Population Variability and Human Types: Exploring the Scientific Uses of Race from the 1940s to the 1990s

For decades, it was widely assumed, even by some historians of science, that the notion of human races had lost any real scientific legitimacy sometime around the end of the Second World War, only to “return” at the beginning of the 21th Century in the wake of the Human Genome Project, as a byproduct of genomic research. Then, a new narrative recently emerged that stopped positing the sudden disappearance of race from the scientific lexicon around 1945, and highlighted instead the shift observed among scientists (apart from a handful of conservative or even plain racist ones) from a “fixist”, reifying, physical-anthropological approach, grounded on the identification of “human types”, to a more biologically informed exploration of population variability. The aim of this session is to move beyond such narratives by empirically comparing the uses of race as a scientific notion in different disciplinary and political contexts, during the second half of the 20th Century. We will especially explore how anthropologists, sero-anthropologists, and different types of geneticists, active in Europe and in Northern America, either referred to racial characteristics or, alternatively, attempted to circumnavigate an increasingly contested notion. Speakers will pay special attention to the way the scientists they studied either affronted the growing stigma associated with the notion of race, tried to ignore it, or enforced it.