In the Museum of Man

This book offers new insight into the thorny relationship between science, society, and empire at the high-water mark of French imperialism and European racism.

Alice L. Conklin is Professor of History at The Ohio State University. She is the author of A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930, coauthor of France and Its Empire since 1870, and coeditor of European Imperialism: 1830–1930: Climax and Contradictions.

In the Museum of Man is provocative in that it implicitly invites scholars to treat 'science' not so very differently from the way in which we treat magic. This invokes the big question of human history: why do people believe what they believe; what instruments do people with special knowledge use in order to demonstrate their beliefs 'work'?

Martin S. Staum:

This masterfully researched study examines the transformation of French anthropology, including its institutionalization and professionalization.... As Conklin makes clear in this thorough and highly valuable study, the vestiges of belief in racial hierarchy did not disappear, but the intellectual circles of Rivet and Mauss helped bring it into disrepute.

Conklin's history of French anthropology/ethnology is a very welcome addition to the history of the field, a subtle, detailed, and fine-grained account of the development—in some cases the underdevelopment—of the discipline in the colonial era. She focuses in particular on changing and contested ideas of 'race.' Indeed, anthropology emerged in nineteenth-century France as an elaboration of biological 'race science' under the aegis of Paul Broca, who endeavored to demonstrate European biological superiority through the rigorous comparative analysis of skeletal remains. Paradoxically, Broca's very rigor ultimately doomed the enterprise.

Jonathan Judaken:

Conklin reconstructs this history with subtlety, and she writes with verve. Her footnotes and bibliography document her deep archival research and vast secondary reading. She touches upon developments in many of the human sciences: philology and linguistics, ancient religions, art, history, archaeology, and museography. She also discusses how the transformations of German, British, and U.S. anthropology were in transnational dialogue with the French...Conklin writes for scholars who can and must make..connections themselves, offering us an opportunity to engage in self-reflection about how science and the core categories of our disciplines are always saturated in the politics of the present.

Camille Robeis:

Conklin explores how race and empire functioned within anthropology in different times and in different contexts from 1850 to 1950. The resulting narrative is complex, nuanced, deeply researched, and ultimately fascinating. Organized more or less chronologically, the seven chapters of this book interweave intellectual, cultural, and political history as Conklin examines the works of the main French anthropologists, the institutions that housed them (laboratories, museums, and schools) and the contexts (political and academic) that framed their projects.

Jennifer Ann Boitin:

Alice L. Conklin's tightly-woven narrative...frankly confronts the occasionally disturbing nuances of the very human choices made by researchers driven to better understand humanity and human interactions. Using an impressive array of archival texts (a term she extends to physical objects and photographs) Conklin is masterful in her exploration of how race, racism and ethnology were redefined by the men and women who created the Museum of Man (Le Musee de l’Homme) between the two world wars. Conklin’s book is a powerfully told story of this evolution and its hiccups, and therefore of the scientific roots of race, racism, colonialism, anticolonialism and antiracism in the twentieth century, and is well worth reading.

Julia Feinn:

Alice Conklin's In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 introduces scholars to the hundred-year history of individuals, networks, and institutions in French intellectual life that culminated in French ethnologists’ active role in UNESCO’s 1950 statement [that race is a social construct]....In the Museum of Man is provocative in that it implicitly invites scholars to treat 'science' not so very differently from the way in which we treat magic.

Julia Fein:

In the Museum of Man is provocative in that it implicitly invites scholars to treat "science not so very differently from the way in which we treat magic... This invokes the big question of human history: why do people believe what they believe; what instruments do people with special knowledge use in order to demonstrate their beliefs "work"?"

William M. Reddy, William T. Laprade Professor of History and Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University:

This is a riveting study of French anthropology from the heyday of cranial measurement under the leadership of Paul Broca (d. 1880) to the rise of structural anthropology fashioned by Claude Lévi-Strauss after World War II. Alice L. Conklin takes in institutional, museological, and intellectual evidence, leading to a fascinating reconstruction and critique of the exhibits of the Musée de l'Homme in the 1930s and an insightful discussion of the Vichy interlude and its aftermath.

Harry Liebersohn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, author of The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea:

The human sciences are undergoing profound revision at this momentand the transformation is nowhere more evident than in the case of anthropology and its historiography. The history of anthropology in France has a special role to play in this new discussion because of the strong universalistic tendency in French intellectual life. In this book Alice Conklin traces in fine-grained detail the conflicts, tensions, paradoxes, and debates on the century-long path from a science that accepted racial differences as a fact of nature in the age of European imperialism to the repudiation of 'race' and the study of a unified humanity in the aftermath of World War II. Deeply researched and authoritatively written, Conklin's book will influence debates about race, human rights, and their intellectual history in the twentieth century.

Frederick Cooper, New York University:

Alice L. Conklin's book is simultaneously a history of the key institutions in which the study of mankind took place, of the discipline of anthropology, of the thinking of social scientists, and of a concept that has played an important and often nefarious role in European history. She demonstrates that rather than there being a 'colonial' or a 'French' conception of race, there was no consensus but heated and unresolved arguments about what, if anything, race meant.