The survey about the Statement organized by Dutch anthropologists shows how Dutch racial scientists used the Statement to distance themselves from Nazi racial science by employing a rhetoric of humility, insistence on the difference between scientific findings and moral choices, suggestions for alternative conceptualizations of race, and a strategic internationalism to connect with the international community of experts. This paper traces the reception of the first Declaration on Race among scientists in the Netherlands to demonstrate how the Statement's impact differed in different contexts. The statement led to strong international criticism from physical anthropologists and geneticists, because they disagreed with the dismissal of the concept of race and because they felt poorly represented on the committee of experts. The Statement, issued by a committee of experts at UNESCO, was a condemnation of scientific racism and declared that race was a social myth. While we lay out the argument for these connections in the Introduction, the value of this volume will be in the curated texts themselves.Ĭentral to this paper is a survey held among Dutch scientists in 1951 after the publication of the first UNESCO Statement on Race. The ‘materials’ for this research program were in many cases either directly taken from black and brown human beings caught up in Europe’s colonial projects, or reliant upon the data gathered during large-scale expeditions, such as those undertaken by James Cook in the South Pacific during the 1770s, expeditions that were funded in large part by way of profits earned on the sugar and rum produced by plantation slaves. By including these pieces we remind readers that scientific curiosity over the nature and origin of racial diversity, for example, did not develop in a vacuum but indeed existed in full knowledge of the exploitation and dispossession of human beings. The last section is focused on ‘race and empire’ in order to situate the scientific texts of the previous sections in their socio-historical context. This sets up the second section of the volume since one can trace a clear facet of racial biometric science out of this original set of enquiries, however, the bulk of section two is devoted to the many different accounts created at the time to understand and delineate racial differences. Given that at the time there were few ways to definitively prove that babies received contributions from both parents in their creation, mixed-race children became increasingly valuable sources of evidence for those insisting on joint inheritance. The volume has three sections, the first is devoted to selections from life scientists working to create an account of the processes guiding generation and embryogenetic development. The grounds for inclusion stem from our sense that there is an argument to be made for connecting two domains of inquiry that have heretofore remained distinct in both their presentation and scholarly analysis: life science debates regarding generation and inheritance on the one hand, and emerging philosophical and anthropological theories regarding both the grounds of racial diversity and the means for its subsequent classification. The aim of this volume is to bring together a set of key texts from the eighteenth century life sciences.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |