Woodslane | Book - 9780271096865

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Enlightenment Anthropology

Defining Humanity in an Era of Colonialism

ISBN-13: 9780271096865
Publisher: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
By Carl Niekerk
Price: AUD $260.00
Stock: 0 in stock
Availability: Book will be despatched upon release.
Local release date: 28/02/2024
Format: Hardback (229.00mm X 152.00mm) 266 pages Weight: 145g
Categories: Cultural studies [JFC]

Description
Author Biography
Google Preview: In this book, Carl Niekerk probes the origins of modern anthropology in the European Enlightenment, foregrounding how the knowledge transfer between an international array of natural historians and public intellectuals-including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon; Voltaire; Denis Diderot; Immanuel Kant; and Johann Gottfried Herder-shaped the emerging discipline and its central debates. Reexamining how these many voices crossed paths and diverged, Niekerk sharpens our understanding of how anthropology, as we know it today, came to be. As a "natural history of man," anthropology during the Enlightenment argued that humans across the globe belonged to a single species and that human diversity could be explained as the product of time and space, climate and geography. While this knowledge could be emancipatory-fostering curiosity rather than superiority around questions of difference among some thinkers-it also contributed to the emergence of new notions, especially "race" and "culture," that were used by many to justify slavery and the colonial project. With an emphasis on how we can use the ambiguities and deficiencies of the past to help guide our thinking and actions today, this book will appeal to a widely interdisciplinary audience, including anthropologists, historians and philosophers of science, intellectual historians, Germanists, and scholars of the European Enlightenment.; Carl Niekerk is Professor of German and Affiliate Professor of French, Comparative and World Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the editor of The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective and author of Zwischen Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie: Lichtenberg im Kontext der Spaetaufklaerung.; Google Preview content

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Enlightenment Anthropology

Defining Humanity in an Era of Colonialism