The problem of racism in science is one that concerns all disciplines dealing with human differences, from biological to social and cultural sciences. As race and racism(s) have been central to colonial projects (Grosfoguel 2013), the last decade’s renewed interest in decolonial and postcolonial theories mirrors the incessant and justified preoccupation with understanding and tackling racism today. Anthropology, once again, stands in the spotlight of critical assessments of the colonial roots of scientific racism. While engagements with anthropology’s colonial past are not new, having come and gone in waves (Hymes 1973; Harrison 2010 [1991]; Allen and Jobson 2016), the current upsurge and mainstreaming of decolonial critique seems to bother some—usually grey-haired—anthropologists who, often in a defensive gesture, have problematized critical historical reassessments of their discipline as anachronistic or presentist. Anthropologists defending the discipline against updated charges of complicity with colonialism and racism argue that such critiques are either one-sided, pessimistic or historically shallow; for some of these anthropologists, the role of anthropology in colonial projects was simply circumstantial and reflects neither the intentions nor the many positive contributions of the discipline.[1]
While I understand some—but wouldn’t agree with any— of those defensive reactions vis-à-vis a decolonial (self-)criticism of anthropology, my own critical engagement with anthropology’s past also comes from a place of care and worry for the discipline. Having studied anthropology and other social sciences in Brazil before undertaking my MA and PhD in Germany, I have come to ponder the discipline’s Eurocentric biases, a characteristic that surely does not only affect anthropology among all other social sciences but one that starkly contrasts with anthropology’s commitment to understanding the diversity of human experience. In my own examination of the legacies of racism and colonialism in the discipline (Barbosa 2025, I was inspired by Anand Pandian’s (2019, 117–120) ruminations on critique in anthropology: critically examining anthropology’s past can be an insightful way to multiply alternatives and affirm possibilities. At the same time, as some of my own hair starts to go grey, and after spending some years teaching a younger—and usually much more critical—generation of soon-to-be anthropologists, I also worry about the actuality and preparedness of the discipline to understand and withstand the difficult troubles of the present as well as the current waves of unforgiving, perhaps even (self-)destructive criticism, which have even taken the form of metaphorical self-immolation (Jobson 2020).[2]
Taking these critiques to heart, I started a research project to investigate the history and legacy of scientific racism in anthropology, particularly in physical and biological anthropology (see Barbosa et al. 2016). My research dealt with the history and legacy of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A), an infamous research center located from 1927 until 1945 in Berlin and founded by Eugen Fischer, a German anthropologist who had built a career researching “racial mixing” in the colony of German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia. Moving beyond an Eurocentric spatial delimitation of this history, I focused on the international influence of this German school of racial anthropology, particularly in India, a place where many of the KWI-A students came from and went back to, including the famous Indian anthropologist Irawati Karve (1905–1970).
Thinking with the case of Karve, whose oeuvre comprises more than 100 publications in different topics and fields of anthropology, I analyzed the tensions and contradictions that make up the work of a physical-biological anthropologist working throughout the mid-twentieth century.This was a time of pivotal discussions and reconsiderations of the scientific and political affordances of race. While Karve’s work is vast and multifaceted, I focused on her physical anthropological work not only because some selection was necessary with such a massive oeuvre, but also because physical anthropology is the subfield most affected by ground-shaking discussions and contradictions regarding the concept of race in the discipline of anthropology. In sum, I strove to understand Karve’s knowledge-making practices in their historical situatedness, considering both her biographical trajectory and agency, especially as she was the only researcher at the KWI-A who contradicted a racist theory that prevailed at that time and place. I examined how she strove to apply and adapt the racial theories and methods she learned in Berlin to her research practices in India and I showed how the legacies of racial knowledge remain present in spaces of anthropology training in India today. While I have extensively dealt with Karve’s history and current legacy elsewhere (Barbosa 2025; 2022a; 2022b), in the following I make some remarks about two approaches that informed my work on this anthropologist’s history: “critical presentism” and “topology.” Both are insightful ways to grasp the persistent legacies of scientific racism, also in less expected places beyond Europe and North America, and contribute to a critical and forward-looking assessment of anthropology.
