1 This was the first of several meetings where UNESCO's 1950 Statement on Race was drafted. The 1949 committee consisted of Ernest Beaglehole, Juan Comas, Luiz Aguiar Costa-Pinto, E. Franklin Frazier, Morris Ginsberg, Humayun Kabir, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Ashley Montagu. The minutes from the 1949 meetings are summarized in UNESCO, Summary Report (of the Six Meetings), Meeting of Experts on Race Problems, 29 December 1949, UNESCO/SS/CONF.1/SR1, 1949.

2 UNESCO, op. cit. (1).

3 For histories of the statements as marking the demise of race science see Barkan, Elazar, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the US between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Stepan, Nancy, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (Hamden: Archon Books, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stocking, George W., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Provine, William B., ‘Geneticists and race’, American Zoologist (1986) 26(3), pp. 857–887CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For interpretations of the statements as a moment of reflexivity see Reardon, Jenny, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Brattain, Michelle, ‘Race, racism, and antiracism: UNESCO and the politics of presenting science to the postwar public’, American Historical Review (2007) 112(5), pp. 1386–1413CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Selcer, Perrin, ‘Beyond the cephalic index: negotiating politics to produce UNESCO's scientific statements on race’, Current Anthropology (2012) 53(S5), pp. S173–S184, doi:10.1086/662290CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Gannett, Lisa, ‘Racism and human genome diversity research: the ethical limits of “population thinking”’, Philosophy of Science (2001) 68(3), pp. S479–S492, doi:10.2307/3080967CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lipphardt, Veronika, ‘The Jewish community of Rome: an isolated population? Sampling procedures and bio-historical narratives in genetic analysis in the 1950s’, BioSocieties (2010) 5(3), pp. 306–329CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bangham, Jenny, ‘What is race? UNESCO, mass communication and human genetics in the early 1950s’, History of the Human Sciences (1 December 2015) 28(5), pp. 80–107, doi:10.1177/0952695115600581CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Stoler, Ann Laura, ‘Racial histories and their regimes of truth’, Political Power and Social Theory (1997) 11, pp. 183–206Google Scholar.

5 Adams, Vincanne, Murphy, Michelle and Clarke, Adele E., ‘Anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality’, Subjectivity (September 2009) 28(1), pp. 246–265CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Anderson, Warwick, ‘Racial conceptions in the global South’, Isis (1 December 2014) 105(4), pp. 782–792CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. de la Cadena, Marisol, ‘Are Mestizos hybrids? The conceptual politics of Andean identities’, Journal of Latin American Studies (May 2005) 37(2), pp. 259–284CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wade, Peter, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (Chicago: Pluto Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Appelbaum, Nancy P., Macpherson, Anne S. and Rosemblatt, Karin Alejandra, Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Stepan, Nancy, ‘The Hour of Eugenics’: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

7 McCarthy, Thomas Anthony, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Stepan, op. cit. (6); Wade, op. cit. (6); Cueto, Marcos and Palmer, Steven Paul, Medicine and Public Health in Latin America: A History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Dávila, Jerry, Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

9 Tilley, Helen, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bonneuil, Christophe, ‘Development as experiment: science and state building in late colonial and postcolonial Africa, 1930–1970’, Osiris, 2nd series (1 January 2000) 15, pp. 258–281CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conklin, Alice L., A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Ferguson, James, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar. For other examples of colonial development projects see Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Cullather, Nick, ‘Development? It's history’, Diplomatic History (1 January 2000) 24(4), pp. 641–653, doi:10.1111/0145-2096.00242CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Engerman, David C., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Latham, Michael E., Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation-Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar. Anderson, Warwick, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

11 Scott, David, ‘Colonial governmentality’, Social Text (January 1995) 43, pp. 191–220Google Scholar.

12 Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Anker, Peder, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sluga, Glenda, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Smith, Neil, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

14 UNESCO, op. cit. (1)

15 UNESCO, op. cit. (1).

16 Louis Wirth, ‘Implementation of the Resolution of the Economic and Social Council on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities’, Committee of Experts on Race Problems, Paris, 7 December 1949, UNESCO/SS/Conf.1/2, p. 3.

17 Wirth, op. cit. (16), p. 4.

18 UNESCO, The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry (Paris: UNESCO, 1958)Google Scholar. For useful analyses of the 1950 and 1951 statements see Gayon, Jean, ‘Do biologists need the expression “human races”? UNESCO 1950–51’, in Rozenberg, Jacques J. (ed.), Bioethical and Ethical Issues Surrounding the Trials and Code of Nuremberg: Nuremberg Revisited (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), pp. 23–48Google Scholar; Brattain, op. cit. (3); Selcer, op. cit. (3); Yudell, Michael, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 148–159Google Scholar; Teslow, Tracy, Constructing Race: The Science of Bodies and Cultures in American Anthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 305–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Cole, Sally Cooper, Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), p. 157Google Scholar.

