‘Racial brain collection’

The Smithsonian is the world’s largest museum complex, including 21 museums and the National Zoo and research facilities. Most of its museums are found in Washington.

Established in 1846, the Smithsonian is well respected for its expertise in various science fields, as well as in the arts. Its Natural History Museum is one of its most visited but, until fairly recently, it had a dark past that was kept hidden … until The Washington Post published, just last week, several articles, videos, and podcasts exposing a “racial brain collection” that adds to the controversies around racism not just in the United States but in the world.

In this Washington Post exposé, we learn, too, of how the Philippines was implicated in the racial brain collection, the collection of which was itself a blatant display of racism.

A page in the 1906 Smithsonian Institute’s annual report listed newly acquired “objects” for its museum. The page was reproduced in one of the Washington Post’s articles: “… brain of a Moro, and brain of a Tagalog collected for the Museum from the Philippine Department at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.”

It turns out that the Smithsonian, through the years, amassed some 30,700 human bones and other body parts, including 255 brains for what was to become the “racial brain collection.” Most of the body parts and brains were obtained without the permission of families, taken from hospitals, burial grounds, and looted brains. Many of the brains were of American Blacks but there were also brains obtained from 10 countries, including the Philippines. The Philippine brains included some obtained at the turn of the 20th century from the Philippine Medical College, now our University of the Philippines College of Medicine.

The racial brain collection was handled by Ales Hrdlicka, a physical anthropologist who wanted to prove White supremacy through his research comparing brains from different “races.” Hrdlicka was also a believer in eugenics, a pseudoscience claiming you could improve human beings through selective breeding for “superior” physical attributes and intelligence, excluding of course people of color.

Physical anthropology, was part of anthropology training in the US and many countries, including the Philippines, spinning off such fields as criminal anthropology, taught in the University of the Philippines until recently including racial profiling through physical characteristics.

All this pseudoscience drew from collections of bones and brains, in particular Hrdlicka’s work. The ethical angle is dramatized by the bones obtained from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, better known as the St. Louis Exposition and World’s Fair of 1904, which included 1,200 Filipinos and indigenous people brought over for the exhibit. The Philippines had just become an American colony in 1898 and the US was eager to exhibit the natives, inevitably described as primitives.

A Filipino-American activist, Janna Añonuevo Langholz, who had been researching Filipinos who died in St. Louis, found records for a young Kankanaey woman, named Maura, who died of pneumonia on her way to St. Louis. Records showed only her cerebellum (found at the back of the brain) had been removed for the racial bone collection. But the cerebellum was no longer in the collection; it turned out it had been “likely incinerated” by the museum.

The Washington Post investigation included visits to the communities from where the brains were obtained, resulting in the families and communities now looking for ways to bring home the brains for proper burial.

The Washington Post’s exposés should be discussed in our social science classes, particularly for history. Even more importantly, the racial brain collection should be discussed in anthropology classes, with reflection on how the discipline was a child of imperialism. More than just bones and brains and racism, we deal with the bigger picture of colonial museums that used to boast of conquests and exploitation. Next year is the 120th anniversary of the St. Louis Exposition, with many other tales of racism in the display of Filipinos. It should be an occasion to educate ourselves about a little-known aspect of our colonial past, with its links to the resurgence of racism in our times.

Search on the internet for “racial bone collection” and the “Washington Post” to find the articles, podcasts, and videos (Search for “Maura” and “Paghahanap kay Maura”), which were released from Aug. 16 to 19.

mtan@inquirer.com.ph