Relocating anti-racist science: the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race and economic development in the global South
Relocating anti-racist science: the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race and economic development in the global South
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DOI：
10.1017/s0007087418000286
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发表时间：
2018-06-01
影响因子：
0.8
通讯作者：
Gil-Riano, Sebastian
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Gil-Riano, Sebastian
本文回顾了联合国教科文组织第一份《种族问题声明》（1950年）的起草过程，以重新定位对世纪中期反种族主义和科学的历史理解。科学史学家主要将教科文组织的声明解释为北大西洋反种族主义科学家领导的一个反对项目，其目的是消除种族类型学，代之以基于人口的人类差异概念。这篇文章没有关注反种族主义科学家反对什么，而是强调了他们想象的未来以及反种族主义科学所借鉴和促进的应用社会科学项目。参与起草第一份教科文组织种族问题声明的科学专家在殖民后期、后殖民时期和国际项目中发挥了重要作用，这些项目旨在使所谓的落后社区-通常是全球南方的土著或非洲裔群体-现代化、同化和改善。反种族主义科学与殖民后期的发展理论之间的这种联系表明，从固定的种族类型学到人类多样性的社会文化和心理概念化的转变，使冷战时期现代化话语的繁荣合法化。在这种向经济发展范式的过渡中，“种族”并没有消失，而是分裂成一系列精心调整的、表面上反种族主义的概念，这些概念为科学精英干预那些被认为是原始人的生活方式提供了道德激励。
This essay revisits the drafting of the first UNESCO Statement on Race (1950) in order to reorient historical understandings of mid-twentieth-century anti-racism and science. Historians of science have primarily interpreted the UNESCO statements as an oppositional project led by anti-racist scientists from the North Atlantic and concerned with dismantling racial typologies, replacing them with population-based conceptions of human variation. Instead of focusing on what anti-racist scientists opposed, this article highlights the futures they imagined and the applied social-science projects that anti-racist science drew from and facilitated. The scientific experts who participated in drafting the first UNESCO Statement on Race played important roles in late colonial, post-colonial and international projects designed to modernize, assimilate and improve so-called backward communities - typically indigenous or Afro-descendent groups in the global South. Such connections between anti-racist science and the developmental imaginaries of the late colonial period indicate that the transition from fixed racial typologies to sociocultural and psychological conceptualizations of human diversity legitimated the flourishing of modernization discourses in the Cold War era. In this transition to an economic-development paradigm, 'race' did not vanish so much as fragment into a series of finely tuned and ostensibly anti-racist conceptions that offered a moral incentive for scientific elites to intervene in the ways of life of those deemed primitive.