Normality: A Critical Genealogy
Normality: A Critical Genealogy
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常态：一个重要的谱系
DOI：
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发表时间：
2017
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Peter Cryle
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作者：
Elizabeth Stephens;Peter Cryle
“正常并不是一成不变的，”彼得•克雷尔和伊丽莎白•斯蒂芬斯写道（第359页）。《常态：批判谱系》是一部雄心勃勃、内容广泛的研究，它证明了这一关键点，为我们对常态及其文化力量的理解增加了有用的特异性和历史性。从19世纪20年代到20世纪50年代，Cryle和Stephens追溯了“正常”一词和概念的谱系，他们特别关注了“正常”在解剖学、医学、统计学、人类学和人类性学等领域中与“平均”、“典型”、“健康”和“理想”等相关概念之间的交织方式。他们的结论是，常态是不断被争论的，其特点是持续的不稳定，即使它在20世纪获得了广泛的关注。“法线”一词首次出现在18世纪中期的几何学中，指的是一条垂直线。到19世纪20年代，这个词已经转移到比较解剖学，Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire用它来表示对组织稳定性的倾向；随着器官发育到一定程度，它们表现出强大的自然规律，因此没有必要提出“异常”的对立概念。Cryle和Stephens明确地参与了Georges Canguilhem的工作，在他们详细讨论法国解剖学和生理学的辩论时，将他对二元逻辑的关注定性。作者还强调了定量思维和定性思维在常态史上的共存，这种紧张关系将持续到20世纪。在《常态》一书中，克雷尔和斯蒂芬斯专注于同时代人之间的对话，在语境中评估思想，以揭示常态对知识分子同时带来的希望和问题。例如，随着统计学领域的发展，法国医学学院就概率在临床实践中的价值进行了辩论。“数字主义者”输掉了1837年的这场争论，与米歇尔·福柯（Michel Foucault）相反，克雷尔（Cryle）和斯蒂芬斯（Stephens）认为，数学思维并不容易受到欢迎
“The normal is not monolithic,” write Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens (p.359). Normality: A Critical Genealogy is an ambitious, wide-ranging study that demonstrates this crucial point, adding helpful specificity and historicity to our understanding of the normal and its cultural power. Tracing the genealogy of both the term and the concept from about the 1820s to the 1950s, Cryle and Stephens pay particular attention to the ways in which the normal wove in and out of attendant notions such as the average, the typical, the healthy, and the ideal, in fields as varied as anatomy, medicine, statistics, anthropology, and human sexuality. The normal, they conclude, was constantly debated, marked by persistent instability even as it gained popular traction in the twentieth century. The term “normal” made its first appearance in mid-eighteenth century geometry, where it referred to a perpendicular line. By the 1820s, the word had migrated into comparative anatomy, where Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire employed it to mean a propensity to organizational stability; as organs achieved a full degree of development, they evinced robust natural laws that left no need for an opposing concept of “abnormality.” Cryle and Stephens engage explicitly with the work of Georges Canguilhem, qualifying his focus on binary logic as they detail debates in French anatomy and physiology. The authors also emphasize the coexistence of quantitative and qualitative thinking in the history of normality, a tension that would continue into the twentieth century. Throughout Normality, Cryle and Stephens concentrate on conversations among contemporaries, evaluating ideas in context to reveal normality’s simultaneous promise and problem for intellectuals. As the field of statistics developed, for example, the French Acad emie de M edecine debated the value of probabilities in clinical practice. The “numerists” lost this 1837 argument, and Cryle and Stephens, in contrast to Michel Foucault, contend that mathematical thinking was not readily welcomed into