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The Concept of Racein Contemporary

AnthropologyScott MacEachern, Bowdoin College

INTRODUCTION

What is race? First of all, “race” is a word, and like many words it has a variety of meanings.Some of these occur frequently in everyday life, as we talk about “the human race” or aboutAmerican “race relations.” Other meanings are used in government offices and forms, as whenAmericans note which of a number of races they belong to for the Census. Yet other meanings ofthe term “race” are more technical, when for example a biologist talks about different races of aparticular species of plant or animal. The meanings attached to this word “race” are different inall of these contexts, sometimes very different, but in everyday use we continually blur thedifferences between these meanings. This would be a recipe for confusion in any case but, giventhe history of this term “race” in the United States, the potentials for uncertainty and discord areespecially great in this country. “Race” is a loaded word in part because people use that word invery different ways but assume that they are talking about the same thing.

Anthropologists often use the word “race,” as well. One of the most important tasks ofanthropologists is the examination of the biological and cultural variability that exists withinhumanity. We look at the customs of societies in different parts of the world, seeking to find thecommon elements that define our shared existence and the differences that lend variety to our lives.We study the biological characteristics of different human populations, our relations with ourrelatives—the apes and monkeys, and the evolutionary history of our species. We use archaeologyto examine human prehistory. We examine the role that language plays in helping us define ourworlds—and we try to put all of this knowledge to use in the wider world around us.

Every human occupies a position in a complex of groups with different sizes, constructions,and purposes. These groups can include families, bands, villages, religious organizations,fraternities, tribes, companies, and nations. Our membership in these different sorts of groups

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Chapter 3 • The Concept of Race in Contemporary Anthropology 35

adds a vital structure to our lives, allowing us tolearn how to be human and placing us in a denseweb of relationships with family, work-mates,friends, strangers, and enemies. Anthropologistsstudy, among other things, how humans createthese groups. Questions of racial identification areextremely important in these interactions, and areespecially significant in modern, multiculturalsocieties. Given these investigations into thenature of human groups, we could expect thatanthropologists would have a lot to say about raceas it applies to human beings. After all, we mightargue that races are among the largest and mostinclusive of such human groups, and many peopleseem to base expectations of other people’sbehavior on their racial identities.

The study of human races has been animportant part of anthropology since its origin as aprofessional discipline in the nineteenth century(see Chapter 2). Physical anthropologists have inthe past studied the physical characteristics ofmembers of different races; archaeologists andpaleoanthropologists have studied human evolu-tion with the goal of identifying the origins ofthese races; and cultural anthropologists have stud-ied the ways that people use racial identificationsto control social interactions around the world.Anthropologists have certainly had a lot to sayabout human races, and the results of our researchsometimes reflect—and sometimes challenge—the various meanings given to this word “race” bynonanthropologists in the United States.

This chapter will summarize some of theconclusions of anthropological research onhuman races—on their origins, on the ways inwhich people have been identified with differentraces, and on the ways in which race can affectinteractions between individuals and groups.Anthropologists working within the differentsubfields of our discipline have differentconceptions of race and the meaning of racialidentifications, and like nonanthropologists theysometimes use the term without specifyingexactly what they mean. Among the questionsthat this chapter seeks to answer then, are: Whatare anthropologists talking about when they talkabout race, and are they always talking about the

same thing? Are there common elements in allanthropological usages of the term race, or arethese usages sometimes contradictory? Perhapsmost important, what are human races, and howdo they originate and function? This chapter willfocus on the biological concepts associatedwith race, and especially on the relationshipbetween biological and cultural definitions ofhuman races.

BIOLOGY AND CULTURE

Anthropologists consider the meaning of theword “race” in two different ways. First, physicalanthropologists look at the biological characteris-tics of human populations in different areas of theworld. They compare these populations to oneanother, with the goal of understanding the pat-terning of human biological variation. In the -nineteenth century, anthropologists studied theexternal features of people: their skin color, the color and configuration of their hair, theproportions of their limbs, the features of theirfaces and bodies. In the twentieth century, studiesof more subtle variation—of blood groups andantibody types, and most recently and more fun-damentally, of genetic material—has added newlevels of detail and complexity to that research.Physical anthropologists talk about the scales atwhich this human physical variation exists, fromtiny, local communities to groups found acrosswhole continents. Race for these anthropologistsimplies the existence of a number of fundamentalbiological populations into which all humans canbe sorted. This concept was a central part of stud-ies of humanity from their beginning almost twocenturies ago. The question before anthropolo-gists in this case is: do human races exist asbiological groupings, and if so what are theircharacteristics?

