26 Concepts of Race, Ethnicity and Population

Prof. Subho Roy

Contents of this unit

· Introduction

· Concept of race

· Typological model

· Populational model

· Definitions of race

· Clinal model

· Molecular diversity

· Race and ethnic group

· Ethnic identities

· Racism

· Conclusion

Learning objectives

• The history behind the emergence of the concept of race
• What was the basis of classifying world population?
• How the concept of race changed in course of time?
• What are the definitions of race that came up at different time points?
• What is racism?

1. Introduction

Concept of Race

   There exists a wide difference in both physical and cultural characteristics among the people of the world. Physically human groups differ from each other in skin colour, stature, features of hair, nose, head, eyebrows, lips, and so on and culturally they differ in aspects of language, food habit, dress pattern, behaviour and so on. Physical/Biological Anthropologists attempts to understand this physical variation and its underlying reasons.

The interest of studying human physical variation can be traced in the writings of early historians and philosophers like Herodotus (484-425 BC), Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.) and Aristotle (384-322 BC). Each of these scholars attributed this variation to environmental factors. For example, while explaining the reason behind the Egyptian’s thicker skull compared to that of the Persians, Herodotus stated that the Egyptians shave the heads of their children and let them go hatless in the sun, while the Persians covered the heads of their children. Similarly, Hippocrates suggested men with phthisic physique (long and thin) are susceptible to tuberculosis and those with apoplectic physique (short and thick) are predisposed to vascular problems.

The ‘Era of Exploration’, i.e. during the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries marks the discovery of many new lands and people. For example, in the year 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World and the American Indians of that place. Following these discoveries, people of America, Africa and Asia-Pacific regions became known to the world. These people were classified along with Europeans into broad racial categories on the basis of physical characteristic.

Typological mode

From 18th century onwards Anthropologists became interested to study human physical variation and on the basis of that various attempts were made to classify the world population into different categories called ‘race’

George Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon

The term ‘race’ was first used by Buffon, a French naturalist in the 18th century.

    Prior to World War II, most studies of human variation focused on racial differences or phenotypic variation that are readily observable such as skin color, hair form, body build, and stature between large, geographically defined population. The criteria that were used to classify the world population are some observable (eg. Skin colour, hair colour, hair form and nose form), metric (eg. Stature), and other biological characters (eg. Blood groups and blood enzymes). For example, Blumenbach (1775), a German scientist who first classified the world population into five varieties primarily on the basis of skin colour-

Blumenbach

1. Caucasian or white, (people of Europe, west Asia, Central Asia and so on),

2. the Mongolian, or yellow race, occupying Tartary, China, Japan and so on,

3. the Ethiopian, or black race, occupying most of Africa (except the north), Australia, New Guinea and other Pacific Islands,

4. the American, or red race, comprising the Indians of North and South America and

5. the Malayan, or brown race, which occupies the islands of the Indian Archipelago

In course of time more and more characteristics and new methods were employed in classifying human races, as a result of which more number of races and sub races were distinguished. Thus, in 1889 Deniker proposed to divide the humanity into 29 races according to hair form with nose form and skin colour as secondary traits. Later, scholars like Dixon, Haddon and Hooton used metric or quantitative traits like stature, cephalic index, and nasal index along with observable traits in classifying the world population into various groups. Each of these attempts to divide humankind differed in choosing the criteria for classification as well as in the number of categories and subcategories. If you take a casual survey of the classification undertaken on human population so far, no less than 14 different racial typologies would appear in your list. Most of them started with the major racial stocks mentioned by Linnaeus and Blumenbach, which they subdivided further into several subgroups.

Populational Model

Human history records many contacts between peoples from all areas of the world because of population migration or invasion. This led to the interbreeding among different population groups. On the basis of this paradigm, an outstanding development of the twentieth century has been the replacement of typological thinking with a populationist approach that takes into account the range of variability of our species and avoids a simple reliance on average means.

