Science, Race, and Racism

Abstract

How are historically constituted racial technologies and categories mobilized, produced, and materialized in practices and discourses within supposedly universal science? This entry considers the multiple ways in which ethnographic research can showcase how particular histories of racism are updated through scientific practices, and how global scientific projects capitalize on local racial hierarchies. It examines the nexus between science, race, and racism, drawing on ethnographic and historical studies undertaken in Brazil—including the present authors' own research—to highlight how references to miscegenation have been updated and challenged in different situations. The entry emphasizes that anthropological and social studies of science and technology should attend to how issues related to race and racism often emerge in particular, complex, and fraught historical conditions. Such an effort calls for the critical investigation of the ways in which science and technology practices and communities have historically been engendered—and still are—in the processes of racialized hierarchization of certain groups.