Giuseppe Sergi. The portrait of a positivist scientist.

Giuseppe Sergi (1841-1936) was one of the most important anthropologists and psychologists of the age of positivism and this article focuses on three domains of his scientific research: degeneration, eugenics and race. His concept of degeneration is defined as the development of special forms of human adaptation to the environment. This issue is closely related to his theory of the "stratification of character", which had a profound impact on Italian psychiatry and criminal anthropology in the late nineteenth century. Thus, special emphasis is placed on the differences between Sergi and Cesare Lombroso regarding their definitions of criminality and genius. Concerning eugenics, the article analyzes Sergi's key role in the Italian context, discussing his eugenic program based on both repression and education. His remedies against the spread of degeneration included not only radical and repressive measures, but also the improvement of popular education and the living conditions of the working class. In the field of physical anthropology, the article examines Sergi's morphological method of classifying ethnic groups. Although sharply criticized in Italy and abroad, this method had two major effects. First, it led to the definitive split between Sergi and Paolo Mantegazza and to the foundation of the Societá Romana di Antropologia in 1893. Second, it was the starting point for Sergi's theory of Mediterranean "stock", which claimed that European populations were of African origin in contrast to contemporary theories of Aryan supremacy. The article ends with a look at the heated debate over Sergi's Mediterraneanism during the period of Fascism.

The diagnostic eye--on the history of genetic and racial assessment in pre-1938 Austria.

The present contribution examines the history of the genetic biology experts reports in Austria up until 1938. This field of activity effected the research topics and -methods at the Viennese Institute for Anthropology considerably and caused an increase of application in practice. The motives of the scientists, the coalition of interests as well as the orientation towards the content of the discipline before 1938--which created the prerequisites for the racial experts reports of the NS time--will be discussed.

Views from the periphery: discourses of race and place in French military medicine.

Numerous authors have interpreted the history of anthropological and medical conceptions of race in nineteenth century France as following a path mapped out by phrenology, anthropometry, and Paul Broca's version of physical anthropology. On balance, this has resulted in an historical narrative centered on Parisian intellectual life and one leaving the impression that by the 1890s anthropological theories had moved away from ethnological and cultural explanations toward more biological views of race. This article, by contrast, examines the world beyond Paris and the literatures of naval and army medicine from about 1830 to 1920. It describes the contours of a medical and anthropological pluralism in matters of race and ethnicity and argues that cultural and ethnological perspectives remained important to theorists of race through World War I.

Modern sport, modernism and the cultural manifesto: de Coubertin's Revue Olympique.

This article studies the Modern Olympic Movement within the cultural framework of early twentieth-century aesthetics. By examining the first 13 years of the Revue Olympique, the bond between sport and ideals of beauty emerges as a powerful indicator of a broader socio-cultural discourse. Discourse analysis exposes the Revue Olympique as homogeneous and coherent device of praxis that located the Olympic Movement and the genre of sport festival it promoted among the dominant ideas about beauty, art and culture of this era. It functioned as a type of cultural manifesto for Pierre de Coubertin's international Olympic Movement.