Why was the concept of race so important to anthropology in the late 19th Century and why did that change ?

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Emma PETIT

Carna Brknovic

TU06

Why was the concept of race so important to anthropology in the late 19th Century and why did that change ?

In his book Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama depicts himself as struggling to find where he belongs as a "mixed-race" child, feeling rejected from both communities. This suggests that even nowadays, the concept of race is crucial in understanding the way people identify themselves, and the way people interact within society. The definition of what "race" actually means has enormously changed over time, going from being a "biological" way of classifying the humankind to being a purely social construction based on discrimination and inequality. In th e late 19th Century, anthropological research started to focus on race as a new way of classifying people into different "breeds" based on physical features and thus account in a scientific way for human diversity, constructing racial hierarchies. Human physical differences started being ways of identification, and the development of scientific racism and social evolutionism with Darwin stated that race was determined and one could not change his race. However, in this essay I will not only account for these theories