Superior: The Fatal Return of Race Science. Angela Saini

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СКАЧАТЬ Not that our evolutionary journey was one big leap, but that we are the gradual products of elements that already existed, in our African ancestors but also in Neanderthals, Denisovans and other archaic humans. Perhaps some of what we think of as purely human characteristics exist in other living creatures today, too.

      It’s a radically different way of thinking about what it means to be us, ditching the European Enlightenment view, and taking a cue instead from other cultures and older systems of thought. It’s a challenge to researchers who have dedicated their careers to identifying the first modern humans and defining what they were like, chasing the tail of the Enlightenment philosophers who thought they already knew. Archaeologists are still trying to hunt down the earliest cave art, the earliest sign of symbolic, abstract thought that will signify the leap from a simpler primate to a sophisticated one, in the hope of pinpointing the magic moment at which Homo sapiens emerged, and where. Geneticists, too, hunt for magical ingredients in our genome, the ones that will indicate what makes us so remarkable. Increasingly the evidence suggests that it was never so simple.

      ‘Very few people like looking at human origins from a post-colonial context, but there is a broader story,’ says Porr. There are other ways of picturing humanity than as a uniquely special entity far removed from all other living things. Eleanor Scerri agrees that fresh scientific findings are forcing a rethink of what it means to be human. ‘Popular science needs to get away from this idea that we originated, and that was us. There’s never a time that we were not changing,’ she says. ‘The idea of these immutable forms, and that we originate in one place and that’s who we are, that’s where we’re from.’

      What does this mean for us today? If we can’t agree on what makes a modern human, where does that leave the idea of universal humanity? If our origins aren’t crystal clear then how do we know that we’re all the same? What does it mean for race?

      In a sense, it shouldn’t be of any importance. How we choose to live and treat each other is a political and ethical matter, one that’s already been decided by the fact that as a society we have chosen to call ourselves human and give every individual human rights. In reality, though, the tentacles of race reach into our minds and demand proof. If we are equally human, equally capable and equally modern, then there are those who need convincing before they grant full rights, freedoms and opportunities to those they have historically treated as inferior. They need to be convinced before they will commit to redressing the wrongs of the past, before they agree to affirmative action or decolonisation, before they fully dismantle the structures of race and racism. They’re not about to give away their power for free.

      And if we’re honest, maybe we all need to be convinced. Many of us hold subtle prejudices, unconscious biases and stereotypes that reveal how we suspect we’re not quite the same. We cling to race even when we know we shouldn’t. A liberal, left-wing British friend of mine, of mixed Pakistani and white English ancestry, who has never been to Pakistan and has no deep ties to the country any more, told me recently that she believes there is something in her blood, something biological within her that makes her Pakistani. I feel this way occasionally about my Indian heritage. But where does culture end and ethnicity begin? Many of us who cherish our ethnic identities, whether on the political left, right or the centre, perhaps betray some commitment to the idea of racial difference.

      This is the problem for science. When Enlightenment thinkers looked at the world around them, some took the politics of their day as the starting point. It was the lens through which they viewed all human difference. We do the same today. The facts only temper what we think we already know. Even when we study human origins, we don’t actually start at the beginning. We begin at the end, with our assumptions as the basis for inquiry. We need to be persuaded before we cast aside our prior beliefs about who we are. The way new research is interpreted is always at the mercy of the old ideas.

      ‘You can either use the present to explain the past. Or you can use the past to explain the present,’ John Shea tells me. ‘But you can’t do both.’ To make sense of the past – and of ourselves – is not a simple job of gathering together scientific data until we have the truth. It isn’t just about how many fossils we have or how much genetic evidence. It’s also about squaring the stories we have about who we are with the information we’re given. Sometimes this information becomes slotted into the old stories, reinforcing them and giving them strength, even if it needs to be forced like a square peg into a round hole. Other times, we have to face the uncomfortable realisation that a story must be ditched and rewritten because however hard we try it no longer makes sense.

      But the stories we’re raised on, the tales, myths, legends, beliefs, even the old scientific orthodoxies, are how we frame everything we learn. The stories are our culture. They are the minds we inhabit. And that’s where we have to start.

       2

       It’s a Small World

       How did scientists enter the story of race?

      ONCE, A LONG TIME AGO, I floated around the earth in the space of minutes.

      I was on a ride at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, Florida, my little sisters and I perched alongside each other in a slow mechanical boat, buoyed by sugar. ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’ chimed in tinny children’s voices, while minuscule automata played out cultural stereotypes from different countries. From what I can recall, there were spinning Mexicans in sombreros and a ring of African dancers laughing alongside jungle animals. Indian dolls rocked their heads from side to side in front of the Taj Mahal. We sailed past, given just enough time to recognise each cultural stereotype, but not quite enough to take offence.

      This long-forgotten vignette from my childhood is what comes back to me on the drizzly day I approach the eastern corner of the Bois de Vincennes woodland in Paris. I had heard that somewhere here I’d find the ruins of a set of enclosures in which humans were once kept – not as cruel punishment by the authorities, and not by some murderous psychopath. Apparently they were just ordinary, everyday people, kept here by everyday people, for the fascination of millions of other everyday people, for no other reason than where they happened to come from and what they happened to look like.

      ‘Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun,’ American anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in 1973. These webs are ours only until someone comes along to pull at the threads. The nineteenth century had marked an age of unprecedented movement and cultural contact, turning the world into a smaller place than it had ever been. It was less mysterious, perhaps, but no less fascinating. And people wanted to see it all. So in 1907 there was a grand Colonial Exposition on this overgrown site in Paris, within the Bois, in what was known as the Garden for Tropical Agriculture, recreating the different parts of the world in which France had its colonies.

      Eight years earlier, the garden had been founded as a scientific project to see how crops in distant lands might be better cultivated, helping to bring in more income for colonisers back in Europe. This exposition went a step further. To exotic plants and flowers it added people, displaying them in houses vaguely typical of the ones they might have left behind, or at least how the French imagined them to be. There were five mini ‘villages’ in all, each designed to be as realistic as possible so visitors could experience what normal life was like for these foreigners. It was an Edwardian Disneyland, not with little dolls, but actual people. They transformed the tropical garden into nothing less than a human zoo.

      ‘In Paris, there were many exhibitions with human zoos,’ says French anthropologist Gilles Boëtsch, former president of the scientific council at the National Center for Scientific Research, who has studied their dark history. There was a circus element to it all, a cultural СКАЧАТЬ