Abstract
Irawati Karve (1905–1970) is one of India’s most famous anthropologists. Lesser known in India today is that Karve was trained in a racial anthropological school in Berlin in the 1920s. In that school in Germany, Karve was the only researcher who contradicted a racist hypothesis that prevailed at that time and place, namely, that skulls of Europeans had a larger skull capacity on their left side. This story narrates Karve’s thoughts during her research and her confrontation with the implications of scientific racism.
Excerpts from forthcoming biography of Irawati Karve by Umilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, Iru: The Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books, 2024).
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Notes
- 1.
Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns, 1921).
- 2.
Irawati Karve, Normale Asymmetrie des Menschlichen Schädels: Inaugural-Dissertation (Leipzig: Schwarzenberg & Schumann, 1931), 9.
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Barbosa, T.P., Deshpande, U. (2024). What Remains. In: van Roekel, E., Murphy, F. (eds) A Collection of Creative Anthropologies. Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55105-5_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55105-5_15
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