ANTH 203 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Canadian Identity, Punti, Failed State
21 Nov 2017
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Document Summary
Race is not a biological category, even though it is a cultural obsession especially in the us. Ethnicity is more useful because race is a category of ethnicity. Ethnicity = group of a common national or cultural heritage. Genetic variation occurs within racial groups: approximately 90% of variation occurs within racial groups. Race is biologically useless, but its consequences have been huge on society. While slaves don"t have to be dehumanized, they often are. In canada, slavery was practiced although rarely, and in 1833 the slave trade was abolished (compared to 1865 in the us, where there were more slaves). In canada, the colonial economy didn"t actually require large slave labor forces. This is not to say that race didn"t influence the country; first nations were brutally assimilated, but they were not used economically. Rather, people in canada had to pay off their debt, paying it off by working for their debtor.
