JosephYegorovich Deniker (Russian:Иосиф Егорович Деникер,Yosif Yegorovich Deniker; 6 March 1852, inAstrakhan – 18 March 1918, inParis) was aRussian-Frenchnaturalist andanthropologist, known primarily for his attempts to develop highly detailed maps ofrace in Europe.
Deniker was born in 1852 to French parents inAstrakhan,Russian Empire. He first studied at theuniversity and technical institute ofSt. Petersburg, where he adoptedengineering as a profession, and in this capacity, traveled extensively in thepetroleum districts of theCaucasus, inCentral Europe,Italy andDalmatia. Settling inParis, France in 1876, he studied at theSorbonne, where he received a doctorate innatural science in 1886. In 1888 he was appointed chieflibrarian of theNatural History Museum in Paris.[1]
Deniker became one of the chiefeditors of theDictionnaire de geographie universelle, and published many papers in the anthropological andzoologicaljournals of France.[1] In 1904 he was invited by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain to give the Huxley Memorial Lecture. He died inParis in 1918.
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Deniker's complicated maps of Europeanraces, of which he sometimes counted upwards of twenty, were widely referenced in his day, if only to illustrate the extremes of arbitrary racial classification.[2]Deniker 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 thepeoples of Europe were composed of three main racial stocks, while Deniker held there were six primary European races (besides four secondary or subsidiary races). The six primary races are:
The four subtypes are:
According toJan Czekanowski, both Deniker and Ripley omitted the existence of theArmenoid race, which Czekanowski claims to be one of the four main races of Europe, met especially among the Eastern Europeans and Southern Europeans.[5] Deniker's most lasting contribution to the field of racial theory was the designation of one of his races asla race nordique. While this group had no special place in Deniker's racial model, this "Nordic race" would be elevated by the famouseugenicist and anthropologistMadison Grant in hisNordic 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 transliteratedla 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 ofJulian Huxley andAlfred C. Haddon. Ripley argued that Deniker's idea of a race should be rather called a "type", since it was far less biologically rigid than most approaches to the question of race.
The author abbreviation Deniker is used to indicate this individual as the author when citing abotanical name.[6]
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Deniker, Joseph".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 21.
