Inclusion and Exclusion Perspectives on Humanity and Race in Modern European History of Ideas and Science

INSTRUCTORS

László Kontler, Emese Lafferton

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Public perceptions of unity and diversity within humankind, of ethnic and racial difference, class and gender distinctions, develop in dialogue with theoretical inquiry into the same. In turn, such inquiry is deeply context dependent, and the notion of “humanity” it yields is not intrinsic, but a malleable cultural product shaped by processes of historical, social-anthropological, scientific and political self-reflection, and of encounter with “others” in modern Europe. This course intends to survey and problematize the major landmarks of this development through a study of primary texts and relevant secondary literature. It looks at scholarly, philosophical and political texts dedicated to the subject as well as visual representations, and at topics ranging from sixteenth-century confrontations with (and possessions of) the “exotic”, through the reflections of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural law, to evolutionist anthropology and the famous “human displays” or “ethnic shows” attached to nineteenth-century world or national exhibitions. It then explores how, in the context of evolutionary theories and degenerationist thinking, a number of modern scientific disciplines emerged with a preoccupation with observing, measuring, demonstrating, representing, cataloguing, and thus creating and reinforcing human differences and hierarchies. Craniometry, physical anthropology and ethnography contributed to the formation of gendered ethnic, national and imperial identities in order to further nation- or empire-building in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while psychiatry, sexology, psychoanalysis, criminal anthropology, and eugenics problematized, negotiated and interpreted forms of social deviance and concepts of “normalcy,” individual and public health, and deviance in the context of modern, urban and cosmopolitan social setting. Finally, we discuss questions of continuities and discontinuities in history by looking at events paving the way to Nazi discrimination, science and crimes and their postwar legacy, the birth of medical ethics, and recent advances in modern biomedicine and their impact on contemporary racial categories.

LIST OF CLASSES

1. Introduction: conceptual and theoretical issues
2. Columbian encounters: the “Age of Discovery” and making sense of the “Other”
3. “In the beginning all the world was America:” human nature and humanity in modern natural law
4. Cosmopolitanism and the “humanity” of the Enlightenment (1)
5. Cosmopolitanism and the “humanity” of the Enlightenment (2)
6. The “connivance between the circus and the laboratory”: discussing and displaying human difference in the nineteenth century
7. From Darwinian Evolution to Social Darwinism
8. Modern sciences of deviance and difference: phrenology, ethnography, and physical and criminal anthropology
9. Comparative study of eugenics
10. Nazi science: from anthropology to Rassenkunde to new eugenics?
11. Race and modern biomedicine
12. Paper workshop