M Sommer
Biographic Data
| ID | 53702 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Sommer |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Sommer |
| SIGNATURE | SOMMER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lucerne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7958-2901 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Between race, gender, and objectivity: Alice Mossie Brues (1913–2007) and the transformation of physical anthropology
This article examines the career of Alice Mossie Brues (1913–2007), a prominent yet ambivalent figure in twentieth-century physical anthropology, to explore how gender and race shaped scientific authority and knowledge production during a period of profound disciplinary transformation. Trained under Earnest A. Hooton at Harvard, Brues combined classical racial anthropology with emerging approaches from population genetics, evolutionary theory, an…
In the shadow of the tree: The diagrammatics of relatedness in genealogy, anthropology, and genetics as epistemic, cultural, and political practice
The preferred tool for conceptualizing, determining, and claiming relations of kinship, ancestry, and descent among humans are diagrams. For this reason, and at the same time to avoid a reduction to biology as transported by terms such as kinship , ancestry , and descent , we introduce the expression diagrammatics of relatedness . We seek to understand the enormous influence that especially tree diagrams have had as a way to express and engage wi…
Stakeholder Views of Epilepsy in the Biology Classroom: A Qualitative Exploratory Pilot Study
While knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards epilepsy have been extensively investigated, studies that focus on recommendations for teaching units about epilepsy are scarce. To gain an understanding of stakeholders’ views on the content and structure of such units and their implications for educational practice, interviews with teachers (n = 4), first aid instructors (n = 4), representatives of epilepsy-related associations (n = 3), neurolog…
A diagrammatics of race: Samuel George Morton's ‘American Golgotha’ and the contest for the definition of the young field of anthropology
Between the last decades of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, something of paramount importance happened in the history of anthropology. This was the advent of a physical anthropology that was about the classification of ‘human races’ through comparative measurement. A central tool of the new trade was diagrams. Being inherently about relations in and between objects, diagrams became the means of defining human groups and their…
Diagrammatik der Verwandtschaft: Beiträge zu einer langen Geschichte
Die Familie und der Stammbaum des Menschen in der Anthropologie
Die Familie undder
The meaning of absence: The primate tree that did not make it into Darwin's The Descent of Man
This paper engages with a specific image: Darwin's tree of the primates. Although this diagram was sketched in ink on paper in 1868, it did not make it into the publication of The Descent of Man (1871). This may seem all the more in need of an explanation because, as Adrian Desmond and James Moore have shown, Darwin strongly relied on the notion of familial genealogy in the development of his theory of organismic evolution, or rather descent. How…
Population-genetic trees, maps, and narratives of the great human diasporas
From the 1960s, mathematical and computational tools have been developed to arrive at human population trees from various kinds of serological and molecular data. Focusing on the work of the Italian-born population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, I follow the practices of tree-building and mapping from the early blood-group studies to the current genetic admixture research. I argue that the visual language of the tree is paralleled in the n…
Visibility matters: Diagrammatic renderings of human evolution and diversity in physical, serological and molecular anthropology
Images are at the heart of strategies of persuasion. They render certain aspects visible and leave others unrepresented; and they may shape processes of scientific reasoning and imagination. By tracing diagrammatic images in the anthropological sciences throughout the 20 th century, the contributions to this special issue highlight some dominant pictorial traditions for rendering human evolution and diversity visible. This article aims to provide…
Famille / Familles: Difficiles et mouvantes typologies
La diversité actuelle des comportements familiaux pose pour les sociologues et les démographes la difficile question du classement de ces comportements en modèles structurés, c'est-à-dire la construction de typologies cohérentes. Après avoir rappelé quelques étapes marquantes de l'élaboration des typologies de la famille, nous illustrons les difficultés auxquelles se heurte la recherche lorsqu'il s'agit de construire une typologie basée sur des d…
Biology as a Technology of Social Justice in Interwar Britain: Arguments from Evolutionary History, Heredity, and Human Diversity
In this article, I am concerned with the public engagements of Julian Huxley, Lancelot Hogben, and J. B. S. Haldane. I analyze how they used the new insights into the genetics of heredity to argue against any biological foundations for antidemocratic ideologies, be it Nazism, Stalinism, or the British laissez-faire and class system. The most striking fact-considering the abuse of biological knowledge they contested-is that these biologists presen…
Serielle Inszenierung: Die Osborn-Knight Restaurationen der Evolutionsgeschichte
Human tools of the European tertiary? Artefacts, brains and minds in evolutionist reasoning, 1870–1920
This essay explores evolutionary reasoning and notions of progress at the turn of the twentieth century by focusing on the various interpretations used to understand eoliths. These ‘dawn’ (Greek eos) ‘stones’ (Greek lithos) were contested objects and I focus on three geographic episodes in which they were used to support scientific, and sometimes socially inspired, accounts of human origins. Particular attention is paid to the work of Gabriel de …
Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain
Wer sind Sie wirklich?“ – Identität und Geschichte in der ‚Gensequenz‘
DNA and cultures of remembrance: Anthropological genetics, biohistories and biosocialities
Seriality in the Making: The Osborn-Knight Restorations of Evolutionary History
The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth-Century America
