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RACIAL SCIENCE AND “ABSOLUTE QUESTIONS”: REOCCUPATIONS AND REPOSITIONS
Author(s) -
Neswald Elizabeth
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
zygon®
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.222
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1467-9744
pISSN - 0591-2385
DOI - 10.1111/zygo.12496
Subject(s) - absolute (philosophy) , nexus (standard) , epistemology , sociology , descriptive statistics , social science , philosophy , anthropology , statistics , mathematics , computer science , embedded system
In Divine Variations , Terence Keel cites Hans Blumenberg's concept of “reoccupation” as way to approach the relationship between science and religion in racial science. This article explores the potential of a Blumenbergian framework for interpreting the changing forms of this science – religion nexus. It pays particular attention to the shift to quantitative methods, measurement, and descriptive statistics in physical anthropology and the social sciences in the late nineteenth century, which seem to be emphatically secular. Asking whether they too, have a place in the Blumenbergian framework, it proposes that Blumenberg's “reoccupation of the answer position” has as its counterpart a “repositioning of the question.”