![]() As an emerging discipline, physical anthropology gave new impetus to the search for a distinctive national character, and physical anthropologists-in Romania and elsewhere-endorsed cultural theories of ethnogenesis with facts and scientific arguments derived from their research on living populations. Although the most influential narratives of national belonging during this period were often expressed in terms of culture and history, race gradually became a salient category. In this article I discuss theories of racial difference, with a particular focus on anthropological studies carried out on Romanian soldiers between 19. Moreover, by identifying the racial types purportedly constituting the Romanian nation, anthropologists not only hoped to develop a systematic racial inventory of Romania’s ethnic communities, but also to reinforce the myth of ethnogenesis, which described the Romanians as worthy of their noble European origins and legitimized their territorial claims. The interwar and Second World War periods witnessed the full flowering of a Romanian race science that accommodated a racial hierarchy as the basis for national difference. An essential corollary to this development was a strong commitment to the cultivation of distinct Romanian racial types. ![]() It first discusses racial typologies produced by Austrian, German, Italian and Polish anthropologists investigating POWs during the First World War, and then examines how Romanian physicians and anthropologists engaged with these typologies while refining their own scientific and nationalist agendas. ![]() Turda’s article explores the diverse ways in which racial research conducted on prisoners-of-war (POWs) and soldiers contributed to the emergence of anthropological narratives of national identity in Romania between 19. ![]()
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