Critical presentism
While Stocking’s 1965 critique of presentism is still invoked in order to criticize assessments of anthropology’s past wrongdoings for being anachronist, one needs to keep in mind the historical context of Stocking’s formulation. As Ira Bashkow (2019) pointedly shows, Stocking’s widely-cited critique was a response to a specific editorial discussion and political context in the late 1960s; in fact, Stocking later distanced himself from that position and emphasized instead that any historical inquiry lives in an intrinsic tension between a presentist orientation in its object selections and a commitment to historicism. To navigate this inevitable tension, I turn to “critical presentism”, an approach to history of science that was sharply formulated by Laurent Loison (2016) in his programmatic discussion of historical epistemology. A critical presentist approach entails being careful with excessive presentisms:in my project this meant that besides avoiding “inevitabilism” (the most excessive use of causal-narrative presentism), I avoided “descriptive presentism” by paying attention to how the meaning of concepts—including race—shifts situationally, historically, and locally (Loison 2016, 33–36). In sum, writing history with a critical presentist orientation also meant for me that, when I selected aspects of history to focus on, I was oriented by the understanding that history is ultimately looked at from present-day interrogations, to point “the ways into the future,” as Tim Ingold puts it (quoted in Vokes 2014, 124).
I understand this to mean that a critical assessment of the history of anthropology should strive to “reactivate the complexity” of scientific practices (Loison 2016, 36), while also taking account of elements of contingency in the making of scientific knowledge, as we learned from Foucault (1977). By so doing, a history of anthropology can create “awareness of the fleetingness of the present” and “develop tools to criticize present science” (Loison 2016, 36), oriented by historiography’s “double-gesture” of recovering and critiquing (Prasad 2019; Mukharji 2023).
A critical presentist approach also requires an awareness of the risks of moralizing assessments of historical actors based on present-day knowledge and related moral standards. To be sure, while I take for granted that the racial anthropology of Karve and her German colleagues does not hold scientific validity today, I refrain from labelling that racial anthropology “pseudo-science,” for the research done by KWI-A scientists was considered science by the established standards in that historical context (see Mukharij 2023:2-6; Rupnow et al. 2008). Coming to terms with this fact pushes us to reflect more seriously about current scientific standards and our own historical transience as scientists (Loison 2016). At the same time, I avoid judging Karve and her colleagues in moralizing terms as this would not be productive if we want to reflect about our own implications in the legacies of racial knowledge today. As much as we can distance ourselves historically from an anthropologist of the past, devaluing their work on moral grounds would be lazy and self-deceptive way out of the trouble of the heritage of scientific racism, as if current moral standards alone can disentangle science from its past. Also, ethically and morally, different facets of Karve’s oeuvre—although not those tainted by her racial anthropological accents—can be regarded as progressive even today. It is the nuances, changes, and contradictions in a past anthropologist’s work and persona that make them an insightful case to think with when we want to engage with the question of how our science could be better attuned to present-day concerns.
Topology
Grasping the spatial and historical circulation of racial knowledge is tricky. The apparent disappearance and discrediting of “racial science” does not mean that the influence of racial thinking, methods, and theories has ceased (Goldberg 2015). To tackle the legacy of racial knowledge in current science, I built upon different conceptual discussions of temporality and historicity which have pushed against an understanding of history as chronology. For example, Ann Laura Stoler’s (1997) Foucauldian theorization of the “polyvalent mobility” of race called attention to race’s adaptability to different historical contexts. In a similar line, Amade M’charek (2013; 2023) as well as Katharina Schramm and Markus Balkenhol (2019) talk of race as a “slippery object” to describe its situational elasticity and adaptability, while Anne Pollock (2012) writes that race has the ability to jump platforms and take on different shapes rather than disappearing. Both M’charek (2014) and Lundy Braun (2014) have also called attention to how racial knowledge might be inscribed in technologies and material objects which, as they circulate and are put into action, again produce racializing outcomes and thus contribute to the persistence of racialization, despite discursive changes post-race. Thus, as these and other scholars have shown, racial knowledge circulates through time and space in contingent and non-linear as well as material ways.
Therefore, my approach to the legacies of race-ism in their non-linear historicity and through their material incarnations is oriented by what M’charek, Schramm, and David Skinner (2014) termed the topology of race. Drawing from philosophical discussions on temporality, spatiality, and the foldability of time and space (Serres and Latour 1995 cited in M’charek 2014), the topological approach “is based on the presupposition that elements that are distant in time and space can become proximate and relevant in the here and now” (M’charek, Schramm, and Skinner 2014, 472). I followed a topological approach by attending to how objects embody histories and how, as they circulate through space and time, the histories implied in them might be drawn together and relationally affect the outcomes of knowledge production. In other words, topological lenses make visible how historicity in a scene of knowledge production is differently entailed in the human and nonhuman actors at play and how different histories embodied in them come to matter. Seeing through topological lenses implies an understanding of history as multidirectional. It also helps us to delineate how entanglements take shape both in spatial and historical ways.
