Terence Keel

Divine Variations

How Christian Thought Became Racial Science

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Terence Keel is Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, and in the Department of African American Studies.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 200
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. Januar 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 431g
• ISBN-13: 9780804795401
• ISBN-10: 0804795401
• Artikelnr.: 47775809

Autorenporträt

Terence Keel is Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, and in the Department of African American Studies.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
The Introduction lays out the theoretical stakes of the work as a whole. It
opens with a critical evaluation of the work of acclaimed geneticist
Spencer Wells, whose 2002 publication The Journey of Man has helped frame
the now-standard interpretation of human evolution and migration from a
single set of ancestors out of Africa. Wells's account of human evolution
reveals the epistemic authority that modern genetics has obtained on the
question of race and human beginnings. It is argued that contemporary
biologists inherited this authority, however, from their Christian
intellectual ancestors, who provided modern scientists with a cache of
interpretive tools and assumptions that proved useful for narrating the
development of human life and constructing theories of racial difference
believed to supersede all previous accounts of human origins. After laying
out the theoretical ground to be covered, this introductory chapter
provides an overview of the chapters that follow.
1Impure Thoughts: Johann Blumenbach and the Birth of Racial Science
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 examines the thought of the eighteenth-century ethnologist Johann
F. Blumenbach, whose 1775 work On the Natural Variety of Mankind is often
represented as precipitating the secular turn in the modern study of race.
The chapter offers an alternative account of the intellectual ancestry
alive in Blumenbach's racial theories by recovering the Christian sources
of his thinking. Political and philosophical anti-Judaism prevalent in late
eighteenth-century Germany, the transformation of the Protestant Reformer
Martin Luther into a pioneer of German national identity, and the
anti-Jewish writings of Johann David Michaelis in the emergent field of
biblical geography at Göttingen University were all crucial political,
religious, and intellectual influences during the time Blumenbach developed
his racial theories. Drawing on the notion that the epistemological origins
of racial science are fundamentally mongrel, this chapter argues that
Blumenbach's racial theories were not an expression of pure, untainted,
secular rationality.
2Superseding Christian Truth: The Quiet Revolution of Nineteenth-Century
American Science of Race
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 analyzes scientific criticism leveled against the theory of
common human descent beginning in the 1830s. It focuses on the thought of
Josiah C. Nott, a southern physician, early epidemiologist, and major
figure of the so-called American School of Ethnology. Nott claimed that
humanity's common origin, or monogenesis, was an unscientific belief and a
mere carryover from when natural historians were indebted to Christian
ideas about nature and human life. Thus, he attempted to establish an
account of the history of human racial groups that moved beyond the
constraints of the narrative recorded by Moses in the Bible. Despite these
secular aspirations Nott ultimately failed to offer an account of race that
stood independent of Christian thought. The case of American polygenism
illustrates the degree to which modern racial science is indebted to a
religious intellectual history it has attempted to deny and supersede.
3The Ghost of Christian Creationism: Racial Dispositions and Progressive
Era Public Health Research
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 explores how polygenist carryovers emerged in early
twentieth-century medical and public health studies on the links between
race and disease. This persistence further embedded ideas about race
derived from Christian intellectual history into the methods and reasoning
of modern scientists and public health researchers. In the early twentieth
century, the concept of biological determinism-the idea that the fixed
biological makeup of a racial group determines its members' health,
behavior, and intelligence-reoccupies the epistemic space once filled
explicitly by a theological view of nature. This chapter also introduces
the work of the African American physician, ethicist, and social hygienist
Charles V. Roman, who departed from the racial logic of his time. Roman
stressed instead that the idea of common human ancestry should push public
health researchers to think more critically about the social and
environmental factors shaping health outcomes and black susceptibility to
disease.
4Noah's Mongrel Children: Ancient DNA and the Persistence of Christian
Forms in Modern Biology
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 examines how concepts about racial ancestry and the ontological
uniqueness of human life from Christian intellectual history have
historically informed scientific research on the Neanderthal. These
Christian forms are at play in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and
the unanticipated discovery that mating occurred between this hominid group
and modern humans around forty thousand years ago. Geneticists claim that
evidence of this encounter is found almost exclusively in the genomes of
Europeans and Asians. This chapter also shows how scientists in both the
nineteenth and twenty-first centuries deployed notions of distinct
continental groups and fixed racial traits to draw conclusions about
human-Neanderthal relatedness. In both centuries, concepts and reasoning
strategies implicitly divinize nature while also framing human ancestry
into three original groups that represent the reoccupation of the story of
Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, into contemporary algorithmic
representations of human genetic ancestry.
5Beyond the Religious Pursuit of Race
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 provides a summary of the major claims of the book. It also
explains how the conflict thesis for representing the relationship between
science and religion fails to capture how Christian intellectual history
has been key to the formation of the race concept in modern science. Citing
recent data from a 2015 Pew Research Survey, this chapter argues that the
conflict thesis remains a fixture in the minds of Americans, which has
consequences for shifting public perceptions about the assumed secularity
of the scientific study of race. It closes with a call for recognizing that
the scientific study of race is involved in providing a solution to the
existential dilemma of defining what it means to be human. This solution is
neither value-free nor detached from the cultural and religious inheritance
that has fastened itself to the work of Euro-American scientists who study
race.