Focaal

Although research on the history of physical anthropology in Central and Southeastern Europe has increased significantly since the 1990s the impact race had on the discipline's conceptual maturity has yet to be fully addressed. Once physical anthropology is recognized as having preserved inter-war racial tropes within scientific discourses about national communities, new insights on how nationalism developed during the 1970s and 1980s will emerge, both in countries belonging to the communist East—Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, and in those belonging to the West—Austria and Greece. By looking at the relationship between race and physical anthropology in these countries after 1945 it becomes clear what enabled the recurrent themes of ethnic primordiality, racial continuity, and de-nationalizing of ethnic minorities not only to flourish during the 1980s but also to re-emerge overtly during political changes characterizing the last two decades.

This article focuses on interwar Austrian physical anthropology, tracing its scientific aspirations, gradual institutionalization, and wider popularization during the interwar period. Largely concentrated in Vienna, Austrian physical anthropologists debated racial questions extensively and conducted racial evaluations based on detailed morphological studies and in-depth analysis of facial "racial" traits. This method was considered ideal for genealogical studies. A host of new societies and working groups collaborated to develop new methodologies and create influential links to universities and public institutions. Within this context, a certificate or "proof of paternity" was developed to resolve disputed court cases. Not only did issuing these certificates become a key source of work and income for anthropologists and their organizations, they also marked the discipline's crucial shift from a theoretical to an applied science.

This article discusses the relationship between race and physical anthropology in Hungary and Romania between 1900 and 1940. It begins by looking at institutional developments in both countries and how these influenced the most important Hungarian and Romanian anthropologists' professional and research agendas. Drawing from a wide range of primary sources, the article reveals the significant role the concept of race played in articulating anthropological and ethnic narratives of national belonging. It is necessary to understand the appeal of the idea of race in this context. With idealized images of national communities and racial hierarchies creeping back into Eastern European popular culture and politics, one needs to understand the latent and often unrecognized legacies of race in shaping not only scientific disciplines like anthropology, but also the emergence and entrancement of modern Hungarian and Romanian nationalism.

This article engages with the commonly encountered claim that Bulgarian physical anthropology "features a long, fruitful, and honorable existence," by discussing Bulgarian anthropology's contribution to the controversial issue of ethnogenesis. With the Russian influence waning from the mid-1880s on, the pioneers of Bulgarian anthropology were largely influenced by the German example. But the first generation of Bulgarian anthropologists' tradition of "racial liberalism" (Benoit Massin) was lost after World War I. On the eve of World War II a debate on racism raged among Bulgarian intellectuals. By the time blood group analysis had joined anthropometrics, adherents of a closer collaboration with the Third Reich used it to argue for the Bulgarian nation's non-Slavic origins. In 1938 they even disrupted a lecture given by the biologist Metodiy Popov when he wanted to stress the Bulgarians' ethnic relationship with the other Slavic nations, and to repudiate the idea of a hierarchy of races. During the Socialist period a new generation of anthropologists went on to investigate the Bulgarian ethnogenesis using the term "race", although this clearly contravened the 1950 UNESCO statement on the race question.

This article deals with the theory of the "strong nucleus of the Greek race" elaborated by the Greek physical anthropologist Ioannis Koumaris (1879-1970), who headed all academic anthropological institutions in Greece between 1915 and 1970. According to this theory human groups were in a state of "fluid constancy," meaning that the "proper" nucleus of the predominant race always persisted in a stable form despite miscegenation, and was hence capable of resurfacing. This theory footed, first, on racial theories challenging the existence of "pure races" in favor of evidencing "racial varieties" and "racial types" and, second, an early Greek national idea according to which Hellenism possessed the ability to acculturate and absorb foreign peoples or nations without losing its innate qualities. The Greek notion fili (meaning both nation and race), and its shifting semantics from religious to national and racial, is similarly instrumental to this analysis. By means of this theory racial purity was not so much rejected as it was relativized, essentially being replaced by the constancy of a race over time. With the shift from purity to constancy, the imperative of the homogeneity of an entity is not violated but, in contrast, supported by race anthropological arguments. Race hygienic theories, in turn, advanced the shift from racial consistency to purification.

