The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences was founded in 1965 and History of the Human Sciences was first published in 1988. Much can be learned by surveying both across their histories. The Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, established in 1965, has a mission rooted in the idea of disciplines and disciplinary history. During its early years, notable figures in psychology, sociology, and anthropology contributed articles that offered reminiscences on their fields or revisited landmark debates. Despite its wide chronological breadth, the journal recognized that concepts from antiquity or the early modern world did not always fit neatly into disciplinary chronologies. History of the Human Sciences, first published in 1988, in contrast emphasized the intersectional study of the way scientists constructed the human world. It focused on the years after 1850 and employed social science methodologies to frame historical investigations. In its first decade, it took an interdisciplinary approach, drawing inspiration from Foucauldian engagement, science studies, and postmodernism.
Both journals drew on traditions in intellectual history and the history of biology that foregrounded internalism, the history of the inner workings of the sciences.Footnote 1 Many articles in both contributed to internalist debates within the human sciences, treating epistemological and methodological trends in past science as important in their own right. Anthropology, psychology, and sociology, as enterprises seeking ontological insight into notions like “nature/nurture” or “human nature,” were explored in depth, as were developments and debates in geography, economics, population studies, neuroscience, and even medicine. Each emphasized scientists who specifically encountered people as subjects or who drew on human sciences knowledge to elaborate on technoscientific societies and cultures that characterized the period of late industrialization or after. Both took up the challenge of the construction of scientific facts as that trend became magnified in the 1980s and after.Footnote 2
To me, looking back on the history of both journals, both show a surprising lack of engagement with ethics, gender, and sexuality, even as books published from the 1980s onwards made these subjects salient.Footnote 3 Equally, I observe in both slight influence from settler colonialism, alterity, decolonialism, and postcolonity – despite significant literature on these ideas since the 1970s, and which this book shows to be crucial to understanding the context of human science work.Footnote 4 The irony of this latter observation is poignant given that the human sciences’ past is closely intertwined with imperial conquest, racial supremacy, colonial governance, Indigenous affairs, integration, and apartheid.Footnote 5 Moreover, by 2010 it was clear that the methods and questions of postcolonial, subaltern, and Indigenous Studies are intellectual projects that qualify for – even demand – inclusion in the narrative of the methodologies of the human sciences.Footnote 6
The fact that this irony exists leads me rather inevitably into a contemplation of my own position in the academy. As a white male, a gray-haired scholar, and an editor of this book, I am in the necessary position to reflect upon the way I have personally contributed to this unsettling shaping of the canonical history of the human sciences. Through such reflexivity, I hope to shed light on inherent biases within the history of the human sciences that this anthology reveals to be untenable. Looking back on all of those matters that slowly brought me into a career in the history of medicine and science, I see that for much of my career, I surrounded myself with historical texts authored by white men. I am often also teaching the history of the human sciences primarily to science students, many of whom are white, male, and hail (as I did) from rural areas of the United States. I see in them, in other words, a reminder of myself. As I once was, I find many of my students are drawn to the historical secularism of European and American techno-science. As I once did, I suspect they view technocracy as a path toward economic opportunity and security.
Obviously, any attempt to generalize from my personal experience would be of limited import. Still I suppose many of the deceased white males who contributed to the human sciences, and their successors who documented the history of the human sciences, found solace in the idea that science and its methods, when applied to human nature, could provide universal tools for plumbing human existence and even improve the human condition. In essence, my personal encounter with the human sciences continues to be an encounter with ideas, abstractions, and ideologies primarily.
Having never knowingly been a subject of human science research myself, the subjects of those many past encounters, like those discussed across the book’s chapters, proved incidental to my own fascination with the human sciences, fields supposedly on a quest to use scientific knowledge to bestow dignity on humans and humanity. For me, the intellectual allure of the human sciences lay in the way they revealed the intrinsic value of cultures or psychological processes through their variability, making the difference and otherness of the human form the source of dignity and value. This alternative dignity provided a last defense against the commodification of being in the face of artificial intelligence, synthetic life, transhuman studies, or capitalism. Because I never felt myself the object or subject of study, I could extrapolate on future risks to “the human” rather than face any immediate structural violence caused by human scientists who use me as an incidental presence for their studies of our nature.
