Following the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1922-23 led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), a specific brand of Turkish nationalism and statism known as Kemalism emerged as the official foundational ideology for the new state. The intellectual and political origins of this ideology are diffuse and diverse, ranging from late Ottoman pan-Turkic nationalist movements to 19th century German materialism, and have been exhaustively studied by scholars both inside and outside of Turkey. Almost all of the major intellectual currents that informed official Turkish nationalism in the early Republic do, however, have one thing in common: they used the cutting-edge academic and scientistic techniques of their day in an attempt to define who could – and should – be called a Turk. Never was this tendency more pronounced than in the official turn towards anthropology and anthropometry during the era of High Kemalism in the 1930s. Beginning in 1930 with the articulation of the Turkish History Thesis (Türk Tarih Tezi), which claimed that all human civilization had Turkish origins, physical anthropology became an invaluable tool in the arsenal of the Turkish intellectuals who were charged with delineating and building the new nation. This movement reached its zenith in 1939 with the publication of a ground-breaking and ostensibly definitive anthropometric survey of the Turkish ethnie carried out by Afet İnan, an academic and ideologue who also happened to be an adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal. This paper argues that Afet İnan’s study, published as her doctoral dissertation at the University of Geneva under the title "l’Anatolie, le pays de la 'race' turque: recherches sur les caractères anthropologiques des populations de la Turquie," represents the culmination of the “anthropologization” and general scientization of Turkish nationalism. Furthermore, while the anthropometric study and the Turkish History Thesis that it legitimated have become mere eccentric footnotes in Turkish history, this paper will contend that they both constitute part of a long history of attempts to apply avant-garde disciplinary methods to the project of nation-building in Turkey.