative and the positive ontological dimensions of UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns. On the one hand, UNESCO’s anti-racist initiatives were concerned with discrediting and negating the illegitimate conceptions of

‘race’ that had tarnished the reputation of racial classification and scientific inquiry into human biological variation. Thus, with memories of the Nazi Holocaust fresh in mind,

507 This a paraphrasing of some of the most crucial claims from both the 1950 and 1951 Statements, which are reproduced in this UNESCO book: Four Statements on the Race Question (Paris: Unesco, 1969). For a discussion of the subtle differences between the two statements see Jean Gayon, “Do Biologists Need the Expression’Human Races'? UNESCO 1950-51,” in Bioethical and Ethical Issues Surrounding the Trials and Code of Nuremberg : Nuremberg Revisited, ed. Jacques J Rozenberg (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), 23–48.

379 scientific experts sought to discredit conceptions of ‘race’ that gave rise to eugenic projects and instead re-formulate the process of race formation as subject to broad evolutionary forces largely beyond the realm of human control and distinct from the process of cultural formation. If we focus on this negative dimension of the UNESCO Statements (i.e. concerned with negating certain ways of thinking about ‘race’) it is the North American and

European context of scientific racism and early twentieth century eugenics that appears most prominently.

However, if we focus on the more positive ontological claims found in the statements

(i.e. that material progress is the result of cultural history and the notion that humans are characterized by their educability and plasticity) a more relevant context becomes that of colonial and postcolonial nations, and the Global South. Indeed, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 of this study, scientific knowledge concerning the cultural determinants of biological human differences and the relations between racial groups served to enable the aspirations of

‘cultural change’ and modernization that scientific experts projected onto places deemed

“primitive” or “traditional” such as the Amazon or the Brazilian state of Bahia. Instead of projects seeking to reform societies through the control of human heredity, by the post-WWII era notions of ‘culture’ and ‘race relations’ were now solidifying their place as viable and promising candidates through which scientific experts could understand social reality and

380 make prescriptions for societal reform. In UNESCO’s iconic anti-racist statements and related projects, scientific investigations of cultural change and cultural difference thus loomed as a propitious epistemic space that promised to provide crucial answers to the question of how to narrow the gap between so-called ‘backward’ and ‘modern’ nations and to better integrate societies.

It is by paying closer attention to these positive ontological aspects of the UNESCO

Statements (and UNESCO’s anti-racism projects more broadly) that we gain traction on how to situate UNESCO’s anti-racist ambitions within a broader cartography and which allow us to establish their relation to the multiple cultural and linguistic contexts of the Atlantic region. Indeed, it is the positive aspirations animating UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives that most acutely demonstrate the redemptive aspects of UNESCO’s project and sought to distance themselves from the fraught legacy of ‘race’. Instead of reading the Statements narrowly as a reactive project (namely as an attempt to repudiate scientific racism and as a response to Auschwitz and to the eugenic projects of the early twentieth century, which is a reading that primarily foregrounds the North America and Europe context) we can thus begin to read the UNESCO Statements (and UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns more broadly) as part of post-WWII attempts to find different ways to govern interpersonal and international relations, to imagine transnational communities, and to alter and reform societies in the

381

Global South to fit the image of a modern industrialized West. By situating the UNESCO

Statements and anti-racism initiatives within the genealogy of notions such as ‘international development’, ‘culture’, and ‘race relations’ the frames of empire, the cold war, and decolonization become much more relevant.

2 The Persistence Of ‘Race’

Once situated in this expanded geographical frame, the subsequent history of UNESCO’s anti-racism campaigns (that this dissertation has examined) suggests that even in the sociocultural domain ‘race’ proved to be a resilient and stubborn object that resisted scientific experts’ attempts to bypass its significance. After the publication of the 1950 and

1951 statements, UNESCO’s anti-racist efforts shifted from popularizing what scientists deemed to be appropriate conceptions of ‘race’ in light of the latest developments in genetics and population biology, to understanding how racial conceptions (whether false or correct) operate in society and the relationship they bear to the historical and cultural trajectories of particular nations. Over the course of the 1950s, scientific experts associated with

UNESCO’s DSS became increasingly concerned with understanding the ways that immaterial and imperceptible objects like ideologies, stereotypes, attitudes, cultural patterns, and social relations are shaped by racial conceptions and drew from a body of social science

382 knowledge developed within the interwar period to further assemble scientific understandings concerning the social dimensions of ‘race’.

Thus, in chapter one, we saw how conceptions of ‘cultural change’ both in their evolutionary and anthropological guises were inflected with biological concerns about the kinds of bodies that are best suited to tropical environments and with projects of improvement that bore similarities to the colonial governmentalities that had previously been predicated on ‘race’. In chapter two, we saw how American scientists and UNESCO officials turned to Brazil in search of an example of nation free of racism and where ‘race’ did not figure as a category with political import. However, in their search for a polity free from the trappings of ‘race’, the social scientists charged with carrying out UNESCO’s studies instead found substantial evidence for the various ways that ‘race’ had a significant presence in

Brazilian society and the ways that racial conceptions were entangled with the social and economic structure of Brazil’s population.

Similarly, the anti-racist Francophone anthropologists we encountered in Chapter three, sought to distance their ethnographic practices from colonial projects and from race science but, particularly in the case of Leiris, found there ways of seeing the world inexorably tinged with racial overtones. Thus, figures such as Michel Leiris, Roger Bastide, Alfred Métraux, and Claude Lévi-Strauss came to imagine the 'primitive' as source for cultural renewal and as

383 a source for redemption from what they perceived to bet the violent legacy of industrialized modernity. For these figures, the religions and cultural practices of Afro-descendant and indigenous communities in the Americas appeared as radically distinct from the Cartesian culture and philosophical tradition that they grew up in and reminded them of the contingency and alterability of their own culture while providing them with an opportunity to observe and experience cultural possibilities that did not exist within their own society.

