Race and History: Comments from an Epistemological Point of View.

The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: The invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus's Systema naturae (1735); and the demise of racial typologies after WWII in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation marks that almost invariably surround the term. "Race" is placed outside of rational discourse as a residue of outdated essentialist and hierarchical thinking. I will throw doubt on this underlying assumption, not in order to re-legitimate race, but in order to understand better why race has been, and continues to be, such a politically powerful and explosive concept.