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vincentML -> RE: Of species, race, and ethnicity.... (11/1/2016 11:23:13 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Awareness
No doubt Twink will be along shortly to babble incoherently. Upon fact-checking her narrative, it will probably be either completely unsupported by science or rest upon a misinterpretation of actual science put through the filter of her unhinged-by-acid monkey-brain.
Everything is not science and everything cannot be fact checked by science. Only a rigid, authoritarian mind would think so.
When we talk or write socially about the archaic broad categories of racial phenotypes our discourse is guided by what we have learned and the stereotypes we have accepted, in which case Race is indeed socially constructed.
In Europe and North America, these divisions have often used language that focused on physical and geographical differences: “Black,” “White,” “Nordic,” “African,” and so on. Anthropologists have established that ingrained prejudices have often had far more to do with these racial definitions than have the real physical characteristics of people. “Race” in these investigations by cultural anthropologists is conceived of as a cultural construction, not a biological fact. It is in reality a kind of ideology, a way of thinking about, speaking about, and organizing relationships among human groups: Who is your friend, or enemy? Who is a neighbor, or a foreigner? This ideological understanding of race may use the language of physical features when talking about group differences, but biology is not fundamentally important to the ways that these groups are defined. The question before anthropologists in this case is: how and why do people use cultural criteria to define human races, and how have these definitions changed through time?
Over the last two centuries, a more restricted meaning of the word “race” has become common in English. In this case, a race designates one of a number of fundamental divisions within the human species. These races are usually described in biological terms, although people have most often claimed that
behavioral and cultural differences between races exist as well. The number of races identified according to this meaning of the term has varied, but Europe,Africa, and Asia are often identified as the homelands of three of these races, and people talk about “Europeans” (or “Caucasoids”), “Africans”(or “Negroids”), and “Asians” (or “Mongoloids”)as if those three groups constitute fundamental units of humanity.In North American. In North America today, this is the meaning that the general public usually associates with the word “race”:
a. human races are extraordinarily important;
b. they are based on biological differences;
c. they are ancient and (relatively) unchanging, and
d. they are easily distinguishable from one another.
Scientists, including anthropologists,contributed a great deal to the popularization of this idea of human races through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These scientists gathered a great deal of data on human physical diversity and on the cultures of societies around the world, but their interpretations were very much colored by their own prejudices. They furnished what appeared to be support to these biological models of human races but, as a variety of scholars have noted (Baker 1998; Barkan1992; Hannaford 1996; Jahoda 1998; Smedley1999), these researchers were themselves very much influenced by stereotypes of different groups and the relations between these groups that were pervasive in their own societies.
The history of scientific racism has been covered in Chapter 2, but two things should be made clear at this point. First, through much of the history of anthropological studies of human races, such studies were concerned with hierarchy and not only with classification. Scientists who compared human populations from different areas of the world were trying to distinguish such populations from one another, but they usually ranked these groups with reference to one another as well. Such rankings might be based on notions of intellectual superiority and inferiority, of savagery and civilization, of greater and lesser degrees of evolution, but they have almost always placed Europeans (almost always upper-and middle-class European males) at the pinnacle of human development.
In the early twenty-first century, the concept of race retains its central place among American preoccupations, in society at large, and in anthropology more particularly. Publication of controversial books like The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray 1994) and Race, Evolution and Behavior (Rushton 1995) has focused renewed attention on questions of race in America, and fue lled debates about the biological and cultural meanings of the word.These books attempt to resurrect the race hierarchies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily through varying claims that Africans and especially African Americans are on average less intelligent, more violent, and generally less civilized than people from Europe or Asia. At the same time, some anthropologists continue to argue that biological races are real and important entities, usually claiming that disbelief in the existence of such biological units amounts to nothing more than “political correctness.” “Political correctness” is rarely defined in such claims, but one of two general meanings is usually implied. It means either an inappropriate interest in the experiences of women, people of color, and the disadvantaged, or an inappropriate wariness about the objectivity of certain kinds of scientific research
The same situation holds in anthropology:we can (and must) investigate the various dimensions of race, describing and critiquing the concept as we do so. This involves, among other things, examining whether biological race concepts are appropriate models for investigating variability among human beings. This has been one preoccupation of physical and biological anthropology for more than a century now, and it appears that the answer to this question is “No.”The typological race models that had held sway in anthropology through most of the existence of the discipline are not good descriptions of how human biological variability works. The implications of populational models, on the other hand, are so far removed from popular understandings of the term“race”—with hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of “micro-races” dotted around the globe—that use of the term in such cases does nothing more than risk needless confusion. Science is not an exercise in nostalgia: when a term progresses from being burnished by long use to being made obsolete by increasing knowledge,it needs to be discarded. The concept of biological race in anthropology is at that point
This author makes a detailed argument that the three broad categories of race arise from the prejudices of anthropologists, and it adds confusion to popular fears about "others." Race based upon geography is especially absurd because humans have always been travelers spreading their seed far and wide causing incredible variation. To think the continents are the homes of three large, sustained, and purely racial groupings fails Darwinian need for isolation of populations. It also violated the broad variation of genes in humans.
I have taken the liberty of selecting portions of personal interest without identifying them. If you are unhappy with my decision read the article in its full your own self.
The concept of race in anthropology
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