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- Kjellman, Ulrika, 1963-
(författare)
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A Whiter Shade of Pale : Visuality and race in the work of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology
- 2013
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Journal of History. - : Taylor & Francis. - 0346-8755 .- 1502-7716. ; 38:2, s. 180-201
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In 1922 the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology (SIRB) was founded in Uppsala, with the purpose being to survey and classify the Swedish people according to their race. To make this categorization, both measurements and visual analysis of bodies and faces were used and documented in charts and photographs. The data collected was then intended to make a foundation for a rational population policy aiming at improving the Nordic (Swedish) race. The charts registering body characteristics, the photographic collection brought together by the institute, and the images illustrating the published results all testify to the importance of visuality in this eugenic project: how people looked was crucial when classifying them into different race types. In this study the works of the institute are analysed to see in what way race was constructed through this visuality. The results show how the institute followed a scientific and pictorial rhetoric founded centuries earlier, in which the human species was organized in different subgroups according to their visual appearance. The results also show how race, with time, became more and more differentiated and that white, in the work of the SIRB, came in many shades.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Kjellman, Ulrika, 1963-
(författare)
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How to picture race? : The use of photography in the scientific practice of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology
- 2014
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Ingår i: Scandinavian Journal of History. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0346-8755 .- 1502-7716. ; 39:5, s. 580-611
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The purpose of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, SIRB, was to survey the Swedish people according to its race criteria. In this research process photographs were used to document and portray the different races living in Sweden. This article examines how the photographs were used in this process: What pictorial rhetoric did they use and what did the photographs bring to the research process? The result shows that SIRB did not succeeded in developing consistent methods of portraying race. The style and formula of the portraits varied; sometimes environmental aspects came in to focus, sometimes bodily aspects. These methodological shortcomings must be attributed not only to the fact that the institution was working with a new and immature scientific medium – photography – but also that it operated inside animmature scientific discipline. The race scientific community had no joint theories and methods to work with, and did not know how to affiliate with other disciplines – such as anthropology, focusing on environmental factors, or medicine, focusing on bodily aspects. But the lack of methodological consistency was not just a shortcoming; it could also be used to bias the material in a way that served the ideas of eugenics.
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