{"title":"恐怖真空:德国国家社会主义肖像摄影中的种族错位、符号修复和帝国合法化","authors":"A. K. M. Skarpelis","doi":"10.1086/727562","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Racial purity and supremacy were central to Nazi Germany’s claims to European dominion. At the same time, their very own “racial scientific” research showed that most Germans were “mixed-race.” Given the dissonance between phenotypical aspirations to a Nordic ideal and the reality of a largely nonblond German population, how did the National Socialist regime maintain legitimacy to rule? Anthropologists, bureaucrats, and artists resolved this racial misalignment through horror vacui racialization, an excessive social classification that manifested as a racializing turn inward aimed at Christian Germans. I theorize the role of culture and art in stabilizing race-based rule in authoritarian and colonial contexts through racial repair that realigns desired and actual racial self-understandings. The article shows how an ostensibly biologically essentialist regime strategically used racial relativism in science, politics, and popular culture. I outline the sociological implications of this work for the sociologies of culture, of race and ethnicity, of theories of the state, of empire, and of science and technology studies.","PeriodicalId":7658,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Sociology","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"<i>Horror Vacui:</i> Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography\",\"authors\":\"A. K. M. Skarpelis\",\"doi\":\"10.1086/727562\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"Racial purity and supremacy were central to Nazi Germany’s claims to European dominion. At the same time, their very own “racial scientific” research showed that most Germans were “mixed-race.” Given the dissonance between phenotypical aspirations to a Nordic ideal and the reality of a largely nonblond German population, how did the National Socialist regime maintain legitimacy to rule? Anthropologists, bureaucrats, and artists resolved this racial misalignment through horror vacui racialization, an excessive social classification that manifested as a racializing turn inward aimed at Christian Germans. I theorize the role of culture and art in stabilizing race-based rule in authoritarian and colonial contexts through racial repair that realigns desired and actual racial self-understandings. The article shows how an ostensibly biologically essentialist regime strategically used racial relativism in science, politics, and popular culture. I outline the sociological implications of this work for the sociologies of culture, of race and ethnicity, of theories of the state, of empire, and of science and technology studies.\",\"PeriodicalId\":7658,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"American Journal of Sociology\",\"volume\":\"37 1\",\"pages\":\"0\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":4.4000,\"publicationDate\":\"2023-09-01\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"American Journal of Sociology\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.1086/727562\",\"RegionNum\":1,\"RegionCategory\":\"社会学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q1\",\"JCRName\":\"SOCIOLOGY\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American Journal of Sociology","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1086/727562","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"SOCIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography
Racial purity and supremacy were central to Nazi Germany’s claims to European dominion. At the same time, their very own “racial scientific” research showed that most Germans were “mixed-race.” Given the dissonance between phenotypical aspirations to a Nordic ideal and the reality of a largely nonblond German population, how did the National Socialist regime maintain legitimacy to rule? Anthropologists, bureaucrats, and artists resolved this racial misalignment through horror vacui racialization, an excessive social classification that manifested as a racializing turn inward aimed at Christian Germans. I theorize the role of culture and art in stabilizing race-based rule in authoritarian and colonial contexts through racial repair that realigns desired and actual racial self-understandings. The article shows how an ostensibly biologically essentialist regime strategically used racial relativism in science, politics, and popular culture. I outline the sociological implications of this work for the sociologies of culture, of race and ethnicity, of theories of the state, of empire, and of science and technology studies.
期刊介绍:
Established in 1895 as the first US scholarly journal in its field, the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) presents pathbreaking work from all areas of sociology, with an emphasis on theory building and innovative methods. AJS strives to speak to the general sociology reader and is open to contributions from across the social sciences—sociology, political science, economics, history, anthropology, and statistics—that seriously engage the sociological literature to forge new ways of understanding the social. AJS offers a substantial book review section that identifies the most salient work of both emerging and enduring scholars of social science. Commissioned review essays appear occasionally, offering readers a comparative, in-depth examination of prominent titles. Although AJS publishes a very small percentage of the papers submitted to it, a double-blind review process is available to all qualified submissions, making the journal a center for exchange and debate "behind" the printed page and contributing to the robustness of social science research in general.