Race science in Czechoslovakia: Serving segregation in the name of the nation
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848618301365 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2019.101241 |
| Keywords | race science; nation-building; Czechoslovakia segregation |
| Description | Unduly abundant, the current argument about the miserable role of race science in Central Eastern European countries calls for revisiting the temporal, spatial, and ideological borders of its performance and especially its impact and prestige in Czechoslovakia. In this text, I aim to demonstrate that the postwar reproduction of race science and its implications for a wide range of policies, including segregation of the Roma, was the outcome of a longue durée of Czech race science as an agent and a structure of nation-building. The text is divided into two sections. The first introduces the historical context of establishing and elaborating race science in the Czech lands between the 1890s and 1940s. The next section investigates the vicissitudes of postwar race science, re-approaching eugenics to genetics and physical anthropology to population studies. Then, I shed light on the composition of driving forces that coalesced the efforts of anthropologists and geneticists into a coherent system of theoretical arguments in favor of supervising the population and extreme forms of surveillance over the Roma. |
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