However, French anthropologists were also the heirs to an anthropological tradition that was borne from the colonial interests of the French empire and which had the modernization of so-called primitives as one of its key aims. French anthropologists thus oscillated between the conflicting imperatives of preserving cultural otherness as something valuable in and of itself and a pragmatic recognition of modernization (and the reformation of primitive cultures) as an inevitable and perhaps desirable outcome of cultural contact.

Finally, in chapter four, we saw how the moral economies that underpin scientific objectivity and neutrality proved insufficient for dealing with questions of ‘race’ and

‘racism’. Indeed, in this chapter, the failed attempt to create an international society for race relations research and the controversies provoked by Bibby’s handbook show how ‘race’ persisted as a charged object that created tension and disharmony in spite of UNESCO experts best attempts to remain neutral and dispassionate. Further, the controversies and

384 disagreements described in this chapter show how a moral economy predicated on neutrality and objectivity was often deployed as a means to advance the strategic interests of the US state within UNESCO and to dampen anti-colonial and structural anti-racist approaches.

From this vantage point, it is clear that the politics of the Cold War served to constrain anti- racism and the forms of transnational community that scientific experts sought to build to a liberal framework that equated racism with individually held prejudice and was primarily concerned with producing harmonious interpersonal relations.

3 The 1960s And Decolonization: A Shift In Discourse?

However, if we move forward to the 1960s (when decolonization was at its peak and when UNESCO’s membership was significantly increased with newly created nations from

Africa and other parts of the world) and examine UNESCO’s anti-racist publications we can see a notable shift in tone. By the mid 1960s, UNESCO officials decided that it was necessary to issue updated statements concerning scientific understandings of ‘race’ in light of the rise of the Apartheid regime in South Africa and persistent anti-Semitic manifestations in Europe. Instead of drafting a single comprehensive and all-encompassing statement,

UNESCO officials arranged for the publication of two statements: 1) the 1964 statement titled “Proposals on the biological aspects of race” that was drafted by an international

385 committee of biologists in Moscow and which was intended to issue a revised statement of the “biological aspects of the race question” in light of the most recent developments in genetics and 2) the 1967 “Statement on Race and Racial Prejudice” which was drafted by a team of legal experts and social scientists representing disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, political science and drawn from both the Global North and South.508 The

1967 statement, in particular, reflects the different sensibility that UNESCO’s publications adopted in this time period. Whereas previous statements focused primarily on the scientific aspects of the question, the 1967 candidly acknowledged that “faced with the exposure of the falsity of its biological doctrines, racism finds ever new stratagems for justifying the inequality of groups.”509 Indeed, the 1967 statement suggested that “in order to undermine racism it is not sufficient that biologists should expose its fallacies.”510 Instead, the statement

508 The team was comprised of Muddathir Abdel Rahim, University of Khartoum (Sudan); Georges Balandier, Université de Paris (France); Celio de Oliveira Borja, University of Guanabara (Brazil); Lloyd Braithwaite, University of the West Indies (Jamaica); Leonard Broom, University of Texas (United States);G. F. Debetz, Institute of Ethnography, Moscow (USSR); J. Djordjevic, University of Belgrade (Yugoslavia); Clarence Clyde Fergusm, Howard University (United States); Dr Dharam P. Ghai, University College (Kenya); Louis Guttman, Hebrew University (Israel); Jean Hiernaux, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium); A. Kloskowska, University of Lodz (Poland); Kéba M’Baye, President of the Supreme Court (Senegal); John Rex, University of Durham (United Kingdom); Mariano R. Solveira, University of Havana (Cuba); Hisashi Suzuki, University of Tokyo (Japan); Romila Thapar, University of Delhi (India); C. H. Waddington, University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom), see Four Statements on the Race Question, 55. 509 Ibid., 51. 510 Ibid., 52.

386 argued that it was also necessary that “psychologists and sociologists should demonstrate its causes” and that “the social structure is always an important factor.” At the same time, the statement struck an optimistic tone in arguing that the “anti-colonial revolution of the twentieth century has opened up new possibilities for eliminating the scourge of racism.”511

Although a more detailed history of UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives from the 1960s forward is beyond the scope of this study, the very brief history that can be gleaned from the

1967 declaration serves as useful vantage point for thinking about the historical specificity of

UNESCO’s anti-racism initiatives in the 1950s. Once we look back from the vantage point of the 1967 statement, we can see more clearly how anti-racism in the 1950s was constrained to a liberal framework that placed its hopes in the corrective power of science and in the redemptive promise of anthropological conceptions of ‘culture’. Anti-racist publications from the 1950s endorsed the redemptive aspiration that science could undermine the moral and political valence of ‘race’ and escape the pernicious legacy of scientific racism by exposing the contradictions inherent in racial discourses and re-classifying ‘race’ as a social artifact.

However, in a short period of roughly twenty years characterized by major geopolitical re- alignments, this anti-racist approach itself came to be seen as a historical artifact. Rather than indexing an end to ‘race’ UNESCO’s prior and ongoing anti-racism initiatives thus speak to

511 Ibid., 51-2.

387 the persistence and plasticity of ‘race’ and of the need to acknowledge its ongoing presence rather than attempt to escape its legacy.

388

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