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The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960
230 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1982
30 people want to read
About the author
Nancy Stepan
8 books3 followersNancy Leys Stepan is Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University. She is the author of Eradication, "The Hour of Eugenics": Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America and Picturing Tropical Nature.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 12, 2022
Essential and relatively easy-to-follow resource for those interested in a historiography of biology as it pertains to human diversity. Readers unfamiliar with the topic will be surprised just how influential racial science/scientific racism has been on the development of western academia - and just how late those fires began to be stamped out.
While a wonderful historiography in and of itself, what makes Stepan's work so essential for us today is the exact moment in time the author was writing and compiling it. In her final chapter Stepan leaves us with a review of the exciting new field of human population genetics and her belief in the post-race position inherent to these new techniques/technologies. Published in 1982, there was a real air of having finally overcome race as a real or relevant category in human evolutionary biology at the time. It would not be until the beginning of the 21st century, two decades later, that the human genome would be fully sequenced - and with it race categories would begin to creep back in to science.
Today, you can purportedly discover your "ethnicity" with companies like AncestryDNA, and race in modern population genetics is often treated uncritically as a given. But Stepan's work gives us an essential glimpse into the postwar period in human diversity studies where we had almost defeated the everpresent beast. . . until further scientific advancement gave many a basis to reintroduce it.
Put this on your reading list but definitely commit to further reading to get caught up to the 21st century. We're currently in a critical reconfiguration period in human genomics, as science has once again circled back to bioessentialisms - this work shows us that such an occurrence is not by mistake.
While a wonderful historiography in and of itself, what makes Stepan's work so essential for us today is the exact moment in time the author was writing and compiling it. In her final chapter Stepan leaves us with a review of the exciting new field of human population genetics and her belief in the post-race position inherent to these new techniques/technologies. Published in 1982, there was a real air of having finally overcome race as a real or relevant category in human evolutionary biology at the time. It would not be until the beginning of the 21st century, two decades later, that the human genome would be fully sequenced - and with it race categories would begin to creep back in to science.
Today, you can purportedly discover your "ethnicity" with companies like AncestryDNA, and race in modern population genetics is often treated uncritically as a given. But Stepan's work gives us an essential glimpse into the postwar period in human diversity studies where we had almost defeated the everpresent beast. . . until further scientific advancement gave many a basis to reintroduce it.
Put this on your reading list but definitely commit to further reading to get caught up to the 21st century. We're currently in a critical reconfiguration period in human genomics, as science has once again circled back to bioessentialisms - this work shows us that such an occurrence is not by mistake.
Displaying 1 of 1 review