Anthropology:
- Study of human biological and cultural diversity of time and space
- Why?
o We live in a multicultural world
o To understand ourselves and others better
Scientific Racism:
- The notion of fundamentally different biological stocks (races) as the cause of different behaviours, cultures, etc
- Statements that put forth the idea that cultural traits and behaviours are biologically inherited
- History of Scientific Racism:
- Racial Categories:
o We make sense of the world by categorizing them
o Linnaeus
o Blumenbach
o Hooten
Race:
- Example of typologizing
o Categorizing
Racial Categories:
- Linnaeus (1758):
o “Systema Naturae” identified variants of homo sapiens
- Europaeus albascens (white)
- Asiaticus focus (brown)
- Africanus negreus (black)
- Americanus rubesceans (red)
- Blumenbach (1781):
o Delineation of races into scientific category
- Caucasian (white)
- Mongolian (yellow)
- Malay (brown)
- Ethiopian (black)
- American (red)
- Hooten (1926):
o All races come down to the big three
- Caucasoid (Europe, India, Mideast)
- Mongoloid (East Asia, Pacific Islands, Native American)
- Negroid (Africa, Australia)
o Problems: people can move, where is East Asia? (China?)
Characteristics of Racial Types:
- Salient biological traits
o Skin colour, hair, facial features, stature
- Behavioural propensities
o Intelligence, criminality, violence
What About the Origins of Races?:
- Monogenesis
o Monogenecists: subscribe to the theory of human origins which posits a single origin for all humans
- Polygenesis
o Polygeneists: believe that human races have been created separately in different zones (by God)
- Fixity of species
- Strict limit on environmental influence
- Unchanging underlying type
- Anatomical and cranial measurement differences in races
- Physical and mental differences between racial groups (notice again the idea of “ranking")
- Human races are all distinct
- Science, Race, and Culture:
- Culture:
o Categories - organizing the universe
o “A priori" assumptions
- Races are Western cultural categories
- Race: cultural categories in the hands of science
o Science and quantification - trying to use science and numbers
o Craniometry (measuring heads) and other comparative anatomical measures - in many instances based on “a priori" assumptions
- Critique of Race in the Analysis of Human Sociocultural Diversity:
- Race does not exist biologically - exists as a social construct (socially and culturally)
- Culture is socially transmitted (NOT biologically); it is learned, NOT inherited
- All peoples have an equal capacity to acquire culture
- Critique of Race in the Analysis of Human Biological Diversity:
- Scientific study of human diversity since WWII
o Broader and more systematic analysis of “traits”
o Systematic observations of many more populations than in the past - better data
- Four facts of human biological variation
o There is human variation and it is a valid topic of scientific investigation
o Much human biological variation is geographically localized in its distribution
o Human biological variation is continuous in its geographic distribution
o Human biological variation is discordant in its geographic distribution
- But why is this complex picture of human diversity?
o Newness of species
o Great migrations
- Racial typologies reconsidered in light of today's data
o Tremendous variation within racial groups
o Mean variation WITHIN racial groups exceeds mean variation BETWEEN racial groups
o Physical variation is not distributed by race
o Parents pass genes, not types to offspring
- Alternative unit of analysis
o Cline: gradation in a single trait of gene frequency over geographic distance
Race and Ethnicity:
- Race is salient as a subject of anthropological inquiry (as a Sociocultural phenomenon), NOT as a unit of analysis
- Ethnicity: common identity based on cultural similarity
o Ethnic group: shares Sociocultural attributes: values, beliefs, etc
- Social Races:
o Ethnic groups that are believed to have a biological basis
o Cultural categories: vary cross-culturally
■ Hypodescent in the US
n Susie Guillort Phipps case in Louisiana