How did academics operating within the framework of scientific racism respond to what appeared to be a direct challenge to the very basis of their theories of racial hierarchy? This project will take anthropological, archaeological and race biological studies of the Ainu as a case study for understanding knowledge production within scientific racism during the period 1868-1941. Starting in the 1870s, European and American scientists became increasingly interested the Ainu, a people indigenous to the Okhotsk region in Northeast Asia that challenged many of their assumptions about race and “civilization.” The Ainu appeared to them to both be “Aryan” or “white” and a “primitive,” “dying race” that was being displaced by Japanese colonization, potentially challenging established notions of “white” racial superiority. Did the Ainu provoke a reevaluation of race biological classifications or were they construed so as to conform to or even strengthen theories of racial hierarchy? This project will chart Western racialized scientific debates about the Ainu in order to better understand how knowledge was produced and legitimized within scientific racism in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. The results will be compared with existing studies of racial depictions of other groups that were sometimes considered “white,” especially the Sámi and Māori. This project will offer valuable insights into the contingent ways in which scientific knowledge is created in a specific cultural and political context.