Topological lenses are especially useful in grasping the circulations of race through less expected routes, also beyond Europe and North America, including in places where race does not directly inform social categorizations, like India. In my research on Karve’s physical anthropology and its legacies, working with topological lenses made visible how race persists despite discursive efforts to erase it and despite the repurposing of objects and methods once created to study race (see Barbosa 2025). Race reappears and circulates also through the methods and technologies Karve and other scientists worked (and still work) with. For instance, many of the anthropometric methods and instruments that were designed in the late nineteenth century to enact racial differences are still being used for purposes other than what the original design foresaw, for instance to study caste or human growth and nutrition. Although the purpose of the research with these anthropometric methods and instruments is not the same as it was a century ago, their use today still produces racializing and biologically-essentializing effects, despite scientists’ intentions. In sum, racializing knowledge persists through the durability of objects like anthropometric instruments and books as well as methods; once put into knowledge-making motion, these elements summon racial knowledge from the past scientific context in which they were designed. Understanding these topological effects is crucial for the continuing efforts in shaping an anti-racist, anti-essentializing, and decolonial anthropology, in India as elsewhere (Barbosa 2025).
Conclusion
There can be different ways to critique the history of anthropology as well as the history of scientific racism, while keeping an eye on the future we want for our sciences. Discussions of historicity and temporality in the study of scientific knowledge have developed since Stocking’s (later self-criticized) postulate against presentism from the 1960s. Both critical presentism and topology present us anthropologists important tools to identify the global histories and lingering legacies of scientific racism in our discipline. If virtually all anthropologists can agree in our concern about the future of anthropology in today’s precarious times, I am convinced that disregarding the calls to deal with anthropology’s entanglement with colonialism and racism just won’t do. Reactionary defensiveness will not just be insufficient to safeguard the discipline’s scientific authority but will also contribute to undermining it. Such willful avoidance of anthropology’s dark pasts can also be hazardous—socially and politically—as it would render us unable to spot the repetition of harmful effects like those in which imperial projects and anthropological knowledge have worked in tight collaboration, intentionally or not. In this sense, the understanding of history that I present here starkly opposes those positions within anthropology that insist on writing hagiographic history or mobilizing counterexamples and anti-racist figures in the history of anthropology, like Franz Boas, as a way to brush aside decolonial critique.[3] This sort of defensive disciplinary historiography will not save anthropology from its loss of political relevance; on the contrary, this anti-postcolonial defensiveness implies missing the chance to update the discipline’s responsiveness not only vis-à-vis the renewed global political urgency in discussing racism and (neo)colonialism but also vis-à-vis the concerns and moral impetus of younger and ever more diverse generations of anthropology students. Thinking of historical critique as a way to multiply possibilities and visualize how things could be otherwise will allow us to calibrate our (self-)criticism of our discipline’s past to the concerns of the present. By so doing, we can continue to hope for, and actively build, different and better ways of doing anthropology.
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[1] By writing this, I also have in mind the discussions in reaction to Akhil Gupta’s Decolonizing U.S. Anthropology (2021) as well as many positions seen in anthropology departments and conferences in Northern Europe.
[2] Commenting on the Californian wildfires that happened simultaneously with the 2018 meeting of the (US-) American Anthropological Association in an air-conditioned venue in San Diego, Ryan Cecil Jobson (2020) articulated different critiques in and to (US-based) anthropology in that year in his “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn.” My reservations to his review go in the same direction as those written by Luísa Reis-Castro (2021) and Samar Al-Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, and Madiha Tahir (2020), who call for a consideration of the geopolitics of location in the critique enunciated by Jobson—a tenured professor in one of the most renowned anthropology departments in the US. Jobson’s critique also does not mention anthropological spaces that have also literally burnt in the past years due to lack of funding—the reduction of Brazil’s National Museum to ashes being one example (see Reis-Castro 2021, 147-149). As Al-Bulushi, Ghosh, and Tahir (2020) put it, in conversation with Faye Harrison, “[i]f the appeal to ‘let anthropology burn’ aims to strike at the heart of the highly stratified system of knowledge production in the discipline, then the ‘epistemological imperialism’ [Harrison] of the US academy would be a good place to start the fire.”
[3] On the limitations of “the Boasian fix”, see Jobson (2020). See also Mark Anderson (2019) for a nuanced account on the liberal anti-racism that was typical of the Boasian anthropological tradition.