20 Arthur Ramos, Introduction to O Negro Brasileiro: Etnografia Religiosa e Psicanálise, excerpt published in Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental (2007) 10(4), pp. 729–744, 744CrossRefGoogle Scholar, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S1415-47142007000400015.

21 Lange, Brad, ‘Importing Freud and Lamarck to the tropics: Arthur Ramos and the transformation of Brazilian racial thought, 1926–1939’, The Americas (2008) 65(1), pp. 9–34, doi:10.2307/25488071CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 During this period, Ramos lent a hand to the nation-building projects of the Vargas regime and organized a week of activities commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1938 and the importance of Afro-Brazilian culture for Brazil's national identity. See Cole, op. cit. (19), pp. 157–158.

23 On eugenic projects during the Vargas administration see Stepan, op. cit. (6), pp. 162–170.

24 See Dávila, op. cit. (8), pp. 21–51.

25 Dávila, op. cit. (8), pp. 39–40.

26 Maio, Marcos Chor, ‘O Projeto Unesco e a Agenda das Ciências Sociais no Brasil dos Anos 40 e 50’, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais (1999) 14(41), pp. 141–158CrossRefGoogle Scholar, available at https://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0102-69091999000300009.

27 Costa-Pinto, Luiz Aguiar, O negro no Rio de Janeiro (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1953), p. 25Google Scholar.

28 On Costa-Pinto's career and views on race relations see Maio, Marcos Chor, ‘Uma Polêmica Esquecida: Costa-Pinto, Guerreiro Ramos e o Tema Das Relações Raciais’, Dados (1997) 40, pp. 127–162CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Giraudo, Laura, ‘Neither “scientific” nor “colonialist”: the ambiguous course of inter-American Indigenismo in the 1940s’, Latin American Perspectives (1 September 2012) 39(5), pp. 12–32, doi:10.1177/0094582X12447275CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giraudo, Laura and Sanchez, Juan Martin, La Ambivalente Historia del Indigenismo: Campo Interamericano y Trayectorias Nacionales 1940–1970 (Lima: IEP, 2011)Google Scholar.

30 Comas, Juan, ‘Cultural anthropology and fundamental education in Latin America’, International Social Science Bulletin (1952) 4(3), pp. 451–461, 451Google Scholar.

31 Walsh, Casey, ‘Eugenic acculturation: Manuel Gamio, migration studies, and the anthropology of development in Mexico, 1910–1940’, Latin American Perspectives (2004) 31(5), pp. 118–145, doi:10.1177/009-4582X04268405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Hobhouse also argued that animals could evolve by overcoming their biological instincts. He called this process ‘orthogenic evolution’ and imagined it as a model for understanding the nature of ‘race progress’ in society. See Renwick, Chris, British Sociology's Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 107–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Hobhouse's influence on the development of sociology in Britain see Collini, Stefan, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

33 Morris Ginsberg, Preface to Rumney, Jay, Herbert Spencer's Sociology: A Study in the History of Social Theory (New York: Atherton Press, 1966), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

34 Ginsberg, op. cit. (33), p. 3.

35 Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawney, Ginsberg, Morris and Wheeler, Gerald Clair William Camden, The Material Culture and Social Institutions of the Simpler Peoples: An Essay in Correlation (London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd, 1915)Google Scholar, available at http://archive.org/details/materialcultures00hobhrich, p. 6.

36 Hobhouse, Ginsberg and Wheeler, op. cit. (35), p. 6.

37 For example, Ginsberg and Hobhouse classified simpler peoples with categories such as ‘simple hunters’, ‘higher hunters’, ‘hunter and gatherers’, ‘incipient agriculture’, ‘agriculture pure’ and ‘highest agriculture’. Hobhouse, Ginsberg and Wheeler, op. cit. (35).

38 Steinmetz, George, ‘A child of the empire: British sociology and colonialism, 1940s–1960s’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (1 September 2013) 49(4), pp. 353–378Google ScholarPubMed.

39 Beaglehole, Ernest, Property: A Study in Social Psychology (New York: Macmillan Co., 1932), p. 19Google Scholar.

40 Beaglehole, op. cit. (39), pp. 20–21.

41 Beaglehole, op. cit. (39), p. 127.

42 Beaglehole, op. cit. (39), p. 315.

43 Beaglehole, op. cit. (39), p. 294.

44 Ritchie, James, ‘What ever happened to cross-cultural psychology?’, New Zealand Psychological Society Bulletin (1992) 92, pp. 17–21Google Scholar; Ritchie, J.E., ‘Obituary: Ernest Beaglehole’, Journal of the Polynesian Society (1966) 75(1), pp. 109–119Google Scholar; Shapiro, Harry Lionel, The Anthropometry of Pukapuka: Based upon Data Collected by Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1942)Google Scholar.

