Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Geertje Mak
2026-2027
Home institution
University of Amsterdam; NL-Lab; KNAW
Country of origin (home institution)
Netherlands
Discipline(s)
Anthropology and ethnology; Modern history
Theme(s)
Education & Science; Gender, Family & Youth; Inequalities, inclusion & Social Innovation
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Professor of Gender History and Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, NL-Lab and KNAW
Research Project
A Race without Geslacht? Blood(lines) in physical-anthropological research in Dutch New-Guinea (1920 -1962)
Until the 1920s, German and Dutch physical anthropology was built on a deeply racialised division between so-called Naturvölkerand Kulturvölker — between peoples deemed to have no history (“primitives”) and those who did. Research focused on morphology: differences in skulls and outer appearance, ideally studied in populations considered “pure” and isolated.
Under the growing influence of the eugenicist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, however, hereditary notions of race began to displace morphology as the core element of racial measuring. This shift created a fundamental problem: how could race be understood as hereditary without reference to geslacht — genealogy, ancestry, and sexual mixing? And how did physical anthropologists deal with this problem in practice?
Research Interests:
history of physical anthropology; history of race; racial science; history of eugenics; genealogy; Geslacht