Scientists as Intermediaries: Studies of Ethnicity and Race in Poland and the Interchange of Knowledge, 1918–1952
Scientists as Intermediaries is an account of the transnational circulation of social scientific knowledge, its dissemination, and translation of ideas for policy-relevant applications of research to societies. It argues that the studies of ethnicity and race which developed in interwar East Central Europe in a close relationship to the German-speaking scholarship and the anglosphere, as well as often unacknowledged influence of the Soviet project, are intimately interconnected with early American area studies. More specifically, my project traces links between epistemologies and practices of anthropology in the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) and related social scientific endeavors conducted in the United States from the interwar period up to the early cold war. It attempts to understand the dissemination of knowledge, its appreciation, devaluation, and repudiation through analysis of direct and indirect interactions between scholars situated in their sociopolitical networks. Simultaneously, it proposes a shift of attention toward the “non-Western” arbiters of knowledge, and the implications of their agency in the development of the anthropological field as a means of intervening in society.
