Joseph Deniker

Joseph Deniker (March 6, 1852, Astrakhan – March 18, 1918, Paris) was a French naturalist and anthropologist, known primarily for his attempts to develop highly-detailed maps of race in Europe.

Deniker was born in 1852 to French parents in Astrakhan, Russia. He first studied at the university and technical institute of St. Petersburg, where he adopted engineering as a profession, and in this capacity travelled extensively in the petroleum districts of the Caucasus, in Central Europe, Italy and Dalmatia. Settling at Paris, France in 1876, he studied at the Sorbonne, where he received a doctorate in natural science in 1886. In 1888 he was appointed chief librarian of the Natural History Museum in Paris.

Deniker became one of the chief editors of the Dictionnaire de geographie universelle, and published many papers in the anthropological and zoological journals of France. In 1904 he was invited by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain to give the Huxley Memorial Lecture. He died in Paris in 1918.

Deniker's classification system

Deniker's complicated maps of European races, of which he sometimes counted upwards of twenty, were widely referenced in his day, if only to illustrate the extremes of arbitrary racial classification. In the late 19th century and early 20th century he had an extensive debate with another racial cartographer, William Z. Ripley, over the nature of race and the number of races. At the time, Ripley maintained that Europe was composed of three racial stocks, while Deniker held there were ten European races (six primary races with four subsidiary or sub-races). The 6 primary races are Nordic, littoral / atlanto-mediterranean, oriental, adriatic / dinaric, ibero-insular, and occidental / cevenole. The 4 subtypes are sub-Nordic, north-occidental, vistula, and sub-adriatic.

Deniker's most lasting contribution to the field of racial theory was the designation of one of his races as la race nordique (the Northern race). While this group had no special place in Deniker's racial model, it would be elevated by the famous eugenicists and scientific racist Madison Grant in his Nordic theory to the engine of civilization. Grant adopted Ripley's three-race model for Europeans, but disliked Ripley's use of the "Teuton" for one of the races. Grant transliterated la race nordique into "Nordic", and promoted it to the top of his racial hierarchy in his own popular racial theory of the 1910s and 1920s.

Deniker proposed that the concept of "race" was too confusing, and instead proposed the use of the word "ethnic group" instead, which was later adopted prominently in the work of Julian Huxley and Alfred C. Haddon. Ripley argued that Deniker's idea of a "race" should be rather called a "type", since it was far less biologically rigid that most approaches to the question of race.

Selected works

Recherches anatomiques et embryologiques sur les singes anthropoides (1886)
Etude sur les Kalmouks (1883)
Les Ghiliaks (1883)
Races et peuples de la terre (1900)
The races of man: an outline of anthropology and ethnography (1900)

References

Arthur Keith and Alfred C. Haddon, "Obituary: Dr. Joseph Deniker" Man 18 (May 1918): 65-67.
Ashley Montagu, "The Concept of Race," American Anthropologist 64:5 (October 1962): 919-928.