"Much of modern science, medicine, and ideas of race have coeval and violent origins, entangled together for centuries in the forms of racial science, which themselves have been used to propel projects of power and domination around the world. Ordering the Human explores this entanglement. It does so by illuminating the malleability and situatedness of race, attending to the mechanisms that consolidate racial ways of knowing, and tracing the forces and flows that influence movement of racial concepts in scientific knowledge production. From fields as diverse as genetics, forensics, public health, history, sociology, and anthropology, and in case studies from South Africa, India, Brazil, France, New Zealand, Singapore, Iran, Lebanon, and the Netherlands, the contributions excavate the global praxis of racial science and the mechanisms by which it has been deployed to oppress. In the first of four sections, "Individuals and Composites," contributors show how individuals are aggregated into populations, andthen how populations are turned into composites. In each one of these translations, erasures and new classifications are imposed to produce recognizable data for purposes of surveillance, criminalization, healthcare access, and immigration, to name just a few. In "Purity and Mixture," contributors ask how racial classification carries different social and political significance in national and technical contexts. In the United States and South Asia, for example, purity was enforced culturally and legallyresulting in the need to categorize and draw rigid boundaries around racialized bodies. In "Stability and Circulation," we see how racial categories are stabilized, exported, and circulate through scientific and medical networks and biotechnologies. And,finally, in "Past and Promise," contributors will explore how scientists and the broader public navigate the use of racial categories to link the deep past with future imaginaries. As the legacies of racial divisions continue to influence and circumscribe lives globally, this book project will provide a vital starting point to systematically and synthetically analyze the role of racial science and to strategize possible ways out of the naturalization of racial categories on a global scale"--
Modern science and ideas of race have long been entangled, sharing notions of order, classification, and hierarchy. Ordering the Human presents cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the racialization of science in various global contexts, illuminating how racial logics have been deployed to classify, marginalize, and oppress.
These wide-ranging essays—written by experts in genetics, forensics, public health, history, sociology, and anthropology—investigate the influence of racial concepts in scientific knowledge production across regions and eras. Chapters excavate the mechanisms by which racialized science serves projects of power and domination, and they explore different forms of resistance. Topics range from skull collecting by eighteenth-century German and Dutch scientists to the use of biology to reinforce notions of purity in present-day South Korea and Brazil. The authors investigate the colonial legacies of the pathologization of weight for the Maori people, the scientific presumption of coronary artery disease risk among South Asians, and the role of racial categories in COVID-19 statistics and responses, among many other cases. Tracing the pernicious consequences of the racialization of science, Ordering the Human shines a light on how the naturalization of racial categories continues to shape health and inequality today.
Ordering the Human presents cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the racialization of science in various global contexts, illuminating how racial logics have been deployed to classify, marginalize, and oppress.
