Joseph Deniker
Joseph Deniker was a
French naturalist and
anthropologist, known primarily for his attempts to develop highly-detailed maps of
race in Europe.
Deniker was born in 1852 to French parents in
Astrakhan,
Russia. He first studied at the
university and technical institute of
St. Petersburg, where he adopted engineering as a profession, and in this capacity travelled extensively in the
petroleum districts of the
Caucasus, in
Central Europe,
Italy and
Dalmatia. Settling at
Paris, France in 1876, he studied at the
Sorbonne, where he received a doctorate in
natural science in 1886.
Encyclopedia
Joseph Deniker was a
French naturalist and
anthropologist, known primarily for his attempts to develop highly-detailed maps of
race in Europe.
Deniker was born in 1852 to French parents in
Astrakhan,
Russia. He first studied at the
university and technical institute of
St. Petersburg, where he adopted engineering as a profession, and in this capacity travelled extensively in the
petroleum districts of the
Caucasus, in
Central Europe,
Italy and
Dalmatia. Settling at
Paris, France in 1876, he studied at the
Sorbonne, where he received a doctorate in
natural science in 1886. In 1888 he was appointed chief
librarian of the
Natural History Museum in Paris. His complicated maps of European
races, of which he sometimes counted upwards of twenty, were widely referenced in his day, if only to illustrate the extremes of arbitrary racial classification. In the late 19th century and early 20th century he had an extensive debate with another racial cartographer,
William Z. Ripley, over the nature of race and the number of races. At the time, Ripley maintained that Europe was composed of three racial stocks, while Deniker held there were ten European races . Deniker's most lasting contribution to the field of racial theory was the designation of one of his races as
la race nordique . While this group had no special place in Deniker's racial model, it would be elevated by the famous
eugenicists and
scientific racist Madison Grant in his
Nordic theory to the engine of civilization. Grant adopted Ripley's three-race model for Europeans, but disliked Ripley's use of the "Teuton" for one of the races. Grant transliterated
la race nordique into "Nordic", and promoted it to the top of his racial hierarchy in his own popular racial theory of the 1910s and 1920s.
Deniker proposed that the concept of "race" was too confusing, and instead proposed the use of the word "ethnic group" instead, which was later adopted prominently in the work of
Julian Huxley and Alfred C. Haddon. Ripley argued that Deniker's idea of a "race" should be rather called a "type", since it was far less biologically rigid that most approaches to the question of race.
Deniker became one of the chief editors of the
Dictionnaire de geographie universelle, and published many papers in the anthropological and
zoological journals of France. In 1904 he was invited by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain to give the Huxley Memorial Lecture. He died in
Paris in 1918.
Selected works
- Recherches anatomiques et embryologiques sur les singes anthropoides
- Etude sur les Kalmouks
- Les Ghiliaks
- Races et peuples de la terre
- The races of man: an outline of anthropology and ethnography
References
- Arthur Keith and Alfred C. Haddon, "Obituary: Dr. Joseph Deniker" Man 18 : 65-67.
- Ashley Montagu
...
, "The Concept of Race,"
American Anthropologist 64:5 : 919-928.