Population model of race is based on the premise of evolutionary principles to the of study human variation. The model conceives that people whose ancestors have more or less exclusively mated with each other over long periods of time will show great similarity with each other because the members of the breeding populations would be expected to share many genetically inherited traits and to have a similar appearance (Coon et al., 1950; O’Neil, 2010). The concept of ‘geographical race’ and ‘local race’ emerged from this premise. Garn divided the world population into 9 geographical races. Later, Coon, Garn and Birdsell made a finer subdivision of 30 local races, which Garn modified to 32 and Dobzhansky into 34. A local race is a breeding population adapted to local selection pressures and maintained by either natural or social barriers to gene interchange.

Definitions of race

Some definitions on races that came up in the mid of the 20th century were viewed from an evolutionary perspective and with an assumption about the role of geographic distribution in race formation and second on the importance of breeding populations in forming a collection of traits which sets the groups apart. Scholars such as Hooton, Dobzhansky and Garn in their definitions have explicitly mentioned that these breeding or Mendelian populations can change in time and are not like water tight compartments.

Hooton (1946) defined race ‘as a group whose members present individually identical combinations of specific physical characters that they owe to their common descent.’

Dobzansky (1944) said ‘Races are defined as populations differing in the incidence of certain genes, but actually exchanging or potentially able to exchange genes across whatever boundaries (usually geographic) separate them. He further added that race differences are objectively ascertainable facts; the number of races we choose to recognize is a matter of convenience (1962).’

Boyd (1950) defined race as a population which differs significantly from other human populations in regard to frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many gene loci we choose to consider as a significant ‘constellation’.

Some even defined races as populations which can be readily distinguished from another on genetic grounds alone (Hulse, 1963).

Mayr (1963) defined races in terms of subspecies saying ‘…a subspecies is an aggregate of local populations of a species, inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of a subspecies, and differing taxonomically from other populations of a species.

Baker (1967) while speaking on race concluded ‘race may be defined operationally as a rough measure of genetic distance in human populations and as such may function as an informational construct in the multidisciplinary area of research in human biology.

Brues (1977) defined race as ‘a division of a species which differs from other divisions by the frequency with which certain hereditary traits appear among its members.

The above definitions may show subtle differences, but at the same time the definitions exhibit certain commonalties like the role of geographic distribution in race formation and sharing of genetic trait among people who are related to each other through common ancestry, i.e. breeding population.

Clinal model

By the time of 1950s scholars were able to generate a large genetic data base of human groups distributed across the world. This made clear that a clinal model would more accurately reflects the true nature of human biological variation. This is the first model which did not attempt to compartmentalize human population into distinct groups. It says that closer the spatial distance between the human groups, the chance of mating with the neighboring groups increases compared to the ones who are distantly placed. Thus, the people whose ancestors have lived close to ours for many generations are more likely to share genetically inherited traits with us than are people who live further away. Further, the model states that genetically inherited traits most often gradually change in frequency from one geographical area to another. Thus, one can find different frequency zones, or clines for a particular genetic trait.

For example, the frequency of B blood allele generally increases from southeast and northeast Asia to central Asia. Within this more or less continuous cline, there are isolated pockets of relatively low B allele frequency. Therefore, the distribution of this genetically inherited trait appears to be mostly clinal but, in part, it is also discontinuous (O’Neil, 2010).

Source: http://anthro.palomar.edu/vary/vary_2.htm, retrieved on March 18, 2015

Molecular diversity

Richard Lewontin (1972) argued that the majority of human genetic variation (~85%) occurred within a given population opposed to between populations. This means (1) between group genetic variations represents little of the total genetic variation between any two individuals and (2) racial categories correspond poorly to underlying patterns of human genetic diversity. The concept challenged the biological validity of racial categories. The observation made by Lewontin was later endorsed through the findings of Human Genome Project that revealed all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99·9 percent the same. The sequencing of human genome (the full set of nuclear DNA), helped to estimate how often two individuals differ at a specific site in their DNA sequences — that is, whether they have a different nucleotide base pair at a specific location in their DNA. Geographical location, linguistic affinity or social proximity, endogamy reveals how close we are with our neighboring groups.