My hope is that the readers of this anthology have realized by now (I assume most readers knew this before they opened this book) that almost every aspect of my privileged frame is questionable – morally, intellectually, methodologically, and ideologically. For those who share my origin story, I hope this self-reflection generates productive discomfort in the face of the question: How then can we frame the history of the human sciences moving forward, knowing or at least suspecting that we must? To think through an answer to that question, I will focus my argument on the larger organization of this book. This is no impartial review of each author’s individual case. Instead, I am hoping to take what I see as the larger persuasive argument of this whole book and state it succinctly to you. I think this book’s authors in total are collectively calling for a revisionist stance against an epistemological conceit within the human sciences: namely, the narrative that a particular scientist’s situational context allows them to retain their own moral reasoning and imperatives even as they seek universal knowledge from others who are incidentally available. This book insists that knowledge made through encounters simply does not work like that.
The Savage Expedition to Civilization
The opening of our anthology centers around the theme of expedition science. While this phrase may seem innocuous, it holds significant meaning in its relational context, as demonstrated in the chapters by Rodriguez, Warren, and Gil-Riaño. The romanticized notion of Victorian and Edwardian anthropologists, naturalists, and geographers as adventurers on expeditions has persisted in our cultural consciousness, perhaps stemming from a confluence of cultural representations in such examples as Muscular Christianity, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, National Geographic Magazine, Tom Swift, Indiana Jones, colonial clothing chic, and David Attenborough. However, a critical examination of the term “expedition science” shows its position within a particular Eurocentric power dynamic. Those who were colonized, captured, and then traveled to Europe (think Jemmy Button the Yámana boy taken hostage by Captain Robert Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle) were not considered to be on expeditions, nor were individuals like C. L. R. James, Gandhi, or Aché children who found themselves in settings imagined civilized.Footnote 7
These observations highlight a range of euphemisms within the human sciences that similarly obscure the relational nature of research. Expressions such as “going native,” for example, are overtly racist, while other terms like “ethnoscience,” “ethnomethodology,” “cultural competency,” or “participant-observer” may appear more benign but still rely on the premise that those being studied are not fully aware of or able to participate in the research being conducted on them. Such language reinforces the power dynamics inherent in research that studies marginalized communities or exploits colonized subjects.
Three potential responses to the romantic ideal of scientific adventurers are described by Rodriguez, Warren, and Gil-Riaño. The first response is that the adventurers participated in projects larger than science, such as imperialism, colonialism, or genocide. Rodriguez clarifies that the pursuit of Indigenous skulls in the late nineteenth century cannot be regarded merely as a typical event in the history of craniometry when, during the same period, the Argentinian military (by then a nationalist and settler force) exterminated and displaced thousands of Indigenous people. Gil-Riaño further illustrates this point by emphasizing that the relationship between scientists and children in twentieth-century Paraguay concealed the relationship between scientists and their military contacts, as well as the relationship between settler societies and groups compelled to assimilate to settler logic and governance. The fact that the children became loot from expeditionary violence, and subsequently became evidence against hereditarian racial determinism, demonstrates that even antiracist human science drew strength and substance from colonial violence.
The second response is that visible patterns of resistance and refusal to cooperate with the logic of expeditionary science demonstrate the subjects/objects’ shrewd recognition of, and thus subversive autonomy within, these episodes of normal science. The subjects shaped human science knowledge. Warren’s case highlights that frustrated scientists interpreted their subjects’ autonomy and resistance as evidence of irrationality. Their label of irrationality fits well with other similar terms, such as “savage,” “child-like,” “innocent,” “happy carefree,” “insane,” and so on.
There is no scholarship so far as I am aware that has considered such labels through the postcolonial insight that such alterity could be a type of doublespeak by the subject that generated evidence that contradicted the objectives and reasoning of human science investigation. However, to even begin to comprehend how such actions may have influenced European or settler scientific knowledge, it is necessary to have a nuanced understanding of how subjugated peoples created and practiced resistance, recognize that it occurred, and accept that this autonomy shaped scientific knowledge. Such a project of reclamation of the human sciences would have profound consequences.
