Marks, Jonathan

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ScholarlyCommons@Penn

History of Anthropology NewsletterVolume 39Issue 2 December 2012 Article 91-1-2012The Study of Jewish Biological Difference After1945Jonathan MarksThis paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/han/vol39/iss2/9For more information, please contact repository@pobox.upenn.edu.History of Anthropology Newsletter 39.2 (December 2012) / 16 posed against expertise and shared decision-making threaten to undermine the legitimacy of the World Heritage Committee and its ability to act. “The Study of Jewish Biological Difference After 1945,” October 15-16, hosted by The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), report submitted by Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, jmarks@uncc.edu The conference was organized by Veronika Lipphardt (MPIWG) and Amos Morris-Reich (Haifa), and sponsored by Minerva-Gentner, which aims to increase the contact between Israeli scholars and those of other nations (and which had not previously supported history of science). The organizers intended the conference to focus “on the history of scientific accounts of Jews in the life sciences after the end of World War Two,” and was especially timely, given the appearance of recent full length works by two geneticists (David Goldstein, Jacob’s Legacy; and Harry Ostrer, Legacy) and an anthropologist (Nadia Abu el-Haj, The Genealogical Science).  Three themes emerged during the presentations: (1) trans-World War II narratives of Jews and genetics (Veronika Lipphardt, Anne Cottebrune, Alexander von Schwerin, Amir Teicher, Felix Weidemann),  (2) the development of the field of human genetics in Israel (Raphael Falk, Nurit Kirsh, Snait Gissis, Amos Morris-Reich); and (3) contemporary issues of genomics and Jewish identity (Petter Hellström, Yulia Egorova).  The discussants were Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Paul Weindling and Jonathan Marks.  Discussions about publication are underway. “Colonial Governmentalities Workship,” held at the Institute of Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, October 31st to November 1st, report submitted by Ben Dibley, University of Western Sydney, B.Dibley@uws.edu.au  The literature on governmentality in colonial contexts is well developed.  Less attention has been paid to the materialities through which particular forms of colonial rule are exercised—the focus of this workshop, which emphasized how collecting cultures were implicated in the rationalities of government in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century colonial situations. Participants examined the different kinds of knowledges—such as anthropology, archaeology, and folklore studies—associated with practices of collecting, and the roles these played in shaping forms of colonial rule, such as those of settler, conquest, or neo-conquest colonialism. Organized around paired papers, the workshop was led by Tony Bennett, Institute of Culture and Society (ICS), University of Western Sydney (UWS).  It was part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, “Museum, Field, Metropolis, Colony: Practices of Social Governance.” (For an overview of this project, see http://www.uws.edu.au/ics/research/projects/ museum_field_metropolis_colony.)  Henrika Kuklick (University of Pennsylvania) and Tony Bennett presented the first paired papers. Both focused on the practice of anthropology and its relations with colonial governance. Each offered distinctive accounts on the materialities of ethnographic fieldwork, advancing contrasting conceptualizations of anthropological practices and their folding into relations of government. Kuklick argued that, in contradistinction to laboratory science, anthropology was a form of work that shared in the methods of field sciences, which she characterized as more historical than experimental, with knowledge witnessed, rather than manufactured. Like other field scientists, anthropologists had to negotiate with administrative regimes, but their 

The Study of Jewish Biological Difference After 1945

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The Study of Jewish Biological Difference After 1945

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