Professor (Dr.) Arup K. Chatterjee’s paper, “The Science of the Andamans and the Sign of the Four: The distorted racial hierarchy of British imperial anthropology” (Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, 14(2), 11 February 2019), has been cited in the Wikipedia article on the Andaman Islands.
About the Article
In this peer-reviewed article, Chatterjee examines how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British scientific and anthropological practices produced and naturalized racial hierarchies through study of the Andaman Islanders. The essay traces the entanglement of penal-colony administration, travel writing, museum practices, and emergent racial science—showing how islands and islanders were transformed into laboratory-objects for imperial knowledge-making. Chatterjee reads archival reports, missionary accounts, colonial ethnographies and visual records to demonstrate the ways in which “science” was mobilized to justify governance, exclusion, and hierarchical categorization. The paper also interrogates cultural reverberations that linger in public memory and academic discourse.
Citation on Wikipedia
The Wikipedia article now references Dr. Chatterjee’s piece as part of its discussion of colonial-era scientific practice and racial anthropology in the Andamans. This particular citation appears within the article’s section that addresses historical encounters and colonial representations of the Andaman Islanders, and it has been used by editors to nuance statements about how nineteenth-century anthropology produced racial taxonomies. The placement highlights the article’s contribution to debates on scientific authority and colonial governance; it also signals to casual readers that the history of the islands includes contested and scholarly interpretations, not only travel anecdotes. We encourage readers and students to follow the citation from Wikipedia to the full peer-reviewed essay for a more detailed, referenced account, and to consult the primary sources cited in Dr. Chatterjee’s bibliography for archival depth.
Why This Matters — Scholarship in Public Resources
Wikipedia often serves as the immediate reference point for students, travellers, journalists, and the general public. The inclusion of a rigorously researched, peer-reviewed analysis on the Andamans contributes crucial nuance to a public narrative that can otherwise be flattened by popular myth or dated colonial assumptions. By bringing archival scholarship into an open-access encyclopedia, the citation helps contextualise the historical roots of racial anthropology and invites readers to reassess how scientific rhetoric once shaped—and still shapes—understandings of island cultures.
Further Reading and Contact
We welcome this acknowledgement as an instance of academic research informing a public platform. If you are citing Chatterjee’s work, or if you have suggestions for additional public resources that reference his research, please let us know via the contact page. We will continue to update the Mentions section with new citations and media appearances.
Arup K. Chatterjee 