Doctoral Dissertation Research: Miscegenation Nation: Race Crossing and the Human Sciences in Hawaii, 1889-1945

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This doctoral dissertation project, supported by the Science, Technology & Society (STS) program at NSF, examines how American ethnologists, physical anthropologists, and sociologists studied race crossing in Hawaii between 1880 and 1945. It investigates how the following projects shaped local and disciplinary knowledge about race mixing and its consequences: the establishment of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (1889); physical anthropologists' photographic and physical measurement surveys of mixed race people; mixed race family studies by sociologists at the University of Hawaii; and race relations research at the University's War Research Lab during World War II. Combining archival research in Hawaii and the continental United States, this historical study explains the importance of research in Hawaii to the development of theory and practice in the human sciences. It also illustrates how government agencies and local businesses applied knowledge about racialized territorial subjects. The history of the scientific study of race in the U.S. has focused primarily on scientists' concerns with race relations and mixing between black and white people. Incorporating Asian and indigenous people into studies of race mixing made research in Hawaii more representative of human diversity, as it made results more ambiguous and challenging to contemporary definitions of race. This dissertation research brings together the history of racial science, the history of biology, the history of the social sciences, and the history of scientific activism. Hence, this project enhances historical understandings of the role of territories in the development of ideas about the nature of race itself; and demonstrates how the territory of Hawaii served as a disciplinary laboratory where social scientists worked out how biology should influence their disciplines. The project stands to expand and deepen STS understanding of the role of race crossing knowledge in scientists' debates about scientific racism.