Racial Taxonomy | Ahnenkult

Race in the post-War classroom

Apr 032011

Prompted by Richard Spencer’s article about a contemporary Russian raciology textbook, I’ve decided to post some maps of human racial distribution that found themselves in recent (for the Slovenian materials, perhaps ongoing) use in European schoolbooks. I unfortunately don’t have any publication details, as I received these images third- or second-hand, so any additional information would be appreciated.

From a (West?) German school atlas in use from the late 1980s to the early 1990s (but apparently omitted from more recent editions). The terminology is that of Egon von Eickstedt: “Mongolids” in light yellow, “Europids” in pink, “Negrids” in dark brown, and uninhabited areas in white. Contact-races (e.g., “Mestizen”) and zones of racial transition are denoted with intermediate tones. Special forms (“old races” like the Ainu, Weddids/Veddoids, Melanesians, Australian aborigines, negritos, Khoisan, and African pygmies) are in in green. Notwithstanding my objections to particular colors’ extents and the unrealistic abruptness of many transitions, the overall effect is undeniably striking.

Two maps from Slovenian schoolbooks, employing mostly the same terminology as the first, and possibly based upon it, but more refined in a number of particulars (like the treatment of small islands and the representation of admixed regions such as Madagascar), apart from which similar objections still hold.

Miscellaneous musings on the Ainu, I.

East Eurasian Prehistory, Ethnographic Photos, Lost Tribes, Racial Taxonomy 14 Responses »

Jan 152011

Racial reunion:

Western writings about the Ainu are pervaded by the notion that European man had, after centuries of exploration, after thousands of encounters with nothing but irreconcilable aliens, at long last discovered a race in whom true brotherhood was to be found: as one British captain declared, something like a strange drop of oil in the Ocean, being surrounded by Mongols yet not one of them. The Ainu’s simplicity and attunement with Nature were beatific; he was magnificent even in savagery: tall, lithe, straight and strong, with hair, beard, and moustaches never desecrated by the touch of the scissors ; with a high broad brow, dark eyes, straight nose and oval face, he was a far nobler creature than the Red Indian, who I had always fancied was the pride of wild men (Bickmore 1868).

For proponents of the Europoid or Caucasoid idea, White man and Ainu were shineshikpuikotcha utara, people of the same eyesocket (Batchelor 1905), and what the former took for familial resemblance produced not only a flurry of travelogues and anthropological treatises but also harsh critiques of Japanese policy and at least one marriage — Polish exile-anthropologist Bronisław Piłsudski fathered two sons with an Ainu woman on Russian Sakhalin (Siddle 1996: 78).

One can hardly fault them for their excitement. Even in the age of photography — after admixture with morphological Mongoloids had come to a head with expanding Japanese settlement — that little feeling in the amygdala was undeniable: