Abstract

In this introductory chapter, the recent and current historicization of Blumenbach’s legacy is discussed as the interplay between reductive contextualism and critical responses to it. Three interrelated contexts shape the historicization of Blumenbach as fluctuating between attempts to fix his legacy and to critically examine the driving forces behind the ongoing reproduction of the Blumenbachian approach: (1) race in science and the impact of science on producing both racist and anti-racist arguments; (2) the transfer between premodernity (the eighteenth-century or theological approach to humanity) and modernity (the nineteenth-century or secular/scientific vision of science); and (3) the public or political engagement of scholars in (de)legitimizing particular politics against human dignity. Relying on Hans Blumenberg’s approach to exploring the complex nexus of pre-modernity—modernity and Sylvia Winter’s application of Blumenberg’s vision to the issue of whiteness, we develop a framework for the immanent critique of race in science. Following the longue durée of Blumenbach’s approach to human variation as numerous adaptations provides options for revising the entangled history of race in science.