The Journey of Man by Spencer Wells

In week 10’s seminar; Indigenous Transformations in STS, the readings mentioned the genealogical study of Spencer Wells. He aimed this research to show that we all come from the same ancestor and that race has no biological meaning. His approach supported the idea of antiracialism, which is the idea of opposing racial categories. However, as we mentioned in the seminar, his approach to indigenous people and the terms he uses such as “European” way, “our distant past” and “very special people”, while also involuntarily seeing different human beings as evolutionary stages show us that there are some foundational problems with racism in his research. Below you can watch the documentary of this research:

You can also watch his TED talks if you are interested:

 

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