Content deleted Content added
Maxeto0910 (talk | contribs) No edit summary Tags: Visual edit Mobile edit Mobile web edit Advanced mobile edit |
Undid revision 1260022630 by DBaiocchi78 (talk) - unsure whether this pic is relevant for the article. But it is surely not relevant for the section, and the caption is poorly written. |
||
| (13 intermediate revisions by 6 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{short description|Disused conception of a person's racial or ethnic makeup}}
{{Race}}
The concept of [[race (human categorization)|race]] as a categorization of [[anatomically modern human]]s (''[[Homo sapiens]]'') has an extensive history in Europe and the Americas. The contemporary word ''race'' itself is modern; historically it was used in the sense of "[[nation]], [[ethnic group]]" during the 16th to 19th centuries.<ref>Kennedy, Rebecca F. (2013). "Introduction". Race and Ethnicity in the Classical world : An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation. Hackett Publishing Company. p. xiii. ISBN 978-1603849944. "The ancients would not understand the social construct we call "race" any more than they would understand the distinction modem scholars and social scientists generally draw between race and "ethnicity." The modern concept of race is a product of the colonial enterprises of European powers from the 16th to 18th centuries that identified race in terms of skin color and physical difference. In the post-Enlightenment world, a "scientific," biological idea of race suggested that human difference could be explained by biologically distinct groups of humans, evolved from separate origins, who could be distinguished by physical differences, predominantly skin color...Such categorizations would have confused the ancient Greeks and Romans."</ref><ref>Bancel, Nicolas; David, Thomas; Thomas, Dominic, eds. (23 May 2019). "Introduction: The Invention of Race: Scientific and Popular Representations of Race from Linnaeus to the Ethnic Shows". The Invention of Race : Scientific and Popular Representations. Routledge. p. 11. ISBN 978-0367208646. 'The Invention of Race' has assisted us in the process of locating the "epistemological moment," somewhere between 1730 and 1790, when the concept of race was invented and rationalized. A "moment" that was accompanied by a revolution in the way in which the human body was studied and observed in order to formulate scientific conclusions relating to human variability."</ref> Race acquired its modern meaning in the field of [[physical anthropology]] through [[scientific racism]] starting in the 19th century. With the rise of modern [[genetics]], the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the [[American Association of Biological Anthropologists]] stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."<ref name="AAPARace">{{cite web|author=American Association of Physical Anthropologists|title=AAPA Statement on Race and Racism |website=American Association of Physical Anthropologists|access-date=19 June 2020 |date=27 March 2019 |url=https://physanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/}}</ref>
Line 67 ⟶ 66:
====Johann Friedrich Blumenbach====
[[File:
[[File:
[[Johann Friedrich Blumenbach]] (1752–1840) divided the human [[species]] into five [[Race (classification of human beings)|races]] in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls), and called them (1793/1795):<ref>Blumenbach, J. F. 1779. ''Handbuch der Naturgeschichte'' vol. 1, pp. 63f. The names of Blumenbach's five groups are introduced in his 1795 revision of ''De generis humani varietate nativa'' (pp. 23f.) as ''Caucasiae, Mongolicae, Aethiopicae, Americanae, Malaicae''. See also: Kowner and Skott in: R. Kowner, W. Demel (eds.), ''Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Interactions, Nationalism, Gender and Lineage'' (2015), p. 51.</ref><ref>{{cite book |author=Johann Friedrich Blumenbach|title=Handbuch der Naturgeschichte|page=62|year=1797|url=http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/blumenbach_naturgeschichte_1797?p=84|access-date=2020-06-06}}</ref>
* the [[Caucasian race|Caucasian]] or white race. Blumenbach was the first to use this term for [[Ethnic groups in Europe|Europeans]], but the term would later be reinterpreted to also include [[Ethnic groups in the Middle East|Middle Easterners]] and [[
* the [[Mongoloid|Mongolian]] or yellow race, including all [[East Asian people|East Asians]].
* the [[Malay race|Malayan]] or brown race, including [[Ethnic groups
* the [[Negroid|Ethiopian]] or black race, including all [[List of ethnic groups of Africa|sub-Saharan Africans]].
* the American or red race, including all [[Indigenous peoples of the Americas|Native Americans]].
Line 109 ⟶ 108:
His stance in this case was considered to be quite radical in its time, because it went against the more orthodox and standard reading of the Bible in his time which implied all human stock descended from a single couple (Adam and Eve), and in his defense Agassiz often used what now sounds like a very "modern" argument about the need for independence between science and religion; though Agassiz, unlike many polygeneticists, maintained his religious beliefs and was not anti-Biblical in general.
In the context of ethnology and anthropology of the mid-19th century, Agassiz's polygenetic views became explicitly seen as opposing Darwin's views on race, which sought to show the common origin of all human races and the superficiality of racial differences. Darwin's second book on evolution, ''The Descent of Man'', features extensive argumentation addressing the single origin of the races, at times explicitly opposing Agassiz's theories. {{Citation needed|date=October 2024}}
===Arthur de Gobineau===
Line 119 ⟶ 118:
To Gobineau, the development of empires was ultimately destructive to the "superior races" that created them, since they led to the mixing of distinct races. This he saw as a degenerative process.
According to his definitions, the people of [[Spain]], most of [[France]], most of [[Germany]], southern and western Iran as well as [[Switzerland]], [[Austria]], [[Northern Italy]], and a large part of [[British Isles|Britain]], consisted of a degenerative race that arose from miscegenation. Also according to him, the whole population of [[North India]] consisted of a yellow race. {{Citation needed|date=October 2024}}
===Thomas Huxley's racial definitions===
Line 147 ⟶ 146:
===Charles Darwin and race===
{{More citations needed section|date=October 2024}}
Though [[Charles Darwin]]'s evolutionary theory was set forth in 1859 upon publication of ''On the Origin of Species'', this work was largely absent of explicit reference to Darwin's theory applied to man. This application by Darwin would not become explicit until 1871 with the publication of his second great book on evolution, ''[[The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex]]''.
Line 177:
[[Franz Boas]] (1858–1942) was a [[German American]] anthropologist and has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". Professor of anthropology at Columbia University from 1899, Boas made significant contributions within [[anthropology]], more specifically, [[physical anthropology]], [[linguistics]], [[archaeology]], and [[cultural anthropology]]. His work put an emphasis on cultural and environmental effects on people to explain their development into adulthood and evaluated them in concert with human biology and evolution. This encouraged academics to break away from static taxonomical classifications of race. It is said that before Boas, anthropology was the study of race, and after Boas, anthropology was the study of culture.
The 20th-century criticism of racial anthropology was significantly based on Boas and his school. Beginning in 1920, he strongly favoured the influence of social environment over heritability. As a reaction to the rise of [[Nazi Germany]] and its prominent espousing of [[Nazism and race|racist ideologies]] in the 1930s, there was an outpouring of popular works by scientists criticizing the use of race to justify the politics of "superiority" and "inferiority". An influential work in this regard was the publication of ''We Europeans: A Survey of "Racial" Problems'' by [[Julian Huxley]] and [[A. C. Haddon]] in 1935, which sought to show that [[population genetics]] allowed for only a highly limited definition of race at best. Another popular work during this period, "The Races of Mankind" by [[Ruth Benedict]] and Gene Weltfish, argued that though there were some extreme racial differences, they were primarily superficial, and in any case did not justify political action. {{Citation needed|date=October 2024}}
===Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon===
| |||