Topic
Biological anthropology
About: Biological anthropology is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1126 publications have been published within this topic receiving 12757 citations. The topic is also known as: biological anthropology & somatology.
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TL;DR: In the 1960s, when the use of non-documentary sources of evidence to reconstruct history in Africa first achieved prominence, physical anthropology was thought to offer some potential as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In the 1960s, when the use of non-documentary sources of evidence to reconstruct history in Africa first achieved prominence, physical anthropology was thought to offer some potential. Of particular interest to African historians was the new genetic approach, with its emphasis on comparative studies of blood group distributions. This resulted in several papers in books and journals of African history, where the promise of these new physical anthropological techniques was pointed out to historians. The influence of these early articles has waned, however, and recent books on historical method in Africa give physical anthropology little prominence.References to physical anthropology in the book by Thomas Spear, for instance, a book that introduces “historical method” in Africa, are relegated to the chapter on “the archaeological record” and are perfunctory. In particular there is a failure to appreciate the implications of the fundamental difference between the analysis of excavated human biological remains--a branch of physical anthropology which has much in common with archeology--and the deduction of more recent evolutionary and non-evolutionary history from the comparative analysis of the biological characteristics of living peoples--a branch of physical anthropology that is much more similar to linguistics than to archeology.
3 citations
01 Jan 2010
3 citations
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3 citations
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TL;DR: This article analyzed how physical anthropologists created scientific circuits between the Netherlands and their colonies in the East Indies and showed that national and imperial anthropology were not two separate spheres and that the movement of anthropologists and their objects was important both for the making of anthropology as a scientific discipline and for making anthropological ideas.
Abstract: This article analyses how physical anthropologists created scientific circuits between the Netherlands and their colonies in the East Indies. It shows that national and imperial anthropology were not two separate spheres and that the movement of anthropologists and their objects was important both for the making of anthropology as a scientific discipline and for making anthropological ideas. Trying to define the physical features of people in Dutch fishing villages and in East Indies inland regions, anthropologists formed geographies of imaginary difference. Anthropological data from the Indies however was valued more highly than that from the Netherlands, which means that distance continued to matter. New Imperial Historians would therefore do better to sharpen their perception of these uneven geographies.
3 citations