The Science of Empire: Darwinism, Human Diversity, and Russian Physical Anthropology.

The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the "natural history of humanity" in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced.

ARA relief campaign in the Volga region, Jewish anthropometric statistics, and the scientific promise of integration.

ArgumentThe article builds a case for the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (Obshchestvo Okhranenia Zdorov'ia Evreiskogo Naselenia [OZE]) as a project of medicalized modernity, a mass politics of Jewish self-help that relied on a racialized and medicalized vision of a future Jewish nation. Officially registered in 1912 in St. Petersburg, it created the space for a Jewish politics that focused on the state of the collective Jewish body as a precondition for Jewish participation in any version of modernity. OZE futurism survived the years of World War I and the Russian Civil War, when the organization had to concentrate on rescue and relief rather than on facilitating the development of new bodies and souls. New archival evidence reveals how race science, medical statistics, and positive eugenics became composite elements of the Jewish anticolonial message and new subjectivity.