Crafting Humans： From Genesis to Eugenics and Beyond

　　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 volume contributes to this growing body of work. It offers 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. This volume discusses these topics in a synchronized way, as interrelated variants of the most central story in history, that of human perfectibility.

作者簡介

Marius Turda

　　Marius Turda is Reader in Central and Eastern European Biomedicine, Oxford Brookes University, and irector of the Cantemir Institute, at the University of Oxford. His current areas of research are mainly history of ideas and medicine, with a particular focus on eugenics, biopolitics, and race. Recent publications include Modernism and Eugenics (Palgrave, 2010), Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945 (CEU Press, 2011), and Re-Contextualising East Central European History: Nation, Culture and Minority Groups (Legenda, 2010). At the moment he is completing a history of Hungarian eugenics to be published by Palgrave and a monograph on race and modernity to be published by Continuum.

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).

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.