Finally, historians of expeditionary science have perhaps asymmetrically accepted that the scientists possessed knowledge while the objects/subjects did not. With the political and economic upheavals occurring from the late 1870s (as depicted by Rodriguez) to the 1930s (as illustrated by Riaño), it is plausible that relationality increasingly implied a shared desire for scientific knowledge by all parties involved – albeit for different purposes. The violence of colonial structures, as described by Rodriguez and Warren, shaped the work of scientists while supporting these structures’ ulterior logics and goals. It is not unreasonable to think individuals encountered by these so-called adventurers may well have had analogous objectives in mind for their own human sciences.
One of the peculiarities of colonial and settler science is its certainty that science possessed universal characteristics while simultaneously assuming that those characteristics were not understood, valued, or desired by those who encountered it as objects and subjects. As noted by Warren, many individuals photographed for the purposes of racial science were actively involved, even holding rulers in specific ways. Despite the deplorable experiences of expeditionary science, it is possible that some people who encountered it became interested in creating useful knowledge to understand why human scientists were prone to violence and supportive of oppression. While such speculation may appear unfounded or absurd, Riaño’s conclusion, though centered on a child of assimilation, testifies to the fact that such desires fueled future resolve.
Externalism in the History of the Human Sciences Is Internalism
So far, my analysis of positionality has focused on “expedition science” as an example to illustrate how postcolonial, Latin American, and Indigenous Studies have redefined internal frameworks within the history of human sciences, critiquing internalist claims. My inquiries into the ownership of scientific knowledge, methodological limitations in historical arguments, and the impact of violent contexts on scientific knowledge may appear to stem from externalist criticism when it comes to the natural sciences. Externalism in the history of science argues that historians must consider social contexts to comprehend the conditions for scientific progress. However, matters become more complex in the human sciences where both the context and the human are the subject and object of study. Studying context is simply part of the internal logic of the human sciences. This makes it difficult to recognize that the intellectual history of the human sciences is never inherently externalist.
Traditionally, historians of the human sciences accepted institutions, disciplines, and their archives as useful ontological constructs to shape their historiography. Intellectual schools, institutes, and disciplinary origins played significant roles for storytelling the history of the human sciences. While this may suffice for historiography, it is important to recognize the normative oddity that the concept of disciplines was itself a human science analytic. Studies of discipline formation originated in sociology, and what appears to be contextual is now in historical writing, in fact, an historical acceptance of an abstract construct construed as possessing ontological recognizability. Critiques, if any, have primarily drawn from Foucauldian analysis, which is often applied to total institutions such as asylums, museums, prisons, and schools, but less frequently to central ideas or entire projects, as Foucault explored in works such as The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge.
This tendency has resulted in an unusual framework for externalism. Historians of science often use an alternative human science category as a framework against which to study the history of its alternatives. Thus, one finds political science, economics, or biomedical frameworks and theories analyze sociological, anthropological, or psychological claims to declare past scholarship limited. Anthropology is often employed to evaluate the veracity of sociology or economics; medical knowledge is brought into dialogue with economics. To simplify, the history of the human sciences often amounts to little more than an argument about a different form of internalism as getting at the “truer context.” Occasionally, this trend becomes known as a “turn,” a kind of cultural vogue – such as the “cultural turn,” “linguistic turn,” or “neuroscience turn.”
Much of this work ends up in a self-referential loop, often only made evident through postcolonial criticism. Yet the leap from there should not be to conclude that the territorial location of these sciences matters and thus that they were somehow different or purer within European nations or the United States. Instead, it appears that the circularity of these sciences contributed to their power, utility, productivity, and violence everywhere.
Part II of this book addresses the self-referential ambiguities present in the human sciences. While the organization of this section may suggest a traditional exposition of encounters within institutions, each of the three authors of the cases in this section asks why power was necessary if the sciences worked. Equally they ask why the sciences seemed to have had mixed successes. Each author finds a distinct obliviousness within the sciences themselves that raises the unsettling question about whether that oversight was contextually generated or whether it is baked into the nature of the objectivity human science researchers have historically claimed.
Arvin exposes the inadequacies of the human sciences through Indigenous and Disabilities Studies frames. She recounts the history of the human sciences in Hawaiʻi as a backdrop for territorial violence and assimilation, while also directly focusing on the desires of Native Hawaiians and the fact that new structural violence contended with extant (if vanishing) institutions and structures as well. What stands out clearly in Arvin’s analysis is the poverty of imagination the human scientists brought to their observations and applications. The inadequacies of their methods led them increasingly backward toward the racial determinism and normative Calvinism that characterized the origins of human sciences. Psychology and social science, which strove (admittedly failing) by the mid twentieth century for nuanced pluralism, perception, cognition, and understanding of interpersonal and community interactions and dynamics, pathologized differences rather than seeking to understand them when confronted by an encounter with alternative worldviews. In other words, the scientists denied the agency their sciences sought to recognize in generalizable ways as characteristic of humans.
Ortiz Díaz explores the territorial violence and assimilation process in twentieth-century Puerto Rico, examining how social scientists from imperial and nationalist backgrounds tried to create a more nuanced human science that matched their societal experience, expectations, and identities. Their goal was to apply it toward prisoner rehabilitation in carceral settings and deliver humane ends, restorative justice, and repair. However, the self-referential logic of looking for a science modeled upon itself proved to be problematic. Ortiz Díaz demonstrates that the available tools for such a reimagined science had to be reforged ideologically, but even then, the tools were unfit for purpose. Unfortunately, the scientists seeking reparative methods ultimately also fell into pathologizing tropes.
Stark’s chapter provides an additional frame for understanding how human sciences are rooted in violence. She argues that bioethics in the United States is an extension of American settler colonialism. Her case study follows the biography of Carolyn Mathews, who began as an undergraduate at NIH and eventually participated in studies of the Akimel O’odham people in Arizona. Mathews in her later life became skeptical about the use of human subjects in experimentation, but her earlier position as a settler was not visible to her. Stark infers from this example that as bioethics emerged in the 1970s and after, it sanctioned an understanding of ethics that aligned with settler colonial precepts in the US Empire. The creation of a bioethics discourse led to self-referential ambiguity, as human subject research could be deemed ethical simply because it had declared it so.
Awareness of these legacies of empire, coloniality, and nationalism adds a critical lens to the study of the human sciences. Postcolonial and decolonial theory and methods run the risk of simply replacing old concepts with new ones in the human sciences. Silva, for instance, envisions neocolonial versions of the human sciences, powered by a correct linguistic currency, which create a global pastiche of elite academic discourse that recognizes sensibilities while perpetuating extractive practices in service to global capital.Footnote 8 These concepts, theories, and methods may not be sufficient on their own to articulate a new relationality within the knowledge/power dynamic woven into the human sciences. In other words, these languages may merely place historians of the human sciences in a position not dissimilar from Stark’s interlocutor, Mathews.
The archive of the human sciences comes with no warning, but perhaps there should be one. Focusing solely on the scientists results in a history that may critique their logic but still duplicates their story. Concentrating only on the scientists’ subjects ends up accepting the scientists’ ventriloquism. What sets these sciences apart is that the archives and the theories they create are often a product of unsettling encounters. Ortiz Díaz’s case makes this clear, as the scientists in his study fail to elide the problematics of their work. Similarly, Arvin’s story ends with Stanley Porteous, the scientist she highlights, having his name stripped from a building named after him in 1974 at the University of Hawaiʻi and renamed after Allan Saunders, a noted faculty activist associated with politically left-wing causes who nonetheless regarded slaveholder Thomas Jefferson as “one of my heroes.”Footnote 9
The Human in the Mirror
In the history of the human sciences, there is often a duality of nature. In studying “the Other” (whomever “the Other is supposed to be”), human scientists hoped to reveal larger truths about themselves-cum-the human. Indeed, this book has sought to make clear that when human scientists used nature as a mirror for the purposes of studying human nature, they often ended up studying their own reflections. Their mirror of nature reflected their sciences’ circular relationality; almost everything seemingly returned to the observer. This hermeneutics of these past encounters now produce the historian’s text, and historical explanations shed light on why the historical claims made within these sciences adopted forms of ownership and governance. In Part III of this book, Karin Rosenblatt, Eve Buckley, and Rosanna Dent explore what happens when both sides claim possession of the mirror.