The essay focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)-the creator of Tarzan-and his contemporary and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935). These historical figures are of interest as multimedia-versed shapers of collective fantasies of human evolution. Both men created and drew on science and fiction to produce vraisemblance in their reconstructions of human prehistory, and thus to ach…
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Neanderthal as Image and ‘Distortion’ in Early 20th-Century French Science and Press
This paper investigates an historical episode that involved an object that was both scientific and popular. In 1908, the first almost complete Neanderthal skeleton was discovered at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. From its very rebirth, the specimen became an object of interest to scientists holding different views of human evolution. It also was of interest for a public whose Catholic and anti-clerical stances were voiced through the press, and …
Eoliths as evidence for human origins? The British context
An amusing account of a cave in Wales’: William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Red Lady of Paviland
In 1823 the first Reader of Geology at Oxford University, William Buckland (1784–1856), unearthed the human skeleton known as the ‘Red Lady’ in Paviland cave, south Wales. While the Red Lady is valued today as a central testimony of early Upper Palaeolithic humans in Britain, Buckland considered the skeleton as of postdiluvian age, meaning from after the biblical Deluge. Rather than viewing Buckland as either obscurantist or as having worked enti…
Wohnstandortgerechte städtische Mietzinse: Eine Fallstudie Zürich
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Neanderthal as Image and ‘Distortion’ in Early 20th-Century French Science and Press
This paper investigates an historical episode that involved an object that was both scientific and popular. In 1908, the first almost complete Neanderthal skeleton was discovered at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. From its very rebirth, the specimen became an object of interest to scientists holding different views of human evolution. It also was of interest for a public whose Catholic and anti-clerical stances were voiced through the press, and …
Visibility matters: Diagrammatic renderings of human evolution and diversity in physical, serological and molecular anthropology
Images are at the heart of strategies of persuasion. They render certain aspects visible and leave others unrepresented; and they may shape processes of scientific reasoning and imagination. By tracing diagrammatic images in the anthropological sciences throughout the 20 th century, the contributions to this special issue highlight some dominant pictorial traditions for rendering human evolution and diversity visible. This article aims to provide…
An amusing account of a cave in Wales’: William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Red Lady of Paviland
In 1823 the first Reader of Geology at Oxford University, William Buckland (1784–1856), unearthed the human skeleton known as the ‘Red Lady’ in Paviland cave, south Wales. While the Red Lady is valued today as a central testimony of early Upper Palaeolithic humans in Britain, Buckland considered the skeleton as of postdiluvian age, meaning from after the biblical Deluge. Rather than viewing Buckland as either obscurantist or as having worked enti…
Eoliths as evidence for human origins? The British context
Population-genetic trees, maps, and narratives of the great human diasporas
From the 1960s, mathematical and computational tools have been developed to arrive at human population trees from various kinds of serological and molecular data. Focusing on the work of the Italian-born population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, I follow the practices of tree-building and mapping from the early blood-group studies to the current genetic admixture research. I argue that the visual language of the tree is paralleled in the n…
Biology as a Technology of Social Justice in Interwar Britain: Arguments from Evolutionary History, Heredity, and Human Diversity
In this article, I am concerned with the public engagements of Julian Huxley, Lancelot Hogben, and J. B. S. Haldane. I analyze how they used the new insights into the genetics of heredity to argue against any biological foundations for antidemocratic ideologies, be it Nazism, Stalinism, or the British laissez-faire and class system. The most striking fact-considering the abuse of biological knowledge they contested-is that these biologists presen…
The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth-Century America
The essay focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)-the creator of Tarzan-and his contemporary and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935). These historical figures are of interest as multimedia-versed shapers of collective fantasies of human evolution. Both men created and drew on science and fiction to produce vraisemblance in their reconstructions of human prehistory, and thus to ach…
Wohnstandortgerechte städtische Mietzinse: Eine Fallstudie Zürich
Eoliths as evidence for human origins? The British context
An amusing account of a cave in Wales’: William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Red Lady of Paviland
In 1823 the first Reader of Geology at Oxford University, William Buckland (1784–1856), unearthed the human skeleton known as the ‘Red Lady’ in Paviland cave, south Wales. While the Red Lady is valued today as a central testimony of early Upper Palaeolithic humans in Britain, Buckland considered the skeleton as of postdiluvian age, meaning from after the biblical Deluge. Rather than viewing Buckland as either obscurantist or as having worked enti…
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Neanderthal as Image and ‘Distortion’ in Early 20th-Century French Science and Press
This paper investigates an historical episode that involved an object that was both scientific and popular. In 1908, the first almost complete Neanderthal skeleton was discovered at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. From its very rebirth, the specimen became an object of interest to scientists holding different views of human evolution. It also was of interest for a public whose Catholic and anti-clerical stances were voiced through the press, and …
The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth-Century America
