Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
Archival records of the Iranian royal family during the 19th century provide insight into the history of modern slavery in Iran.
This paper takes the late Qajar court and harem as a historically specific site through which we can examine the complex and diverse histories of slavery within the region in the nineteenth century, as well as the ways in which hierarchies of race, gender, and sex functioned as constitutive elements of this institution. I examine a particular albeit very elite site, Nasir al-Din Shah’s harem, occupied by a variety of enslaved and formerly enslaved constituents who were a product of the evolving slave trade. The essay ends by zooming in on the lives (and afterlives) of two eunuchs, Aziz Khan and Agha Bahram, who were part of the servant class of Gulistan Palace during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign, and whose life trajectories offer us some insight into the racial and gendered legacies of late nineteenth-century slavery in Iran.
Adopting scientific standards from the disciplines of genetics and evolutionary biology would reduce scientifically inaccurate claims in psychology journals about inherited traits.
Although the American Psychological Association has taken a strong antiracism stance, scientific racism continues to be published in psychology journals and scholarly books. Recent articles claim that the folk categories of race are genetically meaningful divisions and that evolved genetic differences among races and nations are important for explaining immutable differences in cognitive ability, educational attainment, crime, sexual behavior, and wealth; all claims that are opposed by a strong scientific consensus to the contrary. These claims remain a serious source of harm through the naturalization of inequality and through support for the work of racial extremists. Contemporary “racial hereditarian research” claims to rest on modern genetics and evolutionary biology and to draw on their methods, such as genome-wide association studies. These new arguments fail to meet the evidentiary and ethical standards of these disciplines for the study of human variation. If psychology adopted standards from genetics and evolutionary biology, the current racial hereditarian work would be ineligible for publication. Actions that the American Psychological Association can take to deal with scientific racism are described.