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It`s kind, you tell me, Nancy.
I will take another try, later.

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What is also interesting is that this ties in to recent comments on other threads about whether the scientist is responsible for future uses of her work . . .

Anyway, I honestly wonder if the possibility crossed B’s mind at all that his taxonomy could be used to justify oppression. I don’t see how it couldn’t have either but, who knows.

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Speaking of Gould, on Blumenbach’s taxonomy he specifies that Blumenbach made no claims toward moral or mental inferiority of non-Caucasians. In fact, according to Gould, B. saw racial differences based on “beauty” as rather superficial and simply a result of adaptation to different environments.

Yeah, but it was rather naive of him to think that his ideas wouldn’t immediately be used to justify oppression of the clearly inferior lower races. Yeah, hindsight is 20/20, but come on, people were already oppressing each other, and then along comes this shiny new scientifistic theory explaining how the oppressors were aesthetically superior to the oppressed.

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I would agree that Hitt’s discussion of race was squiffy. It actually made my heart sink when I got to it cause I’d been thinking what a fun teaching essay the piece would be up to that point — and then he makes these sort of boneheaded pronouncements that make for nightmare classroom moments. But the overall article — fun, interesting, smart.

it made me think about public intellectualism — we anthros are always bemoaning that no-one wants to read our complicated takes on race and multiculturalism, and/or that none of us are producing sufficiently snappy versions of same for public consumption. But what I think would be even better would be if we had our own legions of popularizers, like geneticists and physicists do. I am sure geneticists and physicists sort of cringe at some popular accounts of their work. but at least there is a community of writers and an audience of readers for it, and a lively public discussion about which popularized versions are stupid and wrong and which popularized versions are admirable and accurate. simultaneously, the research itself marches on. looks like a pretty enviable arrangement to me.

One thing that excited me a LOT about Hitt’s article was that here was a writer acting as “our” popularizer. he got some stuff wrong – of course – but that same loosey-gooseyness allowed him to produce a popular account. It’s hard for me to imagine a professional anthro attempting the same without pouring on wagonloads of scare quotes. anyway. glad you remarked the article’s publication.

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“Following the terminology of his time, Blumenbach referred to these changes as “degenerations”–not intending the modern sense of deterioration, but the literal meaning of departure from an initial form of humanity at the creation (de means “from,” and genus refers to our original stock).”

And the hyperlink was only supposed to be “in his own article”, which didn’t even appear up there. hmmmph.

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I think the issue is that we mean different things when we talk about race — the scientific accounts of genetic diversity and adaptation and clinal distribution and all that seem so counter-intuitive to laypeople that they simply cannot believe it, and to conservatives they seem like so much elitist obfuscation. Also, there seems to be a very strong need in Western culture to track identities down to the body — and so any “clumpiness” in the data is seized on to show that yes, indeed, there are races. Many African-Americans react well to a certain medical treatment? Well, there you go — race in action! You can see this at work in the common response to race-as-social-construct arguments — “you liberals want to deny that there’s any biological differences between people” which is, of course, an absurd argument, if we were making it. which we’re not. I’m clearly biologically different from my brother, from my parents, and from Nelson Mandela. But however much this argument misunderstands the constructivist position, it does express an anxiety about a world in which it were true — a fear of a world in which clear biological differences cannot be identified — and that anxiety can only be explained, I think, by the aforementioned need to use biology, prefereably of the sort that has clearly visible effects, to predict the behavior of people. Because the alternative is a world in which every person’s identity is ambiguous and fluid (the world Rex described in his post on Markell), and then where would we be?

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