The essay focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)-the creator of Tarzan-and his contemporary and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935). These historical figures are of interest as multimedia-versed shapers of collective fantasies of human evolution. Both men created and drew on science and fiction to produce vraisemblance in their reconstructions of human prehistory, and thus to ach…
Wer sind Sie wirklich?“ – Identität und Geschichte in der ‚Gensequenz‘
DNA and cultures of remembrance: Anthropological genetics, biohistories and biosocialities
Seriality in the Making: The Osborn-Knight Restorations of Evolutionary History
Serielle Inszenierung: Die Osborn-Knight Restaurationen der Evolutionsgeschichte
Human tools of the European tertiary? Artefacts, brains and minds in evolutionist reasoning, 1870–1920
This essay explores evolutionary reasoning and notions of progress at the turn of the twentieth century by focusing on the various interpretations used to understand eoliths. These ‘dawn’ (Greek eos) ‘stones’ (Greek lithos) were contested objects and I focus on three geographic episodes in which they were used to support scientific, and sometimes socially inspired, accounts of human origins. Particular attention is paid to the work of Gabriel de …
Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain
Biology as a Technology of Social Justice in Interwar Britain: Arguments from Evolutionary History, Heredity, and Human Diversity
In this article, I am concerned with the public engagements of Julian Huxley, Lancelot Hogben, and J. B. S. Haldane. I analyze how they used the new insights into the genetics of heredity to argue against any biological foundations for antidemocratic ideologies, be it Nazism, Stalinism, or the British laissez-faire and class system. The most striking fact-considering the abuse of biological knowledge they contested-is that these biologists presen…
Population-genetic trees, maps, and narratives of the great human diasporas
From the 1960s, mathematical and computational tools have been developed to arrive at human population trees from various kinds of serological and molecular data. Focusing on the work of the Italian-born population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, I follow the practices of tree-building and mapping from the early blood-group studies to the current genetic admixture research. I argue that the visual language of the tree is paralleled in the n…
Visibility matters: Diagrammatic renderings of human evolution and diversity in physical, serological and molecular anthropology
Images are at the heart of strategies of persuasion. They render certain aspects visible and leave others unrepresented; and they may shape processes of scientific reasoning and imagination. By tracing diagrammatic images in the anthropological sciences throughout the 20 th century, the contributions to this special issue highlight some dominant pictorial traditions for rendering human evolution and diversity visible. This article aims to provide…
Famille / Familles: Difficiles et mouvantes typologies
La diversité actuelle des comportements familiaux pose pour les sociologues et les démographes la difficile question du classement de ces comportements en modèles structurés, c'est-à-dire la construction de typologies cohérentes. Après avoir rappelé quelques étapes marquantes de l'élaboration des typologies de la famille, nous illustrons les difficultés auxquelles se heurte la recherche lorsqu'il s'agit de construire une typologie basée sur des d…
The meaning of absence: The primate tree that did not make it into Darwin's The Descent of Man
This paper engages with a specific image: Darwin's tree of the primates. Although this diagram was sketched in ink on paper in 1868, it did not make it into the publication of The Descent of Man (1871). This may seem all the more in need of an explanation because, as Adrian Desmond and James Moore have shown, Darwin strongly relied on the notion of familial genealogy in the development of his theory of organismic evolution, or rather descent. How…
Die Familie und der Stammbaum des Menschen in der Anthropologie
Die Familie undder
Stakeholder Views of Epilepsy in the Biology Classroom: A Qualitative Exploratory Pilot Study
While knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards epilepsy have been extensively investigated, studies that focus on recommendations for teaching units about epilepsy are scarce. To gain an understanding of stakeholders’ views on the content and structure of such units and their implications for educational practice, interviews with teachers (n = 4), first aid instructors (n = 4), representatives of epilepsy-related associations (n = 3), neurolog…
A diagrammatics of race: Samuel George Morton's ‘American Golgotha’ and the contest for the definition of the young field of anthropology
Between the last decades of the 18th century and the middle of the 19th century, something of paramount importance happened in the history of anthropology. This was the advent of a physical anthropology that was about the classification of ‘human races’ through comparative measurement. A central tool of the new trade was diagrams. Being inherently about relations in and between objects, diagrams became the means of defining human groups and their…
Diagrammatik der Verwandtschaft: Beiträge zu einer langen Geschichte
In the shadow of the tree: The diagrammatics of relatedness in genealogy, anthropology, and genetics as epistemic, cultural, and political practice
The preferred tool for conceptualizing, determining, and claiming relations of kinship, ancestry, and descent among humans are diagrams. For this reason, and at the same time to avoid a reduction to biology as transported by terms such as kinship , ancestry , and descent , we introduce the expression diagrammatics of relatedness . We seek to understand the enormous influence that especially tree diagrams have had as a way to express and engage wi…
Between race, gender, and objectivity: Alice Mossie Brues (1913–2007) and the transformation of physical anthropology
This article examines the career of Alice Mossie Brues (1913–2007), a prominent yet ambivalent figure in twentieth-century physical anthropology, to explore how gender and race shaped scientific authority and knowledge production during a period of profound disciplinary transformation. Trained under Earnest A. Hooton at Harvard, Brues combined classical racial anthropology with emerging approaches from population genetics, evolutionary theory, an…
Philosophy (14 works) · History (12 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Race, Genetics, and Society (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Art (6 works) · History (6 works)