Introduction: “Ties of Blood and History,” or the Ambiguity of Race between Natural Science and Cultural Scholarship

The concept of race has historically shifted between biological and cultural meanings, complicating its definition and perpetuating its presence in modern discourse. Still, the term racism is generally used under the assumption that it is derived from a strictly biological conception of race, and its historical lineage is therefore mainly associated with scientific disciplines that dealt with the natural, physiological, or “measurable” aspects of race. This introductory article argues for a more inclusive reexamination of race’s intellectual history, taking into account the contributions of cultural disciplines and the interdisciplinary interactions that contributed to the inherent fuzziness of the concept of race.