Between 1938 and 1955, the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems (C.I.S.P.), headed by the world-renowned statistician and demographer Corrado Gini, organized a number of field expeditions in order to empirically verify the influence of the environment on the bodily changes of immigrants (Albanian and Ligurian ‘colonies’ in Italy, and Italians in the U.S.). Based on original archival sources, this article analyses, first, how the C.I.S.P. organized the demographic, anthropological and medical investigations on the physical assimilation of immigrants, by adopting a specific research model inaugurated in 1911 by American anthropologist Franz Boas; secondly, it shows how C.I.S.P. research was conceived, from the very beginning, as a fundamental contribution to the elaboration of an alternative, ‘Latin’ eugenic agenda as well as a form of critical distancing from the launch of the ‘Race Manifesto’, in July 1938. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Franz Boas racial science Corrado Gini Race Manifesto Eugenics

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