THE TRANS/NATIONAL STUDY OF CULTURE AND THE INSTITUTIONS OF HUMAN SPECIATION (original) (raw)

The teleology of post-Enlightenment thought-here it matters little whether we call it humanism or the human sciences-can be understood in its archaeological totality as a massive and highly varied eff ort to comprehend in a scientifi c way the staggering diversity of anthropological diff erence. The roots of this project lie in the early modern sciences of biology, philology, and political economy. Its goal is to create an exhaustive taxonomy that would at once be the ultimate compendium of the various types, models, and images of human individuals, communities, and their species, and an explanatory model for their respective internal diff erences. Needless to say, the discovery of such an 'anthropological matrix' would have profound implications not just for knowledge, but also and especially for the organization and governance of human individuals and the societies in which they live in real time. Knowledge about anthropological diff erence can never be, for this reason, 'disinterested'; it is always already implicated in the technologies of population management.