Human 'Race'

Anthropometry

scientific approach to the study of human diversity - standardized measures of human body form - emerged 19th century.

Craniology

subject of Anthropometry -> 'average' values used to establish 'types'. cranial form - good indication of ancestry.

Problematic because it was believed crainium showed brain quality and intelligence.

Franz Gall and Spurzheim did phrenology to determine individuals talents and abilities.

Retzius - believed u could divide Europeans into 3 types

Samuel Morton

amercian physician

skull size +shape = race and character.

skull volume = intellegence, caucasoid skulls were bigger so Europeans r better

Pierre BRoca

shape of skull is associated with brain quality. Recognized that environmental effects can change the skull morphology

lambert Quetelet

interested in Anthropometry measurements on 'populations', noting the influence of poverty in these populations.

focused on establishing 'average' measures. its goal was to correlate with behaviour which 'types' were most suitable for the job - tapped into rising field of crim - idenitifying criminal types

Cesare Lombroso

identifying those 'born criminal' (criminal anthropometry), identify pre delinquents.

Abormalities - receding forehead, large ears, square or projecting chin, broad cheekbones, left handers, compromised sense of taste/smell, exhibitionism. 5 or more = hereditary propensity to scociopathical acts. but usually it was fetus not having enough oxygen

Eugenics

Quetelet and lombrosos work captured Francis Galtons attention.

Eugenics is an attempt to attribute social problems ('the decline of humanity) to biology and genetic inheritance (idea of good and bad biology and genes, and ignoring natural selection does not have an agenda).

became a underpinning of agricultural fair and massive crimes against humanity (controlling reproduction)

Francis Galton

darwins cousin and founder of eugenics movement. focus on anthropometrics to determine racial identities/ characteristics.

'Composite portraiture' merged to individual photographs into generic faces (to delineate types). Standard measurements on large populations to determine the average (norm) distribution of traits.

Gaussian distribution where the 'norm' (mean) is idealized and used to define types/races. Galton believed in highly of nature.

to 'improve ' populations must alter the good and bad ends of distribution. Encouraged mating between 'normal' individuals

Eugenics movement

built off the perception was that human traits inherited by simple (Mendelian) inheritance. family predigrees/bloodlines were looking for criminality, alcoholism

Franz Boas

Challenge eugenics (key founder of anthropology). I

Insisted on a environmental component (genetic potential for each traits in genetic but depends on environment).

Emphasized 'plasticity' in body and size from how they changed in the environment

through 20th century

Typological thinking was replaced with 'population approach'.

Appreciates the range of variability existing within populaitons & range of overlap between populations. that in any population there will always be a range of variation in for any given trait.

Avoids idealizing the average/norm. avoids dumping the definition of types/races around the mean

Synthetic theory of evolution

20th century perspective -> a product of complex and interacting process and variation is the new 'healthy norm', evolutionary forces (NS) + mendels basic genetics + human population genetics + molecular biology. variation is needed and inherent and begins with reproduction.

recent origins of race

Most historians argue that race as we know it in the Western world is a notion that arose during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

While the ancient Greeks and Romans recognized that populations from different continents were physically and culturally diverse, this recognition of human diversity never led to the development of a racial ideology that considered these people inferior by nature.

greeks 'race' and roman empire

n typically ethnocentric fashion, the ancient Greeks divided the world into Greeks and non-Greeks or barbarians, but they recognized that this was a purely cultural distinction.

Later, roman empire was built on making romans out of foreigners after military conquest. There was slavery but it wasn't based off someones ethnic background

beginnings of biological race

began during age of exploration, when europeans discovered amercias and diversity. They developed "folk beliefs" that were unscientific but were supported by both reglious and scientific authority. These beliefs have been codified into the 'racial worldview'

the racial worldview

Human populations form biologically distinct and discrete units that are inherently unequal in endowment •

Superficial differences between human groups are the outer manifestations of deep and significant biological differences in intelligence, morality, and other psychological and behavioral features •

All of these differences between populations can be inherited

• The differences between human groups are permanent, were fashioned at creation (or later by evolution), and remain fixed and unchangeable

class distinctions

create a kind of horizontal divide between so-called upper- and lower-class people without regard to racial status, race provides a vertical separation that links socioeconomic classes while dividing them along racial lines. \

Both class and racial distinctions often become naturalized, that is, they come to be considered a part of human nature,

Platonism

old philosophical tradition, in which different kinds of things were thought to share a hidden, essential nature, irrespective of all the variation that existed around this essence.

Modern science completely rejects Platonic philosophy as a way to understand the essential nature of living things

polygenism

the notion that Africans, Asians, and Native Americans were created separately from Europeans, was a dangerously unorthodox position in the religious world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe

monogenism

It suggested that all peoples were the descendants of Adam, but that different races or varieties had arisen as a result of degeneration from God’s original, Caucasian creation, as the result of the effects of the climate in different parts of the world.

Earnest Hooten

questioned the usefulness of race.

he sought to understand the historical connections between different races or populations and to measure and describe the phenotypic differences that could be used to classify these populations.

followed Platonism. a strong supporter of the idea that races could be distinguished by the size and shape of their skulls,

Franz Boas

questioned the usefulness of race. 'participant observation'. His work disproved the notion that biology determined cultural achievement and suggested that culture, rather than biological race, should be the central focus of anthropological inquiry.

Cephalic index

essential and unchangeable (i.e., biologically determined) trait that allowed one to distinguish between the races.

Most racial schemes of the day relied heav-ily on the cephalic index for distinguishing different European populations based on a typological scheme running from long-headed ( dolichocephalic) to round-headed types (brachycephalic).

Phenotypic plasticity

**the ability of individual genotypes to produce different phenotypes when exposed to different environmental conditions**.

do genetics explain race?

the study of population differences in the frequencies of genes for different blood types seemed to allow a scientific and objective approach to racial classification.

Blood groups like the ABO, MN, and the Rh systems were known to result from the action of individual genes with no significant environmental influence, and different populations were found to vary in the relative frequency of these genes

problem with ABO/ genetics to determine race

1. exists for any racial classification based on traits that vary in a continuous fashion. While differences in the frequencies of blood types certainly characterize different human populations, these differences do not allow the creation of an objective and unambiguous set of races.

2. 2. lack of concordance between genetic data and other racial traits. Race classifications based on one set of morphological features or gene frequencies are nearly always contradicted by classifications based on other traits.

Carlton Coon

Coon’s views on race included an version of nineteenth-century polygenism, in which he suggested a separate evolutionary origin for the five major living races.

He hypothesized that modern Homo sapiens evolved at five different times in the past in five different geographic locations from an ancestral species known as Homo erectus.

Clinal variation

refers to a pattern of gradual change in morphological or genetic traits that occurs across the geographic range of a species

Ashley Montagu

critiqued the biological basis of human race, railed against the typological conception of races so prevalent at the time, and popularized the notion that human race functioned more as a social construction than a biological fact.

Miscegenation

or cross-racial breeding was considered bad for the gene pool of the white race, and the one-drop rule was an attempt to ensure that “black genes” did not find their way into the “white gene pool.”

social constructivist model

which argued that race as biology was a myth but that race holds great importance for the lived experiences of people in racial or racist societies.