Caucasian Race from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
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Caucasian race From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Caucasian race (also Caucasoid,[1] or Europid[2]) is a grouping of human beings historically regarded as a biological taxon, which, depending on which of the historical race classifications used, have usually included some or all of the ancient and modern populations of Europe, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia, Central Asia and South Asia.[3] In biological anthropology, Caucasoid has been used as an umbrella term for phenotypically similar groups from these different regions, with a focus on skeletal anatomy, and especially cranial morphology, over skin tone.[4] Ancient and modern "Caucasoid" populations were thus held to have ranged in complexion from white to dark brown.[5] In the United States, the root term Caucasian has also often been used in a different, societal context as a synonym for "white" or "of European ancestry".[6][7] First introduced in early racial typologies and anthropometry, the term denoted one of three purported major races of humankind (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid).[8] Since the second half of the 20th century physical anthropology has moved away from a typological understanding of human biological diversity towards a genomic and population based perspective, and they have tended to understand race as a social classification of humans based on phenotype and ancestry as well as cultural factors, as the concept is also understood in the social sciences.[9] However, "Caucasian" and "Caucasoid" as a biological classification remains in use in forensic anthropology where it is sometimes used as a way to identify the ancestry of human remains based on interpretations of osteological measurements.[10][11] A Caucasoid female skull (National Museum of Health Contents and Medicine). 1 Etymology 2 History of the concept 2.1 Meiners 2.2 Blumenbach 2.3 Coon 3 Physical anthropology 4 Classification 5 Origin 6 Usage in the United States 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 10 Literature Etymology The appellation Caucasian for the grouping was popularized by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who named it after the category's archetypal skull, a cranium of a woman from Georgia in the Caucasus region.[12] The traditional anthropological term Caucasoid is a portmanteau of the demonym Caucasian and the Greek suffix eidos (meaning "form", "shape", "resemblance"), implying a resemblance to the native inhabitants of the Caucasus. It etymologically contrasts with the terms Negroid, Mongoloid and Australoid.[13] History of the concept Meiners The term "Caucasian race" was coined by the German philosopher Christoph Meiners in his The Outline of History of Mankind (1785). Meiners' term was given wider circulation in the 1790s by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German professor of medicine and a member of the British Royal Society, who is considered one of the founders of the discipline of anthropology.[14] Meiners acknowledged two races: the Caucasian or beautiful, and the Mongolian or ugly. His Caucasian race encompassed all of the ancient and most of the modern native populations of Europe, the aboriginal inhabitants of West Asia (including the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs), the autochthones of Northern Africa (Egyptians, Abyssinians and neighboring groups), the Indians, and the ancient Guanches.[15] In his earlier racial typology, Meiners put forth that Caucasians had the "whitest, most blooming and most delicate skin".[16] In a series of articles, Meiners boasts about the superiority of Germans among Europeans, and describes non-German Europeans' color as "dirty whites", in an unfavorable comparison with Germans.[17] Such views were typical of early scientific attempts at racial classification, where skin pigmentation was regarded as the main difference between races. This view was shared by the French naturalist Julien-Joseph Virey, who believed that the Caucasians were only the palest-skinned Europeans.[18] Blumenbach It was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach who gave the term a wider audience, by grounding it in the new methods of craniometry and Linnean taxonomy.[12] Blumenbach did not credit Meiners with his taxonomy, however, claiming to have developed it himself — although his justification clearly points to Meiners' aesthetic viewpoint of Caucasus origins: Caucasian variety—I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (original members) of mankind.[19] In contrast to Meiners, however, Blumenbach was a monogenist and considered all humans to have a shared origin and as a single species, and he also did rank his caucasian grouping higher than other groups in terms of mental faculties or potential for achievement as Meiners had done.[12] In various editions of On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Blumenbach expanded on Meiners' popular idea and defined five human races based on color, using popular racial terms of his day, justified with scientific terminology, cranial measurements, and facial features. He established Caucasian as the "white race", Mongoloid as the "yellow race", Malayan as the "brown race", Ethiopian as the "black race", [20] and American as the "red race". In the 3rd edition of his On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Blumenbach moved skin tone to Drawing of the skull of a second-tier importance after noticing that poorer European people (such as peasants) whom he observed generally worked outside, Georgian female by Johann [21] often became darker skinned ("browner") through sun exposure. He also noticed that darker skin of an "olive-tinge" was a natural Friedrich Blumenbach, used feature of some European populations closer to the Mediterranean Sea.[22] Alongside the anthropologist Georges Cuvier, Blumenbach as an archetype for the classified the Caucasian race by cranial measurements and bone morphology in addition to skin pigmentation, and thus considered Caucasian racial more than just the palest Europeans ("white, cheeks rosy") as archetypes for the Caucasian race.[23] characteristics in his 1795 De Generis Humani Varietate. Following Meiners, Blumenbach described the Caucasian race as consisting of the native inhabitants of Europe, West Asia, the Indian peninsula, and North Africa, including toward the south the Moors, Abyssinians and adjacent groups. His idealized Caucasian variety was distinguished by a white complexion, with rosy cheeks; brown or chestnut-colored hair; a subglobular head; an oval and straight face, with moderately defined parts; a smooth forehead; a narrow nose, often slightly hooked; and a small mouth. However, pragmatically, Blumenbach acknowledged that skin color of the Caucasian variety naturally ranged from white to dark brown tones.[5] Coon Among the proponents of the concept there was never any consensus on the delineation between the Caucasoid race, including the populations of Europe, and the Mongoloid race, including the populations of East Asia. Thus, Carleton S. Coon (1939) and Franco Bragagna (2013) included the populations native to all of Central and Northern Asia under the Caucasoid label. However, many scientists maintained the racial categorizations of color established by Meiners' and Blumenbach's works, along with many other early steps of anthropology, well into the late 19th and mid-to-late 20th centuries, increasingly used to justify political policies, such as segregation and immigration restrictions, and other opinions based in prejudice. For example, Thomas Henry Huxley (1870) classified all populations of Asian nations as Mongoloid. Lothrop Stoddard (1920) in turn classified as "brown" most of the populations of the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Central Asia and South Asia. He counted as "white" only European peoples and their descendants, as well as a few populations in areas Distribution of the races after the adjacent to or opposite southern Europe, in parts of Anatolia and parts of the Rif and Atlas mountains. Pleistocene according to Carleton Coon Caucasoid race In 1939 Coon argued that the Caucasian race had originated through admixture between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens of the "Mediterranean type" which he considered to be distinct from Caucasians, rather than a subtype of it as others Congoid race had done.[24] While Blumenbach had erroneously thought that light skin color was ancestral to all humans and the dark skin Capoid race of southern populations was due to sun, Coon thought that Caucasians had lost their original pigmentation as they moved Mongoloid race North.[24] Coon used the term "Caucasoid" and "White race" synonymously.[25] Australoid race In 1962, Coon published The Origin of Races, wherein he proposed a polygenist view, that human races had evolved separately from local varieties of Homo erectus. Dividing humans into five main races, and argued that each evolved in parallel but at different rates, so that some races had reached higher levels of evolution than others.[9] He argued that the Caucasoid race had evolved 200,000 years prior to the "Congoid race", and hence represented a higher evolutionary stage.[26] Physical anthropology Drawing from Petrus Camper's theory of facial angle, Blumenbach and Cuvier classified races, through their skull collections based on their cranial features and anthropometric measurements.