The Neo-Lamarckian Tools Deployed by the Young Durkheim: 1882-1892.

I argue that the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) decided to constitute sociology, a novel field, as 'scientific' early in his career. He adopted evolutionized biology as then practiced as his principal model of science, but at first wavered between alternative repertoires of concepts, models, metaphors and analogies, in particular Spencerian Lamarckism and French neo-Lamarckism. I show how Durkheim came to fashion a particular deployment of the French neo-Lamarckian repertoire. The paper describes and analyzes this repertoire and explicates how it might have been available to a non-biologist. I analyze Durkheim's very early writings between 1882 and 1892 in this context to substantiate my argument.

Is nationalizing universalizing and/or vice-versa? : A review essay on ELISE K. BURTON, Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the science of human heredity, Stanford University Press, 2021. IAN MCGONIGLE, Genomic Citizenship: the molecularization of identity in the contemporary Middle East. The MIT Press 2021.

This is a review essay of two books published in 2021 on the history of human heredity-genetics/genomics investigations-in the Middle East. Both books are structured comparatively. Both books grapple with the many uses of biology in nationalizing projects in the Middle East and the unavoidable tension between these particularizing projects and the scientific claim of biology to universality. Furthermore, both grapple with issues of classifications of humans and their uses in biology: the presumably biological human classifications of race, ethnos, and ancestry, and the properly sociocultural ones, such as historical-traditional, by language, by religion. Combined, the two books offer a keen gaze on the complex entwinement of genetics and nationalism in the Middle East from WWI to the present.

Transfer of Lamarckisms and emerging 'scientific' psychologies: 19th - early 20th centuries Britain and France.

The paper argues that transfer of assumptions, concepts, models and metaphors from a variety of Lamarckisms played a significant role in the endeavors to constitute psychology as a scientific discipline. It deals with such efforts in the second half of the nineteenth century and until early twentieth century in Britain and in France. The paper discusses works by Herbert Spencer, John Hughlings-Jackson, Théodule Ribot and Sigmund Freud. It argues that certain crucial facets of their work as discipline-founders could and should be looked upon as resulting from such transfer of/from Lamarckisms. Specifically it looks at the constitutive roles of notions of hierarchical order, parallelism, self, memory and collectivity.

Visualizing "race" in the eighteenth century.

This paper looks at the conditions of the emergence of "race" as a new scientific category during the eighteenth century, arguing that two modes of discourse and visualization played a significant role: that on society, civility, and civilization -- as found principally in the travel literature -- and that on nature, as found in natural history writings, especially in botanical classifications. The European colonizing enterprise had resulted in an extensive flow of new objects at every level. Visual representations of these new objects circulated in the European cultural world and were transferred and transformed within travelogue and natural history writings. The nature, boundaries, and potentialities of humankind were discussed in this exchange within the conceptual grid of classifications and their visual representations. Over the course of the century the discourse on society, civility, and civilization collapsed into the discourse on nature. Humans became classified and visually represented along the same lines as flora, according to similar assumptions about visible features. Concurrently, these visible features were related necessarily to bundles of social, civilized, and cognitive characteristics taken from the discourse on society, civility, civilization, as found in the contemporaneous travelogue.

When is 'race' a race? 1946-2003.

There has been a widely perceived sense of a contemporary resurgence of the category of race in western genetics, epidemiology and medicine. In what follows, some important American and British journals in these fields are surveyed for their content from 1946-2003, with the aim of comparatively tracing the use of the race category among American, British and Israeli authors. Three crucial stages are delineated along this time line, and the correlations between the use of the race category and developments in genetics, as well as the changing guidelines for researchers in the USA, are examined. Concepts of individuality and collectivity in the three fields are analysed in relation to the use of 'race' in the surveyed journals; there follows also a discussion of some recent critical reflections on that use. It is concluded that there has been both continuity in, and reconstruction of, the roles of 'race' within the genetic/medical discourse.