In Rosemblatt’s case, the discovery of the last Mexica emperor’s bones, Cuauhtémoc, in Ixcateopan, Mexico, resulted in conflicting claims of ownership and self-referential truth claims by opponents. The Indigenous community and Eulalia Guzmán, Rosemblatt’s biographical subject, celebrated the discovery as an anticolonial assertion of identity through ownership of the bones. However, masculine and cosmopolitan science accused Guzmán and the community of perpetuating a fraud. The history of bone gathering in the human sciences takes on a new significance in this case. It highlights the longevity of meaning that bones can acquire, a phenomenon familiar in the conventional history of the human sciences. The bones acquired a double rationality, invested with political meaning through conflicting scientific claims and methods. Craniology, now widely regarded as a pseudoscientific relic of racist, racial science, is a prime example of the larger pattern behind Rosenblatt’s argument. In her story, the pursuit of hard knowledge to legitimate claims of authenticity came from the marginal and vulnerable. The resulting collision occurred through scientific claims, methods, disciplinary differences, and innuendo, with gender playing a significant role in attacks against Guzmán. Ultimately, the claim that the bones were a fraud prevailed, but for the community of Ixcateopan the bones retained their meaning. Rosenblatt’s case might encourage some reckoning with the way bones continue to contain meanings for settlers as well, with even their rightful repatriation extracting new symbolic meanings while mediating novel new forms of erasure within often hallowed cultural institutions.
Eve Buckley’s work similarly showcases dual rationality. Her case focuses on population and development studies during the Cold War era and exposes the longevity and reach of neo-Malthusian tenets through dialogues on fertility and scarcity. She examines the writings and advocacy of Josué de Castro, a Brazilian physician and intellectual who challenged the theories of a population crisis in poor nations, arguing that the crisis was due to agricultural fertility rather than human fertility. He called for structural reforms of the global food system to balance out the observable overabundance in wealthy nations. Intriguing in de Castro’s encounter with population studies is the reciprocal forms of abstraction it shows, an infinity mirror of nature reflecting a relationality of object and subject purely determined by the holder. While Buckley rightfully highlights how population control emerged as neocolonial benevolence, denying its human costs, de Castro’s technique for holding the mirror reversed the direction of power by subjecting his wealthy interlocutors in the Global North to their own form of armchair theorizing, albeit about their nature rather than his own. De Castro, in so doing, employed one of human science’s cherished rhetorical practices – creating a “big picture” account of humanity’s condition. De Castro’s inversion of center and periphery articulated global cosmopolitanism against European cosmopolitanism, and thereby submitted Northern and Western cosmopolitan intellectuals in the 1950s to an unusual examination of themselves as subjects in a technocratic, world historical analysis. Like Rosenblatt’s Guzmán, de Castro’s reasoning and writing did not emerge as a winning position, but it did demonstrate the way supposedly factual social science theory assumed ideologically the naturalness of imperial and colonial relations.
Rosanna Dent concludes this anthology’s third section on an optimistic note that extends Rosenblatt and Buckley’s narratives toward particularized alliances, as she analyzes the relational conditions that emerge from the Genographic Project, a recent study proposing a general evolutionary history of humanity based on blood samples. Dent explores the logic of possession and bureaucratic vulnerability, which creates opportunities for abuse for A’uwẽ people, as they navigate their sovereignty with the Brazilian state and transnational researchers, while insisting on a relational and affective ethics of their own. Despite the risks, both the Brazilian state and the A’uwẽ recognize the potential benefits of bioprospecting, as it establishes a foundation for the community’s recognition with the state. However, the scientists navigate Brazil’s regulatory state with a logic of possession of their own, and they historicize samples taken before ethical guidance and modern technologies existed to continue their research. Dent describes how the researchers seek to embrace the affective ethics of the A’uwẽ through long engagement and acceptance of their desires, in a convincing relational shift. While this solidarity may seem puzzling at first, it makes sense as a liberatory project for A’uwẽ sovereignty. Dent hopes that this solidarity will shift the logic of research toward a more ethical approach.
