Description:

Speaker: Elise Burton

Title: Excavating Asian Races: Postwar Japanese Science and Diplomacy in the Middle East

Abstract: Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Japanese archaeologists, anthropologists, and geneticists made their first forays into Iran and Iraq to conduct scientific fieldwork. Contemporary publications and media coverage depicted this moment as a Japanese scientific rediscovery of “West Asia,” a region to which Japan was connected not only through the deep time of human evolution and the prehistory of civilization, but also through more recent shared political experiences as “Asians.” This presentation focuses on the 1956-1966 Tokyo University Iraq-Iran Archaeological Expedition and a 1968-1974 program of medical science collaboration between Tehran University and Gifu University. The archaeological research was accompanied by diplomatic spectacle, as postwar Japan sought to resume bilateral relations with Middle Eastern countries. The medical research was supported by Japan’s Overseas Technical Cooperation Agency to strengthen political as well as scientific ties with Iran. Accordingly, these scientific collaborations were forged using extensive rhetoric about shared Asian cultural and even racial kinship. Yet the actual experience of Japanese scientists in the Middle East, and their published outputs, tended to reinforce their significant differences with Iraqi and Iranian colleagues in understanding racial identity. Using scientific publications, archival documents, and media reports, I analyze how these scientific collaborations simultaneously produced knowledge about human ‘races’ and enacted racialized national identities within Asia.

Biography: Elise K. Burton is an assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interests are race, ethnicity, and nationalism; the history of genetics, anthropology, and evolutionary biology; and transnational scientific collaboration. She is the author of Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity (Stanford University Press, 2021). Before joining Toronto, she was a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (Newnham College). She earned her PhD in Middle Eastern history from Harvard University and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, in two subjects, biology and Middle Eastern studies. As of July 2024, she is a co-editor of Isis, the main journal of the History of Science Society.