Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany (Book Review‪)‬

Andrew D. Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 312 pp. Sometimes it takes a modest, carefully-focused book, rather than a sprawling or theoretically-ambitious one, to clarify the issues in a long-running debate. Andrew Evans's Anthropology at War is such a book. Although tightly focused on German anthropologists and ethnographers in the period between about 1900 and 1930 (of whom there were no great number), Anthropology at War offers a convincing answer to the question, when exactly did racial thinking become dominant in German scholarship? Evans also offers some insight into the related question, why did racial thinking catch on? But perhaps because Evans is as much an historian of Germany as an historian of anthropology, he also throws light on some larger dynamics in German history, most importantly the generational changes which contributed to the weakening of the liberal tradition. We can learn much from this modest book--though perhaps not everything we wanted to know.