Anthropometry

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Anthropometry

ANTHROPOMETRY AND RACIAL POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES

Anthropometry is the scientific study of variation in the size and shape of the human body. Anthropometric data have been used both to justify the belief in human biological “races” and to discredit this erroneous belief. This entry provides an overview of anthropometry and its relationship with “race” and racism.

EARLY ANTHROPOMETRIC BELIEFS

The earliest written records about human size date from about 3500 BCE in Sumeria. Several texts from this period mention a positive relationship between health, social status, and stature. The Sumerians were thus surprisingly astute, for this essentially echoes the current biocultural view of the causes of variation in human body size and shape. Groups of people growing and developing under social, economic, and cultural conditions that foster better nutrition and health tend to be, on average, taller and have longer arms and legs than groups of people growing up under less favorable sociocultural conditions. After more than a century of scientific research, this view may seem commonsensical, but it has not always been so.

The philosophers of the ancient Greeks, such as Plato and Aristotle (c. 350 BCE), considered living people and their cultures to be imperfect copies of an ideal type of physical human being and sociocultural system. The variation in body size and shape among various cultures was seen to be a consequence of the degree of imperfection within different societies. The Greeks of ancient Athens believed that they were closest to the ideal, and that the people of other societies were less perfect. However, the Greeks did not believe in the concept of “race,” of fundamental biological divisions of humankind. Rather, they accepted the unity of all humankind.

MODERN ANTHROPOMETRY

The term “anthropometry” was coined by Johann Sigismund Elsholtz (1623-1688), who also invented an anthropometer, a device for measuring stature and the length of body parts such as arms and legs. Elsholtz was interested in testing the notion of the Greek physician Hippocrates (460?–357 BCE) that differences in body proportion were related to various diseases. In 1881, the French anthropologist Paul Topinard (1830–1911) applied anthropometry to the study of human “races, so as to distinguish them and establish their relations to each other” (Topinard 1881, p. 212).

Another line of racial investigation was craniology, the study of the skull. The Dutch physician Petrus Camper (1722–1789) and his followers measured various angles of the facial bones to determine the race and sex of skulls. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), a German naturalist and anthropologist, identified five “races,” based on a visual inspection of skull shape and size. One of these was named the “Caucasian race,” based on skulls from the Caucasus Mountains region of Georgia. Blumenbach believed that the living people of Georgia were the closest to the original form of the primordial Caucasian type, with European Caucasians being the next closest to the original.

In the United States, Samuel George Morton (1799– 1851) refined the methods and equipment of craniometry. Believing that exacting measurement is more scientific than Blumenbach’s visual method, Morton invented devices to compute a dozen skull measurements. In contrast, the Swedish anthropologist Anders Adolf Retzius (1796– 1860) reduced Morton’s assortment of skull measurements to only two (length and breadth), and he applied these to the heads of living people as well. A simple ratio—head length divided by breadth, or the cephalic index—could then be calculated. One school of craniometrists proposed that “inferior” races were characterized by people with round heads, or by a ratio greater than 0.80. Northern Europeans, the alleged “superior” race, had relatively longer, narrower heads, or a ratio below 0.75. Other craniometrists, such as Paul Broca (1824–1880) disproved this fantasy by showing that all human groups, living and dead, had all types of cranial indices. In place of the cephalic index, Broca proposed that the size of the brain, and its shape, varied between the “races,” the sexes, and between individuals of higher and lower intelligence. In time, this notion was also proven false, but the belief in head shape or brain size as a determinant of “race” and intelligence persisted well into the twentieth century.

ANTHROPOMETRY AND RACIAL POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES

By the late nineteenth century, “race scientists” and politicians in the United States were using anthropometry for all sorts of pernicious purposes. American slavery had long been justified based on the “inferior” racial biology of Africans. Segregation in post–Civil War America was similarly justified by race science. In addition, the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and from China was seen as a new threat to privileged white Americans. Racists used the measurement of stature, body shape, head shape, and brain size as a means to prevent these undesirable “races” entry into the United States.

Some researchers, however, challenged the use of anthropometry for immigration policy. Starting in 1875, Henry Pickering Bowditch (1840–1911) gathered measurements of height and weight of 24,500 school children from around Boston, Massachusetts. In a series of reports published in 1877, 1879, and 1891, Bowditch applied modern statistical methods to describe differences in growth associated with sex, nationality, and socioeconomic level. Bowditch was the first person to construct percentile growth charts, which show the range of normal body growth by sex and age. His findings, published in 1885, showed that the “races” overlapped considerably in their range of body sizes, but that children from the laboring classes were smaller than children from the nonlaboring classes. To account for this fact, Bowditch offered an environmental explanation. He said the nonlaboring classes were taller because of the “greater average comfort in which [they] live and grow up” (Boyd 1980, p. 469).

