A physical anthropologist of great repute, Comas is the author of a widely used anthropometry text (Manual of Physical Anthropology, 1960). He has been a principal protagonist in anthropological discussions of race, taking up the cudgels for “anti-racist” angels in maintaining that physical differences do not imply innate differences in mental ability. Comas is, moreover, prominent in Western Hemisphere indigenist politics—his Ensayos sobre indigenismo was printed by the Interamerican Indian Institute in 1953.
The present small volume comes as a surprise, therefore, since it seems more an exercise in the history of science than anything else. Comas summarizes in twenty-eight pages the half-century of exhibition of two Central American dwarfs, Bartola and Máximo. He dissects the exhibitors’ propagandistic version of their exotic origin in an unknown “Aztec” city preserving in 1850 its isolated way of life, untouched by European civilization. He analyzes the anthropological literature on these two beings during the past century. Then Comas gives ninety pages of Spanish translations of over a dozen articles originally written in English, French, and German.
Exhibition propaganda made much of resemblances between profile sculptures of Indian heads at prehistoric Palenque and the dwarfs’ profiles. Dispassionate scientific demonstration of dwarfism as the cause of the living profiles would have been understandable during the latter half of the last century when the dwarfs were being exhibited. It is hard to understand why, sixty years later, a physical anthropologist who has devoted much of his career to decrying racism should be concerned to demonstrate that these two dwarfs were neither Aztec nor Mexican but offspring of an apparently normal mulatto couple in El Salvador. If Comas is seriously interested in dwarfism, he can still scientifically study it in Mexico. When I last recorded data at the regional pilgrimage festival of St. Francis at Magdalena, Sonora, in 1957, one loudspeaker contributing to the din of the Plaza Madero fair advertised “The World’s Smallest Human.” This female talked a blue streak, in contrast to mute Bartola and Máximo, and should make an excellent subject for study.
