Race (Human Categorization)
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IF : 4.547 | IC Value 80.26 Volume-6, IssueV-9,olum Speciale : 3 | IssueIssue :September-2017 11 | November 2014 • ISSN • ISSN No N 2277o 2277 - 8160- 8179 Original Research Paper Political Science Race (Human Categorization) K. Suresh Kumar Dept. Of Political Science, Cr College Chilakaluripeta, Guntur Dist. KEYWORDS : Race is the classication of humans into groups based on physical The 1775 treatise "The Natural Varieties of Mankind", by Johann traits, ancestry, genetics, or social relations, or the relations between Friedrich Blumenbach proposed ve major divisions: the Caucasoid those groups. First used to refer to speakers of a common language race, the Mongoloid race, the Ethiopian race (later termed Negroid), and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century race the American Indian race, and the Malayan race, but he did not began to refer to physical (i.e. phonotypical) traits. The term was propose any hierarchy among the races. often used in a general biological taxonomic sense, starting from the 19th century, to denote genetically differentiated human From the 17th through 19th centuries, the merging of folk beliefs populations dened by phenotype. about group differences with scientic explanations of those differences produced what Smedley has called an "ideology of race". Social conceptions and groupings of races vary over time, involving According to this ideology, races are primordial, natural, enduring folk taxonomies] that dene essential types of individuals based on and distinct. It was further argued that some groups may be the perceived traits. Scientists consider biological essentialism result of mixture between formerly distinct populations, but that obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective careful study could distinguish the ancestral races that had differentiation in both physical and behavioural traits. combined to produce admixed groups. Even though there is a broad scientic agreement that essentialist Race and polygenism and typological conceptualizations of race are untenable, scientists In the last two decades of the 18th century, the theory of around the world continue to conceptualize race in widely differing polygenism, the belief that different races had evolved separately in ways, some of which have essentialist implications. While some each continent and shared no common ancestor, was advocated in researchers use the concept of race to make distinctions among England by historian Edward Long and anatomist Charles White, in fuzzy sets of traits or observable differences in behaviour, others in Germany by ethnographers Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster, the community suggest that the idea of race often is used in a naive] and in France by Julien-Joseph Virey. or simplistic way, and argue that, among humans, race has no taxonomic signicance by pointing out that all living humans Models of human evolution belong to the same species, Homo sapiens, and subspecies, Homo Today, all humans are classied as belonging to the species Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens and sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens. However, this is not the rst species of homininae: the rst species of genus Homo, Race and colonialism Homo habilis, evolved in East Africa at least 2 million years ago, and According to Smedley and Marks the European concept of "race", members of this species populated different parts of Africa in a along with many of the ideas now associated with the term, arose at relatively short time. Homo erectus evolved more than 1.8 million the time of the scientic revolution, which introduced and years ago, and by 1.5 million years ago had spread throughout privileged the study of natural kinds, and the age of European Europe and Asia. imperialism and colonization which established political relations between Europeans and peoples with distinct cultural and political Biological classication traditions. As Europeans encountered people from different parts of In the early 20th century, many anthropologists accepted and the world, they speculated about the physical, social, and cultural taught the belief that biologically distinct races were isomorphic differences among various human groups. The rise of the Atlantic with distinct linguistic, cultural, and social groups, while popularly slave trade, which gradually displaced an earlier trade in slaves from applying that belief to the eld of eugenics, in conjunction with a throughout the world, created a further incentive to categorize practice that is now called racism, After the Nazi eugenics program, human groups in order to justify the subordination of African slaves. along with the rise of anti-colonial movements, racial essentialism Drawing on Classical sources and upon their own internal lost widespread popularity. Race anthropologists were pressured to interactions—for example, the hostility between the English and acknowledge ndings coming from studies of culture and Irish powerfully inuenced early European thinking about the population genetics, and to revise their conclusions about the differences between people—Europeans began to sort themselves sources of phenotypic variation. A signicant number of modern and others into groups based on physical appearance, and to anthropologists and biologists in the West came to view race as an attribute to individuals belonging to these groups behaviours and invalid genetic or biological designation. capacities which were claimed to be deeply ingrained. Ancestrally differentiated populations Early taxonomic models Cladistics is another method of classication. A clade is a taxonomic In the 18th century the differences among human groups became a group of organisms consisting of a single common ancestor and all focus of scientic investigation. But the scientic classication of the descendants of that ancestor. Every creature produced by sexual phenotypic variation was frequently coupled with racist ideas about reproduction has two immediate lineages, one maternal and one innate predispositions of different groups, always attributing the paternal. Whereas Carl Linnaeus established a taxonomy of living most desirable features to the White, European race and arranging organisms based on anatomical similarities and differences, the other races along a continuum of progressively undesirable cladistics seeks to establish a taxonomy—the phylogenetic attributes. The 1735 classication of Carl Linnaeus, inventor of tree—based on genetic similarities and differences and tracing the zoological taxonomy, divided the human species Homo sapiens process of acquisition of multiple characteristics by single into continental varieties of Europeans, asiaticus, Americans, and organisms. Some researchers have tried to clarify the idea of race by after, each associated with a different humour: sanguine, equating it to the biological idea of the clade. Often mitochondrial melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic, respectively. DNA or Y chromosome sequences are used to study ancient human migration paths. These single-locus sources of DNA do not 146 X GJRA - GLOBAL JOURNAL FOR RESEARCH ANALYSIS Volume-6, IssueV-9,olum Speciale : 3 | IssueIssue :September-2017 11 | November 2014 • ISSN • ISSN No N 2277o 2277 - 8160- 8179 IF : 4.547 | IC Value 80.26 recombine and are inherited from a single parent. Individuals from group: W1 (White-British), W2 (White-Irish), W9 (Any other white the various continental groups tend to be more similar to one background); M1 (White and black Caribbean), M2 (White and black another than to people from other continents, and tracing either African), M3 (White and Asian), M9 (Any other mixed background); mitochondrial DNA or non-recombinant Y-chromosome DNA A1 (Asian-Indian), A2 (Asian-Pakistani), A3 (Asian-Bangladeshi), A9 explains how people in one place may be largely derived from (Any other Asian background); B1 (Black Caribbean), B2 (Black people in some remote location. African), B3 (Any other black background); O1 (Chinese), O9 (Any other). The other is categories used by the police when they visually Rachel Caspari (2003) have argued that clades are by denition identify someone as belonging to an ethnic group, e.g. at the time of monophyletic groups (a tax on that includes all descendants of a a stop and search or an arrest: White – North European (IC1), White – given ancestor) and since no groups currently regarded as races are South European (IC2), Black (IC3), Asian (IC4), Chinese, Japanese, or monophyletic, none of those groups can be clades. South East Asian (IC5), Middle Eastern (IC6), and Unknown (IC0). "IC" stands for "Identication Code;" these items are also referred to as Genetically differentiated populations Phoenix classications. Officers are instructed to "record the Another way to look at differences between populations is to response that has been given" even if the person gives an answer measure genetic differences rather than physical differences which may be incorrect; their own perception of the person's ethnic between groups. The mid-20th-century anthropologist William C. background is recorded separately. Comparability of the Boyd dened race as: "A population which differs signicantly from information being recorded by officers was brought into question other populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in September 2007, as part genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, of its Equality Data Review; one problem cited was the number of gene loci we choose to consider as a signicant 'constellation'".]