Crafting Humans： From Genesis to Eugenics and Beyond

書摘1

Crafting a Healthy Nation: European Eugenics in Historical Context --Marius Turda The scholarship on eugenics has long been fragmented: until recently there has been relatively little cross-fertilization between work in the history of science, sociology, anthropology and other disciplines in the humanities. Research has also been fragmented along geographical lines: with relatively little comparative work undertaken and little awareness shown of the regional variations in understandings and configurations that characterized the reception of eugenic ideas in Europe and beyond. The last two decades have, however, seen an increasing number of attempts to redress these omissions. Such that, even those scholars of eugenics who are not comparativists, per se, have become increasingly aware of the broad spectrumof variations, in social, national, and gendered organizations, as well as cultural settings and political expressions, that can be encompassed within the field. This awareness, in turn, has informed the ways in which they describe eugenics, pose questions, and formulate answers.

This growing body of scholarship has reframed the study of eugenics in

broader and more integrated terms, generating a new direction of research that

is interdisciplinary and multi-factorial. The historiography on eugenics is finally

‘catching up’ with the main problems addressed by current debates, not only in

the medical humanities and bioethics, but also in broad historical fields like

sexuality, inequality, and disability. What is now emerging is a synthetic and

critical perspective, which, on the one hand, assesses the relationship between

eugenics and various political ideologies and cultural regimes, while, on the

other, shows how eugenics has provided some of the practical and conceptual

tools necessary for constructing the bio-technologically informed worldview

and ethics cultivated today. But, a crucial question remains unanswered: how

can this geographical and conceptual diversity be brought together into a normative

historical reading of both national and international histories of eugenics?

書摘2

Making Italians: Aryanism and Anthropology in Italy during the Risorgimento

Maria Sophia Quine

‘Italy is made; now we must make Italians.’

(Piedmontese Prime Minister, Massimo D’Azeglio, in 1860)

Aryan race theory was one of modern Europe’s most famous and pervasive myths of origin and descent. As the Prometheus of modern nations, states, and empires, Aryan Man was European Man personified. The quest to uncover the genealogy of Homo Europaeus captivated many people, working in many different European countries, for well over a century. For a long time, one of the idée-fixes in the scholarship about European science and culture was that Aryanism had no impact in nineteenth-century Italy. Mythologies about ancestral races emanating from foreign countries simply had no allure for Italians, Léon Poliakov argued in his pioneering work on the subject.1 Historians have begun to remedy this view in recent years. The primary focus of this new body of literature on Aryanism and racism has been the 1880s –1940s. However, an Italian or “Italo-Aryan” race was not “discovered”, or “invented”, for the first time at the end of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Italian Aryanismand racism, under both liberalism and fascism, should not be seen solely as a function of meridionalism, imperialism, or ‘othering’ (Jews, Africans, or Southerners).

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The new historiography of the Risorgimento should take heed of these for it has a tendency to see Italy as a museum piece and “the nation” as an edifice constructed solely by monuments, idols, and art. In its fixation on the heroic poetry, bel canto, pageantry, and painting of the long nineteenth century, the ‘new’ Risorgimento scholarship has largely ignored a vital part of the history of the ‘making’ of Italians. If historians wish to operate within rigid ‘canons’, science should be allowed entry into it and placed alongside the arts in a pan theon of patriotism. The ‘great’ men of Italian nineteenth-century anthropology comprised the triumvirate of Nicolucci, Mantegazza, and Sergi, who all produced ‘great’ works of fantasy, ‘fact’, and ‘fiction’ about the nation. According to the reasoning of some Italianists, however, their works shared more in common with the ‘German tradition’ of thinking about the nation in racial, biological, and ethnic terms than it did with the more familiar Italian style of nationalism derived from the straight-forwardly political ideas of Mazzini, Cavour, and Cattaneo. Italian ethno-anthropology operated within the domain of the discursive and the mental, which is the prime object of study of the so-called ‘cultural constructivists’. But it also became professionalized and institutionalized in the nineteenth-century, as it proffered itself to liberals in government as the premier public science. As it embedded itself in the bourgeois culture of universities and élites, it sought to be a part of the broader process of nation-building. The new ethno-anthropology did not see Italians as museum pieces, forever frozen on the page or the canvas in ritualized Roman salutes or stylized postures of self-sacrifice in battle. Rather, the three racial scientists that comprised the Holy Trinity of Italian anthropology viewed Italians as a work in progress, a living, organic mass of bones, bodies, and brains to be skilfully crafted into a popolo-nazione. Furthermore, they were all real patriots whose works aimed to fire the ‘hearts and minds’ of their fellowItalians. Beginning with Nicolucci, the triumvirs and patriots established scientific disciplines, political agendas, and cultural traditions that can be traced directly to those bio-political aspirations for a New Man, New Woman, and New Italy that constitute the very core of twentieth-century eugenics and fascism.

書摘1

Crafting a Healthy Nation: European Eugenics in Historical Context --Marius Turda The scholarship on eugenics has long been fragmented: until recently there has been relatively little cross-fertilization between work in the history of science, sociology, anthropology and other disciplines in the humanities. Research has also been fragmented along geographical lines: with relatively little comparative work undertaken and little awareness show...

