RACIAL SCIENCE AND “ABSOLUTE QUESTIONS”: REOCCUPATIONS AND REPOSITIONS: with Terence D. Keel, “The Religious Preconditions for the Race Concept in Modern Science”; Yiftach Fehige, “In What Sense Exactly Did Christianity Give Us Racial Science?”; Ernie Hamm, “Christian Thought, Race, Blumenbach, and Historicizing”; Jonathan Marks, “The Coevolution of Human Origins, Human Variation, and Their Meaning in the Nineteenth Century”; Elizabeth Neswald, “Racial Science and ‘Absolute Questions’: Reoccupations and Repositions”; and Terence D. Keel, “Response to My Critics: The

• Published in: Zygon 2019-03, Vol.54 (1), p.252-260
• Main Author: Neswald, Elizabeth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0591-2385; 1467-9744
• DOI: 10.1111/zygo.12496

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.”