Physical anthropology

⚠ Race, skull measurement, and what replaced them

Bogoras describes the people of this book in the vocabulary of nineteenth-century physical anthropology — cephalic indices, faces "strongly Mongolian in outline", bodies measured against those of "Caucasians". That framework is not a superseded answer so much as a superseded question. The traits it measured do not partition human populations into types, and where northeast Siberians came from is now read from genomes and from linguistic reconstruction instead: see Sikora et al., "The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene" and Flegontov et al., "Palaeo-Eskimo genetic ancestry and the peopling of Chukotka and North America".

Worth knowing before reading chapter II as its author's racial theory: it is not one. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition was designed and directed by Franz Boas, whose programme set historical contact against race as the explanation of why peoples resemble each other, and Bogoras's comparisons here run consistently in one direction — narrowing the distance between the Chukchee and Europeans rather than widening it.

A holder for the book's racial vocabulary, not a people. Chapter II opens on the physical type of the Chukchee and measures it against two categories the anthropometry of 1904 took as given: Mongoloids and Caucasoids. They are here because the book uses the words and a reader meeting them needs to know what they meant to the man writing, which is not what they sound like now.

They describe nothing. Human variation is clinal — it grades continuously across geography and does not partition into types — and the racial taxonomy these terms belong to was abandoned by the discipline that produced them. Where the book says a face is "strongly Mongolian in outline" (1-056) it is reaching for a type that was never there to reach for. Nothing in this edition treats these as classifications of anybody; they are read as period vocabulary, on the same footing as an obsolete binomial.

The book these words appear in was written against them. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition was designed and directed by Franz Boas, whose programme set historical contact against race as the explanation of why peoples resemble each other; the expedition's whole design — survey both shores of the North Pacific and look for what crossed — presupposes that culture travels rather than inheres, and Boas spent the rest of his career turning that evidence against racial determinism. So the vocabulary here is period furniture inside a project aimed at knocking it down, which is worth knowing before reading chapter II as its author's racial theory. It is not one.

Bogoras's own use is comparative and, in the main, descriptive — eye shape, the bridge of the nose, the amount of body hair, always to say that the Chukchee are less distinguishable from Europeans than his readers would expect. It does not stay descriptive. 3-060 explains the childlessness of Russian–Chukchee marriages by "the exhaustion of vital force," with the scarcity of "blood really Russian and Caucasian" offered as the reason, and that is degeneration theory, not observation. The passage is worth reading as evidence about its author.

The actual Mongols are Mongols, a different entry for a different thing that the book spells the same way.

contains	Caucasoids, Mongoloids

Physical anthropology people
- Caucasoids people
- Mongoloids people

Not mentioned on any of the 717 page(s) available here.