In the past, most farmhouses in central China had an ancestral shrine and a paper scroll with the Chinese letters for "heaven, earth, emperor, ancestors, and teachers" on the wall opposite the main entrance. The ancestral shrine and paper scroll were materializations of the central principles of popular Confucianism. This article deals with their past and present. It describes how in everyday action and in ritual this shrine marked a spatial and moral center. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) the ancestral shrines and paper scrolls were destroyed, and replaced by a poster of Mao Zedong. Although the moral principles of popular Confucianism were dismissed by intellectuals and politicians, Mao Zedong was worshipped in ways reminiscent of popular Confucian ritual. The Mao poster and the paper scroll stand for a continuity of a spatial-moral practice of centering. What has changed however is the public evaluation of such a local practice, and this tension can produce a double embarrassment. Elements of popular Confucianism (which had been forcefully denied in the past) remain somewhat embarrassing for many people in countryside. At the same time urbanites sometimes inversely perceive the Maoist condemnation of popular Confucianism as an awkward survival of peasant narrow-mindedness—all the more so as Confucian traditions are now reinvented and revitalized as cultural heritage.

Interviews with the leadership of the Movimento Friuli (MF) were the last task, almost a postscript, of a study that preoccupied me during the 1980s. After a decade of research in the Friuli region of northeast Italy I was reasonably satisfied that I had achieved something like closure on the project. I was reluctant in the summer of 1987 to open any new lines of inquiry that might disturb my contentment.

Sometimes it is suggested that communism collapsed not least because its leaders ran out of any vision of a promising future for Eastern Europeans. My own experience of 1989 partly challenges this assumption. By that time, aware of the imperative of Hungary’s European integration, communists tried to demonstrate their will and skill to lead the country to the new path by proposing a grand project that could elicit the support of Western and domestic elites and capture the imaginations of ordinary people.

Perhaps the most surprising part of my recollection of 1989 is to recall the large part of it that was not surprising at all. Because nothing had gotten back to “normal” in Poland in the 1980s, the political events of that decade always happened with Solidarity as the “other.” Because the political situation never seemed resolved, it was always in flux. What happened in 1989 was thus treated initially as part of that flux, by me and by Polish political actors themselves.

Nineteen eighty-nine was for me, like for so many other Europeans and in particular Central Europeans, a year of miracles. In mid-November of that year I was traveling through the United States and giving papers on working class culture, anthropology, and history. Whenever I was asked where I came from I always answered “from the continent of the revolutions.” What a joy. But I was sad that I had traveled west rather than east.

From a distance—I was glued to television and newspapers in Cambridge—nothing dramatic seemed to be happening in the Siberian provinces of Russia in 1989. All attention was focused on the amazing events in Germany, Czechoslova- kia, Romania, and Bulgaria; yet I remember not only my astonishment at the tumbling of regimes but also constant twinges of regret and impatience that I could not be there.

Like other area specialists, I was astonished when, in the spring of 1989, the Hungarians took down the barbed wire separating them from Austria and the Poles elected the first non-communist prime minister, without arousing repercussions from the Soviet Union. I followed with amazement the news of what was happening in East Germany in late summer and fall—the hoards of people camping out in embassies, the ever-larger demonstrations in Leipzig.

In any given state socialist country, the mode of its collapse lay at the intersection of two forces—struggles within the dominant classes, on the one hand, and struggles between dominant and subordinate classes, on the other hand. The two fed each other in different but complex ways.

Italo Pardo, Between morality and the law: Corruption, anthropology and comparative society. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 187, ISBN 0-7546-4290-9.

Monique Nuijten and Gerhard Anders, eds., Corruption and the secret of law: A legal anthropological perspective, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 234, ISBN: 978-0-7546-7110-7.

Luis A. Vivanco, Green encounters: Shaping and contesting environmentalism in rural Costa Rica. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007, pp. 240, ISBN 1845455045.

James G. Carrier and Paige West, eds., Virtualism, governance and practice: Vision and execution in environmental conservation. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009, pp. 196, ISBN 184545619X.