Anthropometric cartography: constructing Scottish racial identity in the early twentieth century

This paper examines racial cartography—a neglected subject in recent geographical work on the construction of race which has tended to dwell on photographic and museum representations. After sketching in something of the tradition of Victorian anthropometry, and its stress on categorizing human beings, it is argued that race is a socially constructed phenomenon, resulting partly from these obsessions. Using the conceptual framework developed by J. B. Harley this paper focuses on the cartographic products of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, during the early twentieth century. It concentrates specifically on anthropometric maps of pigmentation in Scotland, presented in the work of three anthropologists, John Gray, James Tocher and John Beddoe.