Enacting Race While Objectifying Race: Recovering the Story of the Dutch New Guinea Expeditions (1903, 1909) for the History of Anthropometry

The scientific idea(l)s of racial anthropometry—as formulated by one of the most influential scientists of that field, Rudolf Martin, and taken over by his Dutch pupil Van der Sande—entailed a strict objectification of the study of anatomical difference in relation to geographical descent. It was, in the terms of Daston and Galison, a science driven by an epistemic ideal of objectivity through ‘selfless’ science, in which ‘first impressions’ or non-standardized measures and observations were anathema. Thus, when presenting the anthropometric data from his 1903 expedition to Dutch New Guinea, Van der Sande sought to completely disentangle his data from the story of the expedition. The data was presented as ‘pure facts’, ready for circulation in European ‘centers of calculation’. To un-tell this kind of scientific reporting, in this paper I will retrace the practicalities of the expedition. This will show how, in paradoxical contrast to an ideal of measuring race independent from subjective impressions, the expedition itself continuously enacted race in the way it assigned roles and practically divided groups within the expeditionary group. This contradiction short-circuited when the successor of Van der Sande in the third expedition, Von Römer, started to measure the non-European members of the expedition team.