Caucasian race

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For the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains, see Peoples of the Caucasus.
For other uses of the term "Caucasian", see Caucasian.
The 4th edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (Leipzig, 1885-1890) shows the Caucasian race (in blue) as comprising Aryans, Semites and Hamites. Aryans are further subdivided into European Aryans and Indo-Aryans (the latter corresponding to the group now designated Indo-Iranians). Adjacent to the Caucasians are the Sudan-Negroes to the south (shown in brown), the Dravidians in India (shown in green) and Asians to the east (shown in yellow, subsuming the peoples now grouped under Ural-Altaic (light yellow) and Sino-Tibetan (solid yellow)).

The term Caucasian (or Caucasoid) race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the indigenous populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia.[1] Historically, the term has been used to describe the entire population of these regions, without regard necessarily to skin tone. In common use, the term is sometimes restricted to Europeans and other lighter-skinned populations within these areas, and may be considered equivalent to the varying definitions of white people.[2]

The concept of a Caucasian race was developed around 1800. Today some scholars reject the concept because human genome studies have not demonstrated a precise genetic definition of Caucasian.[3][4]

Contents

Origin of the concept

The concept of a Caucasian race or Varietas Caucasia was developed around 1800 by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist and classical anthropologist.[5][5] Blumenbach named it after the peoples of the Caucasus (from the Caucasus region), whom he considered to be the archetype for the grouping.[6] He based his classification of the Caucasian race primarily on craniology.[7] Blumenbach wrote:

"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 (birth place) of mankind."[8]

In physical anthropology

The Georgian skull Blumenbach discovered in 1795 to hypothesize origination of Europeans from the Caucasus.
Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) divides “Europäid” types into: Nordic, Dinaric, Mediterranean, Alpine, East Baltic, Turks, Bedouins, Afghans.

"Caucasoid race" is a term used in physical anthropology to refer to people of a certain range of anthropometric measurements.[9] 19th century classifications of the peoples of India considered the Dravidians of non-Caucasoid stock as Australoid or a separate Dravida race, and assumed a gradient of miscegenation of high-caste Caucasoid Aryans and indigenous Dravidians. Carleton S. Coon in his 1939 The Races of Europe classifies the Dravidians as Caucasoid as well, due to their "Caucasiod skull structure" and other physical traits (e.g. noses, eyes, hair). In his The Living Races of Man, Coon stated that "India is the easternmost outpost of the Caucasian racial region". Sarah A Tishkoff and Kenneth K Kidd state: "Despite disagreement among anthropologists, this classification remains in use by many researchers, as well as lay people."[10]

According to Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, the concept of race has been all but completely rejected by modern mainstream anthropology.[11] The United States National Library of Medicine has used the term "Caucasian" as a race in the past, but has discontinued its usage in favor of the term "European".[12] In the United Kingdom and Europe, the term "Caucasian" is mostly used to describe people from the Caucasus, although it may still be used as a racial classification.[13]

In the medical sciences

In the medical sciences, where response to pharmaceuticals and other treatment can vary dramatically based on ethnicity,[14][15] there is great debate as to whether racial categorizations as broad as Caucasian are medically valid.[16][17] Several journals (e.g. Nature Genetics, Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, and the British Medical Journal) have issued guidelines stating that researchers should carefully define their populations and avoid broad-based social constructions, due to the fact that these categories are more likely to be measuring differences in socioeconomic class and access to medical treatment that disproportionately affect minority groups, rather than "racial" differences.[18] Nevertheless, there are journals (e.g. the Journal of Garstroentorology and Hepatology and Kidney International) that continue to use poorly defined "racial" categories such as Caucasian.[19][14]

Usage in the United States

In the United States, the term Caucasian has been mainly used to describe a group commonly called White Americans, as defined by the government and Census Bureau.[20] Between 1917 and 1965, immigration to the US was restricted by a national origins quota. The Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) decided that Asian Indians – unlike Europeans and Middle Easterners – were Caucasian, but not white, because most laypeople did not consider them to be white people.[21]