Richard Lewotin

It is believed that anatomically modern humans have migrated from Africa to other parts of the world around 100,000 years. In course of movement from one part of the world to the other, humans have left a distinct signature in their DNA (Bamshad and Olson 2003). The continued gene flow among populations reduced genetic differentiation among geographically distributed human populations unlike other mammalian species. Thus, at one point of time, all the members of our species were similar, but with time ethnic differentiation took place subsequently through a series of demographic expansions, geographic dispersal and social groupings. For example, the genetic diversity of indigenous human populations drops with increasing geographic distance from eastern Africa. One would expect this pattern if groups of migrants moving away from Africa carried with them just part of the genetic variation existing in Africa. Consistent with this picture, the broad patterns of genetic variation found outside Africa tend to be a subset of those found inside Africa (http://www.nchpeg.org/index).

Race and ethnic group

The terms ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘ancestry’ forms a network of biological and social connections that link individuals and groups to each other. This is to say that biological or genetic variation between  human groups becomes meaningful if we have an understanding about the historical factors. But, the race-based model that correlates some combination of alleles with behavioural traits is not acceptable (http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/09/02/new-paper-genetic-diversity-an/). Montague (1964) said ‘an ethnic group represents one of the number of populations, comprising the single species Home sapiens, which individually maintain their differences, physical and cultural, by means of isolating mechanisms such as geographic and social barriers. These differences will vary as the power of the geographic and social barriers acting upon the original genetic differences vary.’

The work of Frederik Barth in the 1970s emphasized that members of one ethnic group distinguish themselves from the members of other ethnic groups on the basis of a presumed common ancestry and shared cultural traits. As a consequence, the member of a particular ethnic group prefers to choose mate the same ethnic group (endogamy). For example, your immediate family members might have a preference of getting a life partner for you from their own ethnic group. This preference is generally given so that your life partner does not feel alienated from your kin members or vis-à-vis because of shared linguistic, cultural and religious affinity. The continuous preference towards endogamy might offer a biological entity to a particular ethnic group. However, these ethnic boundaries are not that rigid; an increase in cross cultural marriages could be a good example. Ethnic boundaries may take in different forms- cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic and so on (Heyer et al., 2009).

There is one common thing between the concept of race and ethnicity, i.e. shared common ancestry. Despite this similarity, there are some differences. First of all, race is primarily unitary. You can only have one race, while you can claim multiple ethnic affiliations. You can identify ethnically as Oriya and Indian, but for racial identity- you have to be essentially either black or white. Compared to the concept of ethnic group, race is hierarchical and there is a built-in inequality in power. Some are of the opinion that both ethnicity and race are socially constructed, and both are illusory and imagined. But racial categories have had a much more concrete impact on peoples’ lives, because they’ve been used to discriminate and to distribute resources unequally and set up different standards for protection under law (http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-experts-03-02.htm).

Ethnic affinities

How close we are with our neighboring ethnic groups? When people move from one place to another, as per human tendency, they try to adapt themselves to the new place. Over time, some of the migrants adopt the local language for better communication and, in turn, for better living. Thus, language shift is a phenomenon where a new language is adopted by a population with virtually no influence on their genetic make-up (Tamang and Thangaraj 2012).

Several studies have shown that the ethnic groups of India show striking similarities at DNA level. This corroborates with the hypothesis that a small number of females entered India during the initial process of the peopling of India. Later, dispersal of humans took place from India to southeast Asia. Molecular data also reveals that the ancestors of the present Austro-Asiatic tribal populations may have been the most ancient inhabitants of India and footprints of human movements from west and central Asia into India has been traced (Majumdar 2001).

Let us take an example from the Siddis community. It is believed that the Siddis were brought to India from Africa by the Portuguese traders between 17th and 10th century. These people were sold to the Nawabs and Sultans of India to serve as soldiers and slaves. The members possess typical African features like dark skin, curly hair, broad nose, and so on. At present the members of this community are found in the states of Gujarat, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Molecular evidence (Alu and mitochondrial DNA) confirmed the Siddis’ show 70% affinity with African and 30% with Indian and European). It has also been estimated that the Siddis have admixed with the neighboring Indian populations for about 200 years ago (eight generations) which coincides with historical record (Tamang and Thangaraj 2012).

