Sebastián Gil-Riaño, <i>The Remnants of Race Science: UNESCO and Economic Development in the Global South</i> New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. Pp. 392. ISBN 978-0-231-19435-8. £30.00 (paperback).

The Remnants of Race Science is an important contribution to scholarship about the shifting concept of human races in twentieth-century science.The book's introduction provides a compelling argument for the post-war persistence of race science as a social science, in contrast to an already thriving literature on race science that focuses primarily on postwar biological sciences.Within that literature (see especially the work of Jenny Bangham and Jenny Reardon), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has mainly been analysed in terms of its anti-racist public education campaigns, often contrasted with the World Health Organization (WHO) as an actual coordinator of scientific activities that maintained racial research in biomedicine.Gil-Riaño productively draws our attention back to UNESCO, not only as a source of public statements and educational pamphlets on race, but also as organizer and funder of social science and ethnographic research among racialized communities deemed to be economically backward.Although many anthropologists and sociologists who worked with UNESCO's Social Sciences Department rejected race as an immutable biological category, their research supporting UN economic development projects in Latin America 'contained active remnants of race science and eugenic discourse' (p.24).This apparent contradiction, Gil-Riaño contends, makes more sense if we recognize the extent to which UNESCO social scientists were influenced by beliefs about racial mixing and acculturation drawn from the colonial and postcolonial experiences of Latin America.The geographic scope of the book is more limited than the title and marketing copy imply: initial invocations of a nebulous 'global South' quickly give way to 'southern hemisphere', a more restrictive geography that excludes regions of Asia and Africa often considered part of the former category.In fact, Gil-Riaño's research is mainly about Brazil, with secondary case studies involving Peru and Polynesia.The character linking the book together is Alfred Métraux (1902-63), a Swiss anthropologist and UNESCO official whose career trajectory and archival materials frame the introduction and conclusion and weave through most of the chapters.Gil-Riaño convincingly demonstrates that Métraux, despite his European background and education, developed a unique perspective on racial difference through his long residence in Argentina, extensive ethnographic research on South American indigenous peoples, and interactions with Māori anthropologist Te Rangi Hīroa.This character focus is briefly obfuscated in Chapter 1, which exhaustively describes the career trajectories and racial thought of two physicians from Bahia, Nina Rodrigues and Arthur Ramos.The intellectual biography of Ramos is justified by his three-month stint as director of UNESCO's Social Sciences

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