Decolonising the Present by Colonising the Past? A Case From the History of Physical Anthropology

Inspired by the current transdisciplinary debate about decolonisation, this article raises the fundamental question of how medicine can manage its own history in a way that safeguards the drive for decolonisation, but without eradicating the traces of previous misconceptions. We will do so by reconsidering a case from the complex records of physical anthropology, more specifically, a selected corpus of texts written by the two Norwegian physicians Kristian Emil Schreiner and Alette Schreiner in the early twentieth century, and their relation to race and racism. By teasing out the conceptual nuances and specificities in these texts, we do not attempt to exonerate the Schreiner couple of accusations of racism. Rather, we argue that it is essential to approach the past with caution, avoiding oversimplification when striving to distance ourselves from past thinking.