AN100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Franz Boas, Folk Classification, Soup Kitchen
AN100 - Lecture 11 - Race, Ethnicity, Caste, Class
The earliest anthropologists to question race and sex
- Franz Boaz
- Replaces race with culture concept to explain diversity
Anthropological Perspective of Race
- Race is a social construction (history)
- No pure race but only human race - homo sapiens
- Classification of races is selective and arbitrary (ex why skin colour and not body type?)
- No simple correlation between physical and behavioural or mental differences
- Physical differences varies within and between groups
- Genetic differences are few among humans
- Genetic variances exist within a race
Hypodescent in the US
- Folk classification of ‘blood’
- Children of mixed race are assigned the identity of the non-white parent regardless of
skin colour tone
- *Compare with Brazilian tipo (type) divided by colour
- Brazilians - shades of colour
- Americans - heritage
What of physical differences?
- Environmental differences
- Natural selection or selective advantage of physical traits - body shape, skin colour
- Mutation: random and accumulate over time in different populations
- Genetic drift: frequencies of genes differ with geographic mobility or when disasters
occur
- To prove race exists we need to ask if humans can interbreed (fertile); prove pure and
unmixed race
- Ex donkey + horse = mule (cannot reproduce)
Race as ‘beliefs and actions’
- Racialism: ethnocentric belief in the existence of biologically distinct races
- Racism: the systematic oppression and ill treatment of so called ‘races’ based on such a
belief (action)
- New racism: racial differences as insurmountable and immutable ‘cultural’, rather than
biological
- “Zero tolerance for barbaric cultural practices”
- “Identity soup kitchen” campaign in Paris (pg 208)
- “Sanitization of the body” (Pakistani women in Canada)
Caste (Jati)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
An100 - lecture 11 - race, ethnicity, caste, class. The earliest anthropologists to question race and sex. Replaces race with culture concept to explain diversity. No pure race but only human race - homo sapiens. Classification of races is selective and arbitrary (ex why skin colour and not body type?) No simple correlation between physical and behavioural or mental differences. Physical differences varies within and between groups. Children of mixed race are assigned the identity of the non-white parent regardless of skin colour tone. *compare with brazilian tipo (type) divided by colour. Natural selection or selective advantage of physical traits - body shape, skin colour. Mutation: random and accumulate over time in different populations. Genetic drift: frequencies of genes differ with geographic mobility or when disasters occur. To prove race exists we need to ask if humans can interbreed (fertile); prove pure and unmixed race. Ex donkey + horse = mule (cannot reproduce)
