ABSTRACT
In a context of an emerging modernity, the debate about human origins and diversity resulted in doubt and nostalgia, but above all in an outburst of indefensible research and knowledge that was marked by arrogance. Despite the existing early criticism on race by European medical doctors and Afro-American abolitionists, d’Omalius returned to Blumenbach and eighteenth-century insights with the risk of being called ‘retrograde’. Race was not only used to classify populations worldwide. Long before Belgian colonization in Congo, this ill-defined category, that in the end proved to be inexistant, was mainly used to structure European pasts and identities. Although Belgium remained neutral in the Franco-Prussian war, anthropological debates were affected by the conflict. Belgian anthropologists long operated without institutional framework and were members of different European geographical, anthropological, ethnographic, and ethnological societies. Unlike many SAB members, the archaeologist, museum director, and Darwinist Dupont stressed the importance of milieu, migration, and evolution.