Together, Rosenblatt, Buckley, and Dent point to a growing recognition that the phenomenological characteristics of encounters can sometimes escape or transcend the physical and structural violence of the human sciences. Although neither Rosenblatt nor Buckley can do more than recognize the double rationality of the human sciences, which can create epistemic discomfort, both authors show that the human sciences can be used as decolonizing tools too. In Dent’s case, the rejection of the violence of the human sciences may lead to the hermeneutics of the encounter, producing identification, solidarity, and knowledge – although the entire story is becoming rather than told.
Concluding Clearly
As Warren, Rodriguez, and I were working on Chapter 1, I was reminded to read finally an English-language essay by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui criticizing Aníbal Quijano. My initial engagement with Quijano had been revelatory, and thus Cusicanqui’s critique equally gave me pause. It stimulated in me a reconsideration of what historians usually mean when they demand clarity from each other. Cusicanqui highlighted that the jargons and languages of critical theory and human sciences are more than just alienating for many; they represent a form of re-colonialism by language on colonial subjects. According to her, colonial subjects in these jargons became caricatures of the West, and “multicultural adornments for neoliberalism,” unrecognizable to people in the upside-down worlds of colonialism.Footnote 10 The authors of the essays in this book may experience discomfort as they read Cusicanqui’s words. I understand their perspective. We all are in a position with jargon not dissimilar to Aníbal Quijano’s, the subject of her critique.
For historians, too, the complaint hurts. How many times have historians been told to avoid jargon for the benefit of clarity. The request for clarity may be viewed as an attempt at aesthetics. But clarity in the way that historians demand it of each other is obviously a source of power too. It has its own double meaning. Who is deemed unclear? Who must strive to write with acceptable clarity? Who possesses the definition of clarity? Who gets to demand it? Clearly, clarity constitutes a form of dominance over meaning, and thus Cusicanqui’s demand for it feels stubbornly like a shoe that fits uncomfortably. However, this book intends to elicit a different type of discomfort regarding how historians of the human sciences present a history that is profoundly tied to varieties of Enlightenment liberalism. Our book, as a whole, unsettles encounters by insisting that it is ethical to listen in the way Cusicanqui suggests we listen.
It is important to note that this book is not anti-science or illiberal. However, it argues that the human sciences, including their history, must either adopt inclusive methods and nonnormative means of quantification and measurement, or acknowledge that they are not sciences but rather technologies created to perpetuate specific forms of domination.Footnote 11 We have argued collectively that while these technologies of domination may have limitations, they are also useful for facilitating capricious uses – and by implication that the people who use them now do so at their own risk. This interpretation suggests that future human sciences, fueled by bio-recognition technologies, sensor data, neuropharmacology, large-scale data analyses, keyboard and mouse patterns, geo-tracking, and artificial intelligence, are likely to become harbingers of new forms of domination. The danger is that these technologies may frame normal and pathological behaviors, with the goal of predicting patterns with a degree of accuracy that may overlook novel forms of resistance, double rationality, and survivance.
How then can we frame the history of the human sciences moving forward, knowing or at least suspecting that we must? At the risk of being too clear, I offer then in answer to this question a final summary of the argument of the book you have now read: The history of the human sciences is primarily a history of physical and structural violence in which historians of the human sciences are also implicated. Writing about this history requires recognizing that accounts of these sciences may make the violence invisible or cast it as incidental or the result of a few bad actors, while hoping that the larger program will prove viable and emancipatory. The self-referential nature of the human sciences reveals that structural violence is fugitive within the linguistic and epistemic frameworks of the human sciences regardless of intent. Applying the hermeneutics of encounters modeled in these essays to other populations who became objects of study, and according frameworks that draw on affect, desires, agency, needs for reparative justice, and a place in the narrative, is thus crucial and ethical. The object of the encounter is not incidental or abstract, nor is the encounter apolitical, and thus what can be said about it, should be said accordingly.
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