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 that thrived in the 19th Century but I will also highlight the fact that in the early 20th Century, this idea of “biological race“ was rendered false by new generations of social thinkers who proved race to be solely socially constructed, and that culture and ethnicity were a much better way of accounting for human differences.

Race as a concept was first used to justify bad treatments of colonised people in the American colonies. In her essay published in the academic review American Anthropolical, Smedley argues that “Europeans justified their attitude toward human differences by focusing on the physical features of the New World populations, magnifying and exaggerating their differences, and concluding that the Africans and Indians and their descendants were lesser forms of human beings, and that their inferiority was natural and/or God-given“ (1998, p.694). Differences between colonised peoples’ ways of life and the American were accounted for by their racial inferiority and in this manner colonial leaders prevented poor people from both White and non-White backgrounds to unite and revolt against the system by setting the framework for feelings of contempt and digust between the two populations. Therefore, race was justifying oppression and invasion and moreover slavery on a moral point of view ; European ideals of justice, freedom and democracy were overthrown by the view that indigeneous populations were inferior to Europeans. Race was thought of as a “breed“ in the same way that scientists at the time classified animals with a method based on different physical features, such as height, color and so on ; and therefore racial determinism was created as people from one race could not change their race but were rather identified by it. Even though slavery was officially abolished in the United States in 1865 for the Southern states, ideas of inferiority and conflict that constituted racial relations stayed the same and as Alexandre De Tocqueville asserts in his book Democracy in America, “race outlived slavery and became an independent ingredient fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color“ (1969, p.355). Therefore, the origin of the concept of race lays in men themselves, who succeeded in artificially creating different groups of people depending on skin-color, height, eyes-color and so on, in an attempt to divide a population. Then the concept spread and race became the main way of identifying people, and differentiate them.

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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. ...

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