Blumenbach’S Racial Classification: Deconstructing The Timeless Call For Human Differentiation

This open access book explores how the elements of Blumenbach’s epistemology have been variously assembled in different ways and in different historical-cultural and political-social contexts. It looks at the ways in which this epistemology has been enriched with new elements that have ensured its reproduction. The contributors revise approaches to the historical legacy of Enlightenment scholars such as Blumenbach in terms of nuances to our understanding of intellectual responsibility for the reproduction of race-informed thought, the legitimization of racial discrimination, and the lack of critical response to both. "Blumenbach’s Racial Classification: Deconstructing the Timeless Call for Human Differentiation" transcends the simplistic boundaries between “right” and “left” science and revises the internally contradictory impact of racialist/racial thinking on knowledge about humanity. This book deepens our understanding of race as a contributor to various fields of the production of knowledge about humanity and different epistemic platforms. Instead of highlighting the pathos in revealing racism in the stances of the most authoritative thinkers, the editors and authors suggest contemplation of the persistence of epistemologies that promote racially informed views on humanity and their implications. The book attributes the responsibility for atrocities legitimized by “race science” to intellectual movements like Enlightenment, through more complex historicization, making it of great importance to philosophers, historians of science, and those specialised in racial studies and social sciences.

Victoria Shmidt brings together the issue of historical roots of segregation with the legacy of colonial and socialist policies in Central Eastern European countries. Victoria started her academic career within the field of critical social policy, and this period formed part of her broader interest to the historical roots of ongoing institutional violence against diverse disfranchised groups. In 2008, Victoria transferred to the Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, and began to elaborate on the issue of institutional violence against the Roma and people with disabilities in the Czech lands. It has led her to deepening the approaches towards race science and racial thinking as agents and structures of nation-building and inclined to revise the spatial, temporal and ideological borders in the taken-for-granted approaches toward the role of researchers and academic institutions in the most extremal forms of transgression.