Relocating race: introdution

Isis. 2014 Dec;105(4):759-63. doi: 10.1086/679422.

Abstract

The essays here reconsider some of the basal assumptions in Nancy Stepan's now-classic The Idea of Race in Science (1982). Stepan's book focused, for the most part, on metropolitan scientists from 1800 to 1960. The present contributions seek to "relocate" race along one (at least) of three axes: discipline, geography, period. The aim overall is not so much to make the fairly obvious point that "racial" thinking was different in different times and places; rather, the essays seek to use accounts of the relocation of race to "make strange" our assumptions about the conditions of possibility for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century race science in its once-canonical form.

Publication types

  • Historical Article
  • Introductory Journal Article

MeSH terms

  • Biological Science Disciplines / history*
  • Genetic Variation*
  • History, 19th Century
  • History, 20th Century
  • Humans
  • Philosophy / history*
  • Racial Groups / history*