Historicizing Knowledge about Human Biological Diversity in the 20th Century
Find a complete list of group members here.
Find a list of events of the research group here.
Contact address: officelipphardt@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Find the abstract for the workshop "Colonial Subjects of Health and Difference: Races, Populations, Diversities" here.
The diversity of humankind is an abiding explosive political and moral issue.
The research group “Historicizing Knowledge about Human Biological Diversity” examines how life scientists, demographers and anthropologists imagined, researched, and described human biological diversity during the twentieth century. Questions that interest us include: How did scientists narrate the formation of diversity? Which classifications, practices, concepts, and tools did they employ in order to assess human biological diversity? What kind of human variation did they consider to be “biological”, and how did they conceive of “nature” as the cause of human variation? How, if at all, did they bring those supposedly “biological” aspects of diversity in relation with those they perceived as “cultural”? Was human biological diversity primarily their epistemic object, or rather an indispensable epistemic instrument? And how were contemporary social and political valuations of diversity or unity of mankind reflected in their work?
The conceptual novelty of the project is that it understands “Knowledge about Human Biological Diversity” to mean knowledge not just about “race”, but more generally, about human variation that was considered to be “biological”, “hereditary” or “caused by nature” and geographically patterned. To this end, projects within this group consider medical and demographic investigations, population genetics and epidemiological projects in European, colonial and postcolonial contexts, that might not have explicitly contributed to “race science” but did have human variation as a scholarly focus or epistemic premise.
With an emphasis on research practices and designs, members of the group explore the social contexts, historical moments and tacit cultural assumptions that shaped knowledge about human biological diversity. We pay special attention to the many ways in which contemporaries represented and visualized human biological diversity (such as encyclopedic collecting projects, genealogical trees or world maps).
As an interdisciplinary group, we employ historical, anthropological and STS methods that recognize the relevance of both practices and narratives in knowledge production. These enable us to address epistemological questions and at the same time to reveal the political and ideological dimensions implicit in the creation of knowledge about human biological diversity.
Unsolicited applications can be sent to the group's contact address and will be considered twice a year.The project cooperates with
Research Group 'History Within: The Phylogenetic Memory of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules', SNF Professorship Marianne Sommer, University of Zurich
Zentrum für Geschichte des Wissens in Zurich (Philipp Sarasin, Pascal Germann)
C:SL - Collaboratory: Social Anthropology & Life Sciences at the Humboldt-University Berlin
Transnational Health in the Pacific through the Lens of TB at the University of Auckland
PLSSN - Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Network
Other persons related to this project: Birgitta von Mallinckrodt, Anna Frederike Heinitz, Anne Luci Luft
