Writing transnational histories of racism in anthropology: navigating nuance and contradictions

Abstract (English)

This paper explores the transnational entanglements of racial science between Germany and India through the figure of Irawati Karve (1905–1970), a pioneering Indian anthropologist trained at the infamous Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, the talk will explore how racial theories and methods—formulated in European racial science—were adapted in India to study caste and ethnicity, and how they persist in fields such as biological anthropology and population genetics. Through a hauntological material-semiotic approach, it will discuss how an attention to affect and history of technology can make visible the ambiguous but persistent ways in which the legacies of scientific racism are present in anthropology and other sciences dealing with human diversity.