Race became very important in anthropological research because it provided a new taxonomy of human kind based on empirical facts such as the size of the crane, height, and skin-color. In the latter part of the 19th Century, there was a resurgence of the social evolutionary paradigm in a clearly Darwinian context of racial superiority and of “survival of the fittest“. Anthropologists at that time were trying to get a grip over what George Stocking calls in his essay “The Dark-Skinned savage“ (1982, p.110), and interpret primitive societies and the populations that constituted them in terms of inferiority in civilisation. Eliza Barkan in her book The Retreat of Scientific Racism, states that anthropological societies established themselves in every European capital during that period and that “these societies testified to – and provided the locus for – the growing interest in the scientific study of race, which reinforced notions of the hierarchy, antiquity, and immutability of human races“. Darwin was inspired in his theory of evolution by anthropological work of his time that had already accepted the idea of a sort of hierarchy of races, and polygenism at the heart of it. Most of the anthropological milieu in the end of the 19th century based their research on the “comparative method“ that uses the primitive societies as examples of their how their own societies used to be hundreds of years earlier ; therefore saying that every human society will develop itself in the same way as there is an uniformity of the “laws of nature“. American anthropologists especially tried to establish a universal scheme of mental evolution that would explain the shift from what they called « savagery, barbarism and then civilisation ». Lewis Morgan the most influential anthropologist in this domain argued that the human mind had been “guided by a natural logic which formed an essential attribute of the brain itself“ (1964, p.234) which explained the common progression of all societies towards progress in the Western sense. Herbert Spencer on the other hand, saw the difference is lifestyle between Western and non-Western societies as explained by their political and social environment and explained their under-development by a circular Larmackian process which meant that they were trapped in their own savage way of life because development and progress for him only came when “societies grow, become organised, and gain stability that there arise those experiences by assimilating which the powers of thought develop“ (1969, p.92). Therefore, to summarize the late nineteenth century currents of thought, anthropologists were interested in explaining differences between primitives and Western societies and particularly in what they called the « savage », that is why the concept of race was so important in accounting for these differences and establishing a racial theory based on scientific facts, and evolutionary factors.
In the beginning of the 20th century, critics of this social evolutionnary theory started to be heard amongst scholars. Eliza Barkan in her book explains that “a lack of epistemoogical foundations for racial classification, a lack which led to endless, irresolvable inconsistencies and contradictions“ within the social evolutionary theory of races led to the theory to be considered as ill-founded and not acceptable anymore. This represented a massive change in theoretical thinking in anthropology as the concept of race being a way to classify human groups became a no-longer correct taxonomy. Franz Boas was the first anthropologist to refute such thesis about human nature, in a conference in 1911 he said that “The old idea of absolute stability of human types must, however, evidently be given up, and with it the belief of the hereditary superiority of certain types over others“ (1912, p.103). He supported his argument by a number of empirical research on crane-sizes that showed that they were in fact influenced by the environment more than by genetics and hereditary features. He took the example of American-born individual whose heads were of a different shape of their parents who had just come over from Europe, thus showing the impact the environment had on individuals. He demonstrated the plasticity of the human body and in this way made all the arguments about racial determinism completely wrong and no longer capable of accounting for human differences. It is in this manner that the concept of race no longer became important to anthropologists as Boas showed it was useless in accounting for the diversity of human societies and individuals. What Boas pointed out by looking at the environment as influencing human bodies is precisely what will interest anthropologists after him and that is the concept of culture.
Nowadays, the concepts of culture and ethnicity are preferred over race as race was found to be a purely socially constructed concept which accounted more for social inequalities than for human diversity through a biological point of view. Peter Wade in his essay Human nature and race defines race as being “a cultural category which can become an embodied part of the human experience“ (2004, p.157). What he means by embodied is the fact that race is visible on our body through our skin-colour and it is human nature to be embodied therefore we could say that race is a part of our human nature, and that social realities incorporated through race might make the latter a biocultural entity. Today, the concept of race is resurfacing once more ; in the sports domain for example to explain the fact that there is a majority of black athletes in long-distance running or in basketball teams. These suggest a pattern of similar physical attributes to the Black population that we cannot reject and therefore people might feel the need to understand and maybe reinterpret the notion of race as something not purely biological, which would point out some more polygenist theories, but moreover find a new way of accounting for these similarities and differences. Although it is quite evident that there are some differences between African and Asian people, the concept of race being taboo it is really difficult to account in a scientific way about this diversity. Today what prevails is the concept of ethnicity as something more accurate to describe different groups of people as it also encompasses the notions of a shared cultures, norms, customs.
To conclude, the concept of race was very important in the late 19th century for anthropology because it provided scientists with a new way of classifying people and accounting for the extraordinary human diversity ; based on purely empirical evidence of different head forms, sizes, height and so on. It initially was born in Nort America as a jusitification of the bad treatment of the colonized and the slaves but became a widespread assumption very quickly after that. Theories of social evolutionism explained the difference of development between various races as being the result of a lesser developed mind and set of thinking skills, which was based on examples of European heads being bigger than savages’ head therefore more powerful. At the beginning of the 20th century, figures like Franz Boas started to criticize this world-view and argued that race was not biologically founded but that human body was shaped by its environment. This way, people started to think of race as a purely social construct which could be accounted more on discrimination and inequalities than on physical differences. Nowadays, social scientists focus more on ethnicity and culture as ways of classifying human groupings.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY :
Barkan, Elazar. The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print.
Morgan, Lewis Henry. Ancient Society,. Cambridge: Belknap of Harvard UP, 1964. Print.
Smedley, Audrey. ""Race" and the Construction of Human Identity." American Anthropologist 100.3 (1998): 690-702. Print
Spencer, Herbert. Principles of Sociology. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1969. Print.
Stocking, George W. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology : with a New Preface. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982. Print.
Tocqueville, Alexis De. Democracy in America. New York: New American Library, 1956. Print
Wade, Peter. In Anthropological Theory, 2004