Race and Civilizational Difference: The Butler Expedition, Physical Anthropology, and the Making of the Post–World War I Middle East

Drawing on archival materials about a series of expeditions to Ottoman Syria led by Princeton archeologist and political analyst Howard Crosby Butler, this paper recounts a neglected aspect of the process through which Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire were denied rights to sovereign states and self-determination in the Treaties that ended WWI and dissolved the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. A well-known archeologist, Butler was also deeply involved in policy discussions about relations of the United States with the Ottoman Empire, and the fateful question of whether Arab regions of the Ottoman empire were “suited” for independent self-government. Looking at this one expedition, to Ottoman Syria —a region called “semicivilized” together with the rest of the Ottoman Empire in international law of the 19^th and early 20^th century—can help shed light on these momentous issues. This expedition also can help us understand how practices of physical anthropology, anthropometry in particular (the systematic measurement of the morphology of humans or the physical properties of the human body) were deployed to discern “racial typologies” of the region in the changing shape and theories of “race” in anthropology more broadly, and in public discourse about race of which Franz Boas was such a central part. As such, the story sheds light on intersections of civilizational discourse, anthropology, and practices of racialization in Palestine and Syria. The expedition is one laboratory where theories of civilization, racialization, and notions of peoplehood, self-determination, and sovereignty were worked out—in anthropology, politics, and international law.