45 Beaglehole, Ernest, ‘Race, caste, and class’, Journal of the Polynesian Society (March 1943) 52(1), pp. 1–11, 6Google Scholar.

46 Beaglehole, op. cit. (45), p. 2.

47 Beaglehole, op. cit. (45), p. 6.

48 For discussions of this debate in imperial social science and settler-colonial anthropology see Hiatt, L.R., Arguments about Aborigines: Australia and the Evolution of Social Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Wolfe, Patrick, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999)Google Scholar.

49 Montagu dedicated this book to Malinowski and to Edward Westermarck, a Finnish social evolutionist. Montagu, Ashley, Coming into Being among the Australian Aborigines: The Procreative Beliefs of the Australian Aborigines, 2nd edn (Routledge, 1974; first published 1937), p. xviGoogle Scholar. In his description of Aboriginal beliefs on kinship Montagu drew heavily on The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), a colonial ethnography written by Australian anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen, as well as on The Psychology of Primitive People written by the social psychologist Stanley Porteus.

50 Montagu, op. cit. (49), pp. 326–327.

51 Montagu, op. cit. (49), p. 329.

52 My analysis here is influenced by Anne McClintock's concept of anachronistic space; see McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar.

53 Montagu, Ashley, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2001), 259Google Scholar.

54 Saint-Arnaud, Pierre and Feldstein, Peter, African American Pioneers of Sociology: A Critical History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. 204–248CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 See Burgess, Ernest W., ‘Editor's preface’, in Frazier, E. Franklin, The Negro in the United States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1940), pp. ix–xviiGoogle Scholar, available at https://archive.org/details/negrofamilyinthe031737mbp, accessed 9 October 2015.

56 On Herskovits and Frazier's debate about African roots and Afro-Brazilian families see Romo, Anadelia A., Brazil's Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 124–132Google Scholar.

57 Frazier, op. cit. (55), p. 488.

58 Stoczkowski, Wiktor, ‘Racisme, antiracisme et cosmologie lévi-straussienne’, L'Homme (2 May 2007) 182, pp. 7–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.4000/lhomme.29406.

59 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 6Google Scholar.

60 Lévi-Strauss, op. cit. (59). For a discussion of how Lévi-Strauss was influenced by Mauss see Johnson, Christopher, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Formative Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Conklin, Alice L., In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 On the role of genetics in Lévi-Strauss's ideas about historical change see Müller-Wille, Staffan, ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss on race, history and genetics’, BioSocieties (2010) 5(3), pp. 330–347CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

62 See Stoczkowski, op. cit. (58); Müller-Wille, op. cit. (61).

63 On the imperial context of grand comparative sociological studies see Connell, Raewyn, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Cambridge: Polity, 2009)Google Scholar.

64 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), p. 10.

65 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), pp. 9–11.

66 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), p. 8.

67 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), p. 10.

68 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), Fourth Meeting, pp. 1–2.

69 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), Fourth Meeting, p. 2.

70 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), Fourth Meeting, p. 4.

71 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), Fourth Meeting, p. 3.

72 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), Fourth Meeting, p. 3.

73 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), Fourth Meeting, p. 3.

74 UNESCO, op. cit. (1), Fourth Meeting, p. 3.

75 Klineberg, Otto, Tensions Affecting International Understanding: A Survey of Research (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1950), pp. 1–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Studies from this project include de Azevedo, Thales, Les élites de couleur dans une ville brésilienne (Paris: UNESCO, 1953)Google Scholar; Bastide, Roger and Fernandes, Florestan, Relações Raciais entre Negros e Brancos em São Paulo (São Paulo: Editôra Anhembi, 1955)Google Scholar; Costa-Pinto, op. cit. (27); Leiris, Michel, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe (Paris: UNESCO-Gallimard, 1955)Google Scholar; Wagley, Charles, Race and Class in Rural Brazil (Paris: UNESCO, 1952)Google Scholar.

77 Métraux, Alfred, ‘Race and civilisation’, UNESCO Courier (1950) 3(6), pp. 8–9Google Scholar.

78 Wagley, Charles, ‘Alfred Métraux’, American Anthropologist (1964) 66(3), pp. 603–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Métraux, Alfred, ‘Applied anthropology in government: United Nations’, in Kroeber, A. (ed.), Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 880–894, 881Google Scholar.

80 ‘Fallacies of racism exposed: UNESCO publishes declaration by world scientists’, UNESCO Courier (1950) 3(6–7), p. 1Google Scholar.

81 Rohde, Joy, ‘Gray matters: social scientists, military patronage, and democracy in the Cold War’, Journal of American History (2009) 96, pp. 99–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Solovey, Mark, ‘Project Camelot and the 1960s epistemological revolution: rethinking the politics–patronage–social science nexus’, Social Studies of Science (2001) 31, pp. 171–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Escobar, Arturo, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

83 Ferguson, James, The Anti-politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

84 Dudziak, Mary L., Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.