Notes

  1. ^ The Races of Europe by Carlton Stevens Coon. From Chapter XI: The Mediterranean World - Introduction: "This third racial zone stretches from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence along the southern Mediterranean shores into Arabia, East Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Persian highlands; and across Afghanistan into India."
  2. ^ The Oxford English Dictionary defines Caucasoid as as noun or adjective meaning Of, pertaining to, or resembling the Caucasian race. It glosses Caucasian as "relating to a broad division of humankind covering peoples from Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia, and South Asia" or "white-skinned; of European origin".
  3. ^ Confusions About Human Races, R.C. Lewontin
  4. ^ The History and Geography of Human Genes By Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, Alberto Piazza
  5. ^ a b University of Pennsylvania Blumenbach
  6. ^ Oxford English Dictionary: "a name given by Blumenbach (a1800) to the ‘white’ race of mankind, which he derived from the region of the Caucasus."
  7. ^ Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, translated by Thomas Bendyshe. 1865. November 2, 2006.
  8. ^ Blumenbach , De generis humani varietate nativa (3rd ed. 1795), trans. Bendyshe (1865). Quoted e.g. in Arthur Keith, Blumenbach's Centenary, Man, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1940).
  9. ^ Reinhard, K.J., & Hastings, D. (Annual 2003) "Learning from the ancestors: the value of skeletal study".(study of ancestors of Omaha Tribe of Nebraska), American Journal of Physical Anthropology, p. 177(1)
  10. ^ Tishkoff SA, Kidd KK (November 2004). "Implications of biogeography of human populations for 'race' and medicine". Nat. Genet. 36 (11 Suppl): S21–7. doi:10.1038/ng1438. PMID 15507999. http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1438.html. 
  11. ^ Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, "Perishing Paradigm: Race—1931-99," American Anthropologist 105, no. 1 (2003): 110-13
  12. ^ "Other Notable MeSH Changes and Related Impact on Searching: Ethnic Groups and Geographic Origins". NLM Technical Bulletin 335 (Nov-Dec). 2003. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd03/nd03_med_data_changes.html. "The MeSH term Racial Stocks and its four children (Australoid Race, Caucasoid Race, Mongoloid Race, and Negroid Race) have been deleted from MeSH in 2004. A new heading, Continental Population Groups, has been created with new indentification that emphasize geography.". 
  13. ^ Katsiavriades, Kryss. Qureshi, Talaat. English Usage in the UK and USA. 1997. October 26, 2006.; see also Pearsell, Judy and Trumble, Bill (Eds) Oxford English Reference Dictionary. 2002.
  14. ^ a b York P C Pei, Celia M T Greenwood, Anne L Chery and George G Wu, "Racial differences in survival of patients on dialysis", Nature
  15. ^ "Study Shows Drug Resistance Varies by Race", Kate Wong, Scientific American
  16. ^ Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease, Neil Risch, Esteban Burchard, Elad Ziv, and Hua Tang
  17. ^ Genetic variation, classification and 'race', Lynn B Jorde & Stephen P Wooding
  18. ^ The Race, Ethnicity, and Genetics Working Group of the National Human Genome Research Institute (2005) "The Use of Racial, Ethnic, and Ancestral Categories in Human Genetics Research", American Journal of Human Genetics, 77(4): 519–532
  19. ^ "Ethnic and cultural determinants influence risk assessment for hepatitis C acquisition", Anouk Dev, Vijaya Sundararajan, William Sievert
  20. ^ Painter, p.[page needed]
  21. ^ "Not All Caucasians Are White: The Supreme Court Rejects Citizenship for Asian Indians", History Matters

References

Literature

  • Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1775) — the book that introduced the concept
  • Gould, Stephen Jay (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-01489-4.  — a history of the pseudoscience of race, skull measurements, and IQ inheritability
  • Piazza, Alberto; Cavalli-Sforza, L. L.; Menozzi, Paolo (1996). The history and geography of human genes. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02905-9.  — a major reference of modern population genetics
  • Cavalli-Sforza, LL (2000). Genes, peoples and languages. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9486-X. 
  • Augstein, HF (1999). "From the Land of the Bible to the Caucasus and Beyond". in Harris, Bernard; Ernst, Waltraud. Race, science and medicine, 1700–1960. New York: Routledge. pp. 58–79. ISBN 0-415-18152-6. 
  • Baum, Bruce (2006). The rise and fall of the Caucasian race: a political history of racial identity. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-9892-6. 
  • Guthrie, Paul (1999). The Making of the Whiteman: From the Original Man to the Whiteman. Chicago, IL: Research Associates School Times. ISBN 0-948390-49-2. 
  • Wolf, Eric R.; Cole, John N. (1999). The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21681-4. 

See also

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