This volume is based partly on papers presented at the Berendel Foundation’s

second annual conference held at Queen’s College, Oxford between 8 and 10

September 2011. The conference benefitted from the generous financial support

of the Berendel Foundation and the Wellcome Trust (Grant no. 096561). I am

grateful to these two institutions and to the participants for making the conference

the success that was.

‘Crafting humans’ – and its corollary human enhancement – is a contested

topic, both in medical sciences and the humanities.With continuing advances in

science and technology, scientists and the general public alike are aware that the

basic foundations of the human condition are now at stake. This is amply evidenced

in the ‘Superhuman’ exhibition (19 July–16 October 2012) at the

Wellcome Collection in London. One important message of this exhibition is that

the human body could be changed and transformed through the enhancement of

basic physical and mental capacities. Yet, the current discussion of human enhancement

– as illustrated by the specialists invited to contribute and whose

opinions have been recorded for the exhibition – has largely ignored the (pre-)

history of theories of social and biological improvement. The biological malleability

of the ‘human’ is something that is now taken for granted but this volume

questions this aptitude to change and improve humans, highlighting three

critical aspects: the role of religion; the importance of historical time and the

corporeality of historical subjects, like races, nations and societies. Despite the

rapid growth of interest in the interconnectedness of technological progress,

biomedical sciences and ethics, alongside the health benefits of recent discoveries

in genetics and genomics, discussing current theories of human enhancement

within their historical, religious, philosophical, and cultural contexts,

from Antiquity onwards, remains yet to be achieved. In the decisive debates

over the excesses and disastrous effects of human dreams of perfectibility

(particularly since the Holocaust), the problematic connotations of ‘crafting

humans’ are ever present. And if this prompts us to be more careful when

discussing the intellectual sources of contemporary technologies of human

improvement, than it is crucial that we take such claims seriously. Understanding

the human must, therefore, be as much a form of moral introspection

and historical responsibility as a quest for scientific knowledge and adaptability

to technological progress.

This volume is but a modest contribution to this growing body of work. To

some extent, it complements the Wellcome exhibition on the ‘Superhuman’ by

considering the historical, ethical, and philosophical questions raised by the

project of crafting and enhancement. The chapters included here offer insights

into some of the reflections and imaginaries that have inspired and legitimated

both theoretical and practical programmes for ‘crafting’ humans, ranging from

the religious/spiritualist and the philosophical/cultural, to the secular and the

scientific/scientistic; from the mystical quest for human perfection, to the biopolitical

eugenic state of the twentieth century, and current genetic theories of

human enhancement. While vast bodies of scholarship have been devoted to

each of these individual topics, this volume discusses them in a synchronized

way, as interrelated variants of the most central story in history, that of human

perfectibility.

Above and beyond these general comments, there are some specific aknowledgements

that I would like to make. Firstly, for permission to reproduce the

photo on the cover, I am grateful to theWellcome Library, London. Secondly, due

to unforeseen circumstances Sorin Antohi could not join me in editing this

volume. However, my discussions with him about ‘crafting humans’ have been

inspiring and he has left a last inprint upon this volume. As such, I am grateful

for his unfailing support and encouragment. Thirdly, this volume would not

exist without the editorial support and occasional stylistic veto of Stephen

Byrne. This is certainly a better book as a result of our collaboration. Finally, the

volume is dedicated to Yehuda Elkana, who unfortunately passed away as this

volume was prepared for publication. His illness precluded him from submitting

his contribution but his complicitous humor and critical acumen, displayed so

vividly during the conference, are not forgotten. He was a great scholar and a

true friend.

London, 10 October 2012 Marius Turda

This volume is based partly on papers presented at the Berendel Foundation’s

second annual conference held at Queen’s College, Oxford between 8 and 10

September 2011. The conference benefitted from the generous financial support

of the Berendel Foundation and the Wellcome Trust (Grant no. 096561). I am

grateful to these two institutions and to the participants for making the conference

the success that was.

‘Crafting humans’ – and its corollary human enhancement – is a contested

to...

Preface and Acknowledgements

Frank Ankersmit
Aftermaths and “Foremaths”: History and Humans

Moshe Idel
Crafting a Golem: the Creation of an Artificial Anthropoid

Antonis Liakos
The End of History as the Liminality of the Human Condition: From Kojève to Agamben

Roger Griffin
Bio-nomic Man (and Woman): Fantasies of Anthropological Revolution as a Reaction to Modernity’s Nomic Crisis

MerrynEkberg
Eugenics: Past, Present, and Future

Marius Turda
Crafting a Healthy Nation: European Eugenics in Historical Contex

Maria Sophia Quine
Making Italians: Aryanism and Anthropology in Italy during the Risorgimento

Alison Bashford
Julian Huxley’s Transhumanism

List of Contributors

Bibliography

Index of Names

Preface and Acknowledgements

Frank Ankersmit
Aftermaths and “Foremaths”: History and Humans

Moshe Idel
Crafting a Golem: the Creation of an Artificial Anthropoid

Antonis Liakos
The End of History as the Liminality of the Human Condition: From Kojève to Agamben

Roger Griffin
Bio-nomic Man (and Woman): Fantasies of Anthropological Revolution as a Reaction to Modernity’s Nomic Crisis

MerrynEkberg
Eugenics: Past, Present, and Future

Marius Turda
Crafting a Healthy Nation:...