Many Shades of “Race”: Variations in the Concept of Race in French Sero-Anthropology between the 1940s and the 1970s

In this presentation, I will study the transformations of the concept of “race” in French sero-anthropology between the 1940s and 1970s, focusing in particular on the work of Jacques Ruffié and his collaborators, at the Centre d’hémotypologie of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). I will show that, far from being abandoned after World War 2, the concept was still widely used by scholars working at the crossroads of anthropology, blood-typing and genetics. It remained an object of numerous investigations undertaken, all over the world, by institutions such as the Centre d’hémotypologie, both to determine the blood signature of different racial groups, and to study their admixture and filiations. I will explore the many the continuities between these research programs and the concept of race as (re)defined by geneticists and blood typing experts in the 1920s and 1930s, while pointing at other, less obvious, affinities between “hemotypological research” and the older anthropological conception of race. Finally, I will analyze the evolution in the conceptualization of human variability by sero-anthropologists, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and show that their growing interests in the internal diversity of human populations was not altogether deprived of ambiguities.