SUMMARY:

The serologist Ludwik Hirszfeld and his wife Hanna Hirszfeld are considered to be among the first scientists in the world to link research from serology to anthropology. They were able to identify different blood types among soldiers from all over the world during World War I at the Macedonian front. They related them to the geographical place of their descent and postulated a dominance of blood group A in the western parts of the world and a prevalence of B in the east. Their results undermined the prevailing idea that human “races” could be separated from each other with scientific clarity. While this was quite innovative and marked a shift in the anthropological understanding of racial categories, the Hirszfelds, and many others, continued to take for granted the conventional division of humanity into “races.” Their research results quickly circulated globally because heredity and “racial” belonging were hotly debated questions during the 1920s and 1930s. Serology seemed to offer easy solutions to the problem of “race” because blood groups were unconditioned by the natural or social environments. The new research field of seroanthropology was established, and partly professionalized and taken up eagerly by scientists (and ideologists) in the east and west, of whom some interpreted seroanthropology as undermining racial hierarchies whereas others wished to reinforce them; in Eastern Europe its appeal also resulted in a wish to legitimize the territories of the newly founded post-imperial nation-states. The article shows how seroanthropology became part of transnational and national social-biological discourses following World War I and analyzes how expert knowledge from a highly ambivalent and contested field was formed and applied as the result of a close link between scientific and epistemological, cultural and political factors.