This conclusion ran counter to that of English savant Francis Galton (1822–1911). In his book Natural Inheritance (1889) Galton suggested that stature and other physical traits were highly heritable. Galton’s work led some to believe that heredity was the all-powerful determinant of human form and functional capabilities. Galton’s work was used to support the eugenics movement, a pseudoscientific political movement that claimed to be able to improve the human species through controlled breeding. Eugenicists held that the laboring classes were genetically inferior to the nonlaboring classes. One supposed proof of this inferiority was their short stature. Eugenicists also believed that the race, or ethnic origin, of American-born children could easily be determined on the basis of physical measurements, and that racial admixture, especially between Anglo-Saxons and people from southern and eastern Europe, would bring about a physical degeneration of Americans.

Franz Boas (1858–1942), a German-born anthropologist working in the United States, demolished the position of the eugenicists using the data of Bowditch and his own studies of migrants to the United States. Boas found that the children of recent immigrants grew up to look much like the “good old Americans” (older generations of immigrants from northern Europe) due to modifications in the process of growth and development as a response to environmental change. Accordingly, Boas concluded that human physical plasticity is what is real, while the belief in the permanence of “races” is false. The changes in growth discovered by Boas applied to both the laboring and nonlaboring classes. Boas ascribed these changes in physical form to the better health care, nutrition, and child-rearing practices in the United States.

Despite this work, many eugenicists and politicians still called for quotas on the immigration of so-called inferior peoples into the United States. In 1911, Boas presented to the U.S. Congress a report titled Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, which explained his research and probably helped delay the imposition of limitations on immigration. Nevertheless, the American Congress eventually passed the “Immigration Restriction Acts” of 1921 and 1924, which specifically placed immigration quotas on southern and eastern Europeans and Asians.

Yet while Boas and the environmentalists may have lost that political battle, their work influenced future generations of anthropologists, public health workers, epidemiologists, and others. A full appreciation of Boas’ work waited until after the Nazi holocaust of World War II (committed in the name of “racial purification”) and new discoveries in genetics after 1950. Anthropologists then began to reject the typological approach and the concept of “race” in favor of a population approach to the study of human variation and adaptation.

THE MODERN POPULATION PERSPECTIVE

The population approach employs an understanding of human anthropometry, genetics, demography, and socio-cultural behavior to show that there are no scientifically definable boundaries between human groups—meaning that there are no biological “races.” It is known in the early twenty-first century that there is more genetic and anthropometric variation among individuals within any of the “races” than there is between people of different “races.” Africa and Europe, for example, include populations that are both tall (Tutsi men of Rwanda average 5’8”, while Dutch men average 6’) and short (Efe Pygmy men average 4’8”, while Portuguese men average 5’6”).

It is also understood in the early 2000s that there are an unlimited number of social races, or groups of people who are defined on the basis of shared social, economic, political, and religious characteristics, as well as other cultural values such as child-rearing practices. These sociocultural traits can influence the development of biological traits. For example, racism can lead to poverty for some groups, which decreases stature and other body measurements (Komlos 1994). Some social races place infants on their backs to sleep, which tends to produce rounder heads. Social races change over time, and the anthropometric traits of these groups also change. None of these changes in body size or shape are genetic. Rather they are evidence of biological plasticity in body form during the years of growth and development (Lasker 1969). A change in the environment, such as alleviation of poverty or a change in infant sleeping position from stomach to back, will alter the body shape of the affected generation in new ways.

Body proportions, such as leg length relative to total stature, have been widely used to define “races.” In this view, Africans have the relatively longest legs, Asians (including Native Americans) have the shortest legs, and Europeans are intermediate in leg length. These proportions were believed to be immutable, but research has shown that the body proportions of a group can change significantly. Since 1960, the relative leg length of Japanese has increased to the point where it is indistinguishable from that of the British. The Maya of Guatemala are very short-legged, but Mayan children born in the United States have relative leg length that falls within the normal range of both white and black American children. The change among the Maya-Americans occurred in less than a generation, meaning that it cannot be due to genetics. Instead, it seems to be due to improvements in the total quality of their life in the United States.

Thus, at the start of the twenty-first century, a bio-cultural understanding of human development is replacing outdated applications of anthropometry. The new anthropometry is used to assess the social, economic, and political history of human groups, the health of individuals, and the well-being of the human population.