Biological diversity is commonly associated with socially established categories, so that biological and cultural characteristics are often identified with one another. Duster (2003) proposed that instead of choosing only one of these two perspectives – race as biological or race as social – researchers need to recognize it as a biosocial construct, denying neither its biological nor its social attributes. Or one can say that race is the product of social and historical forces rather than being the result of biological, and ultimately genetic, factors.

Racism

Racism is based on the false belief that such factors as intellect and various cultural attributes like values and morality are inherited along with one’s physical characteristics like skin colour, nose form, and hair colour and so on. Such beliefs are based on the assumption that one group is superior to the other. Eugenic movement, notions of purity of races and persecution of people are the outcome of racism- a racial misconception. In the past, ‘leaders among European–Americans fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each ‘‘race’’, linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians’ (American Anthropological Association Statement on “Race” May 17, 1998). As such, anthropologists, from both the socio-cultural and biological/physical schools, have been instrumental in recasting those aspects of traditional Eurocentric ideology, which regarded racial groups as unalterable sub-species, in a new socio-political light

Against this backdrop, UNESCO in the year 1951, made a statement on race. The UNESCO statement on Race was drafted by a group of scholars from various disciplines like, Anthropology, Zoology, Genetics, and Biometry and so on. At the very outset of this statement, the Anthropologists have made it clear that ‘The concept of race is unanimously regarded by Anthropologists as a classificatory device providing a Zoological framework within which the various groups of mankind may be arranged’.

British-born anthropologist Ashley Montagu, a student of both Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, was among the first scientists to argue against the concept of race. He earned fame in the 1940s by arguing that race was a social construct, a product of perceptions, rather than a biological fact. Montague (1942) questioned the scientific validity of human races in his classic work, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Montagu also opposed anthropologist Carleton Coon’s notion that whites and blacks evolved along separate paths.

   Ashley Montague (1942)

Likewise, when Frank B. Livingstone wrote his chapter On the Nonexistence of Human Races in 1964, he criticized the utility of the race concept for explaining genetic variability, arguing that ‘if a population is X per cent Negro in one characteristic it must be X per cent in all characteristics for this [racial explanation of difference] to be an adequate explanation’. In fact, as Livingstone explained, genetic traits can often be discordant and ‘if two genes vary discordantly, the races set up on the basis of one do not describe the variability in the other’. He further suggested that instead of finding out differences between populations, more legitimate and fruitful approach is to understand patterns of biological variation across space. Such an approach would yield greater insight into the adaptive significance of human biological variation because environmental parameters that drive natural selection vary systematically across geographic space. To go by the words of Jacques Barzun (1965, pp 201) on racial classification “No argument has ever been advanced by any reasonable man against the fact of differences among men. The whole argument is about what difference exists and how they are to be gauged”. Thus, the use of the word ‘race’ has long been, and remains controversial and the anthropologists have never been comfortable with this topic.

Conclusion

At present the word ‘ethnic group’ is being used in defining a population. Despite this paradigm shift in the construct of race, the racist view of humanity has not changed. The outcome of this is ethnic violence, warfare, terrorism, and genocide which pose a threat to humanity.

Summary

• Classification of human population on the basis of physical and behavioral traits started during the 16th and 17th century.
• Later, typological model, base on the external morphological characteristics became the sole criteria for classification
• Populational model replaced typological model based on the premise of evolutionary principles to the of study human variation.
• Clinal model contested the Populational model- it states that genetically inherited traits most often gradually change in frequency from one geographical area to another.
• Molecular data provided more precise estimate of human migration and admixture.
• Finally, the concept of ethnic group emerged which distinguish members of one ethnic group from the other on the basis of a presumed common ancestry and shared cultural traits

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Web reference

• New Paper: Genetic Diversity and Emergence of Ethnic Group. http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/09/02/new-paper-genetic-diversity-an/, retrieved on August 14, 2014
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• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1253926/Racist-school-bus-drivers-ignoring-Muslim-girls-wear-hijab.html#ixzz35WUgavNF, retrieved on June 24, 2014