Taxonomy, Race Science, and Mexican Maize

In my brief response to Terence Keel’s essay “Race on Both Sides of the Razor,” I focus on something as pertinent as alleles and social construction: how we write history and how we memorialize the past. Current DNA analysis promises to remap our past and interrogate certainties that we have taken for granted. For the purposes of this commentary I call this displacing of known histories the epigenetics of memory. Just as environmental stimuli rouse epigenetic mechanisms to produce lasting change in behavior and neural function, the unearthing of forgotten bodies, forgotten lives, has a measurable effect on how we act and think and what we believe. The act of writing history, memorializing the lives of others, is a stimulus that reshapes who and what we are. We cannot disentangle the discussion about the social construction of race and biological determinism from the ways in which we have written—and must write going forward—about race. To the debate about social construction and biological variation we must add the heft of historical context, which allows us to place these two ideas in dialogue with each other. Consequently, before addressing the themes in Keel’s provocative opening essay and John Hartigan’s response, I speak about dead bodies—specifically, cemeteries for Black bodies. Three examples—one each from Atlanta, Georgia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Mexico—illustrate how dead bodies must enter our current debates about race, science, and social constructions.

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Raza, ciencia, sociedad

INTERdisciplina ◽

10.22201/ceiich.24485705e.2014.4.47204 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 2 (4) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Peter Wade

Keyword(s):

Cultural Discourse ◽

Human Biology ◽

Science And Society ◽

Race Science ◽

And Behavior ◽

Over Time

Resumen | En este trabajo quiero presentar una cronología convencional del concepto raza que marca un movimiento en el cual raza cambia de ser una idea basada en la cultura y el medio ambiente, a ser algo biológico, inflexible y determinante, para luego volver a ser una noción que habla de la cultura.Resumo cómo la idea de raza ha cambiado a través del tiempo, mirando necesariamente el rol que ha desempeñado la ciencia, y enfocando los diferentes discursos de índole natural-cultural sobre los cuerpos, el medio ambiente y el comportamiento, en los cuales las dimensiones culturales y naturales siempre coexisten.“La naturaleza” no puede ser entendida solamente como “la biología” y ni la naturaleza ni la biología necesariamente implican sólo el determinismo, la fijeza y la inmutabilidad Estar abiertos a la coexistencia de la cultura y la naturaleza y a la mutabilidad de la naturaleza nos permite ver mejor el ámbito de acción del pensamiento racial.Race, Science and Society Abstract | In this article I present and critique a standard chronology of race as, first, a concept rooted in culture and environment, and later in human biology and determinism, and finally back to culture alone.I will outline changing understandings of race over time, with some attention to the role of science, broadly understood, and on the continuing but changing character of race as a natural-cultural discourse about organic bodies, environments and behavior, in which both cultural and natural dimensions always co-exist.“Nature” is not to be understood simply as “biology,” and neither nature nor biology necessarily imply the fixity and determination that they are often assumed nowadays to involve.Being open to the co-existence of culture and nature and the mutability of the latter allows us to better comprehend the whole range of action of racial thinking.

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‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽

10.1017/bjt.2021.1 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-19

Author(s):

Suman Seth

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Eighteenth Century ◽

Charles Darwin ◽

Skin Colour ◽

Race Science ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

Late Eighteenth ◽

History Of ◽

History Of Race ◽

Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

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Isolates and Crosses in Human Population Genetics; or, A Contextualization of German Race Science

Current Anthropology ◽

10.1086/662574 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 53 (S5) ◽

pp. S69-S82 ◽

Cited By ~ 29

Author(s):

Veronika Lipphardt

Keyword(s):

Population Genetics ◽

Human Population ◽

Human Population Genetics ◽

Race Science

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Ann Fabian. The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead. xi + 288 pp., illus., bibl., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2010. $27.50 (cloth).

Isis ◽

10.1086/664868 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 102 (4) ◽

pp. 776-777

Author(s):

Jim Endersby

Keyword(s):

University Of Chicago ◽

Race Science ◽

University Of Chicago Press

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Passenkunde des judischen Volkes

Kazan medical journal ◽

10.17816/kazmj58260 ◽

1930 ◽

Vol 26 (7) ◽

pp. 135-135

Author(s):

H. Gunther

Keyword(s):

Jewish People ◽

Prolific Author ◽

Race Science

Gunther is a prolific author of various books on race science. He published a book on European races, another on the race of the Germanic people (published in 1929 in the thirteenth edition) and here is another book on the race of the Jewish people.

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