RETHINKING RACE HISTORY: THE ROLE OF THE ALBINO IN THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT LIFE SCIENCES
RETHINKING RACE HISTORY: THE ROLE OF THE ALBINO IN THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT LIFE SCIENCES
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重新思考种族历史：白化病患者在法国启蒙生命科学中的作用
DOI：
10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00502.x
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发表时间：
2009
影响因子：
1.1
通讯作者：
Andrew S. Curran
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Andrew S. Curran
在启蒙运动时代生命科学中恢复种族差异建构的学术探索通常忽视了一个独特的事实：绝大多数从事人类理论的十八世纪思想家往往更专注于保留对人类本质相同性的信念，而不是创造本质差异的类别。本文通过对 18 世纪生命科学中被忽视的关键概念——白化病的研究，描绘了与类别、生物过程以及人类和非人类问题相关的人类潜在同一性问题。 1744 年，莫佩尔蒂利用这一概念提出了共同起源或单一起源理论，白化病被纳入科学叙述中。莫佩尔蒂认为“negre blanc”（字面意思是“白人黑人”）是一种种族倒退，是对原始白人的回归，他启发了新一代思想家，其中最著名的是伟大的法国博物学家布冯，断然断言黑人是从白人原型退化而来。 “negre blanc”这一概念的重要性尚未得到充分研究，无论如何估计都不为过。除了白黑人的新角色清楚地说明了白种人和黑种人这一事实之外，白化病还产生了人类物种的新诊断年表。
The scholarly quest to recover the construction of racial difference in the Enlightenment-era life sciences generally overlooks a singular fact: the vast majority of eighteenth-century thinkers who were engaged in theorizing the human were often far more preoccupied with preserving a belief in an essential human sameness than they were in creating categories of essential difference. This article charts the problem of a potential human sameness as it related to questions of category, biological processes, and the human and non-human through an examination of a neglected and key construct in the eighteenth-century life sciences, the albino. The albino was absorbed into a scientific narrative in 1744 when Maupertuis used the concept to put forward a theory of shared origins or monogenesis. Positing that the negre blanc-quite literally a "white Negro"—was a racial throwback, a reversion to a primitive whiteness, Maupertuis inspired a new generation of thinkers, most notably the great French naturalist Buffon, to assert categorically that blacks had degenerated from a prototype white variety. The significance of the concept negre blanc, which has not been studied sufficiently, cannot be overestimated. In addition to the fact that the new role of the negre blanc clearly said as much about whiteness as it did about blackness, the albino generated a new diagnostic chronology of the human species.