Semi-Civilized by Michael C. Hawkins;

Author:Michael C. Hawkins; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-11-26T21:00:00+00:00

Fig. 3.1. Profile photo of a Moro man

Fig. 3.2. Profile photo of a Moro woman

While such examinations could be entertaining, they also inevitably produced anxiety. However, there are virtually no accounts of failure to be found in any official or unofficial records, suggesting perhaps that, despite its apparent scientific objectivity, Woodworth’s department was most likely a set of carefully constructed, scientifically couched affirmations designed to attract patrons and give them a positive experience.

Within a few days Woodworth and Bruner began testing various live exhibits and nonwhite subjects to create a tangible racial “hierarchy of strength, intelligence, [and] dexterity” wherein observers could locate themselves in the vast panorama of human evolutionary development.21 Woodworth focused much of his time on Filipinos, who represented a large majority of native subjects tested in the Department of Anthropometry and Psychometry.22 His experiments were designed ostensibly to circumvent and negate cultural differences, thus preserving the methods’ scientific objectivity. As one reporter observed: “Doctor Woodworth has designed a piece of apparatus by which the keenness of sight of the savage races will be tested without bringing in the element of language.” Thus, it was assumed that native subjects could not compromise the scientific process through mistranslation. Yet, perhaps ironically, the entire premise of Woodworth’s experiments on vision was predicated on a false understanding of native language. An article in the St. Louis Republic explained: “It is a known fact that in the vocabulary of savage tribes there is no word for the color blue; this has led to the belief that savages do not see the color blue, and the supposition has been strengthened by many experiments.”23 This was certainly not the case for Filipino dialects spoken at the fair, which commonly used both indigenous and Spanish terms for the color blue.24 Yet, despite these and other misperceptions, Woodworth persisted in the examinations.

In the end the Department of Anthropometry and Psychometry arrived at somewhat unexpected conclusions. Rather than establishing a definitive hierarchy of physically based developmental differences among the races, both Woodworth and McGee ultimately found no discernible difference on a mass scale, particularly concerning color vision and manual dexterity, the two primary topics of experimentation.25 Woodworth’s assumptions and measurements of color blindness ultimately revealed that “color sense is probably very much the same all over the world.”26 He also found the same to be true for “cheirization,” a belief that higher evolution could be determined by the development of a subject’s forearms and coordinated dexterity.27 After thoroughly testing groups of Filipino, Native American, and Caucasian subjects, Woodworth confirmed that his experiments did not reveal any particular connection between whiteness, right-handed dexterity, and advanced civilization. “The degree of right-handedness has been asserted to vary in different races,” he explained, “and the favoring of one has been interpreted as conducive to specialization and so to civilization. We were, however, unable to detect any marked difference in the degree of righthandedness in different races.”28

While these findings might appear to undermine the structure and purpose of the exposition at large,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.