Other anthropologists, in their study ofhuman cultures and behavior, look at race from anentirely different perspective. In this case, theemphasis is not on the biological characteristics ofhuman populations, but rather on the ways inwhich people divide their social worlds intovarious groups of humans. In Europe and North

36 Chapter 3 • The Concept of Race in Contemporary Anthropology

America, these divisions have often used languagethat focused on physical and geographical differ-ences: “Black,” “White,” “Nordic,” “African,” andso on. Anthropologists have established thatingrained prejudices have often had far more to dowith these racial definitions than have the realphysical characteristics of people. “Race” in theseinvestigations by cultural anthropologists isconceived of as a cultural construction, not abiological fact. It is in reality a kind of ideology, away of thinking about, speaking about, and orga-nizing relationships among human groups: Who isyour friend, or enemy? Who is a neighbor, or aforeigner? This ideological understanding of racemay use the language of physical features whentalking about group differences, but biology is notfundamentally important to the ways that thesegroups are defined. The question before anthro-pologists in this case is: how and why do peopleuse cultural criteria to define human races, andhow have these definitions changed through time?

These two ways of thinking are obviouslyvery different. If race is examined as a biologicalconcept, then we must think about the physicalfeatures of humans, the external ones that we allcan see as well as our internal biologicaland genetic makeup. We would probably examinebiological races by seeking to trace theirevolutionary history over long periods of time,using data from genetics, from physicalanthropology, and from archaeology. If race isexamined as a cultural concept, then we mustthink about attitudes and cultural categories, ideasthat exist within people’s minds and that are actedupon in the real world. These attitudes and ideascan change very quickly indeed, so that we canprobably trace the evolution of cultural categoriesof race over much shorter time periods—cen-turies, or perhaps even decades. Our data willmostly be derived from cultural anthropology andhistorical research.

It is important to remember that the objectsof study—biologically defined races of humansand culturally defined racial categories ofhumans—are not the same in these differentapproaches. This means that the existence of onekind of race does not necessarily imply the

existence of the other. Biological races mightexist among humans, without having any culturalsignificance: if, for example, people were settledin one place and only saw neighbors who lookedjust like them, then their definitions of socialgroups would probably not include a racialcomponent. (This is a hard situation for us toimagine today, where we constantly see peoplefrom all around the world.) Similarly, peoplemay use language that talks about physicalfeatures to divide people up into races, but thatdoes not mean that membership in those racesare necessarily based on those physical features.We can see this in the United States by thinkingabout how many “whites” and “blacks” actuallyhave skin that is white or black in color. The factthat people talk about “race relations” in theUnited States today does not imply that thoseraces are real biological units, any more than thefact that people tell ghost stories implies thatghosts really exist.

For the most part, anthropologists examinerace from one or the other of these two perspec-tives, and only quite rarely do they mix them up.One important exception involves forensicanthropologists, who study human skeletalremains in order to provide information for legalproceedings—the sort of work we might watch onCSI or similar shows. These anthropologistsexamine skeletal remains carefully, gatheringdata on age at death, sex, stature, populationaffiliations, and a number of other possiblecharacteristics of the individual(s) who died.However, for that information to be used, theythen have to translate this information into theracial categories that are used by the police, thelegal system, and by members of the generalpublic. As we will see, this raises interestingquestion of the relations between biological andcultural conceptions of race. In the rest of thischapter, I will examine some of the evidence forthese different kinds of races, seeking to answer anumber of the questions that have been posedabove. I will pay particular attention to biologicalconcepts of race, because much of the evidencefor race as a cultural concept will be examined inother chapters of this textbook.


BACKGROUND OF THE TERM

The precise origin of the word “race” is unknown,but it seems to originate in a Latin root, ratio, witha meaning similar to terms like “species” or “kind”(of thing) (Smedley 1999:37–41). Five hundredyears ago, “race” was occasionally used in Englishto designate groups of humans marked by theircommon origins or shared characteristics, physicalor otherwise. Over the next 200 years, the wordwas increasingly used in English in ways similar towords like “group,” “nation,” “people,” and so on.This general meaning of the word “race” is more orless obsolete today. We still talk about “the humanrace,” but we almost never encounter people usingterms like “the race of Smith’s” or “the race ofbaseball players,” although such uses were fairlycommon 150 years ago.

Over the last two centuries, a morerestricted meaning of the word “race” has becomecommon in English. In this case, a race desig-nates one of a number of fundamental divisionswithin the human species. These races are usuallydescribed in biological terms, although peoplehave most often claimed that behavioral andcultural differences between races exist as well.The number of races identified according to thismeaning of the term has varied, but Europe,Africa, and Asia are often identified as thehomelands of three of these races, and people talkabout “Europeans” (or “Caucasoids”), “Africans”(or “Negroids”), and “Asians” (or “Mongoloids”)as if those three groups constitute fundamentalunits of humanity.

In North America today, this is the meaningthat the general public usually associates with theword “race”:

a. human races are extraordinarily important;b. they are based on biological differences;c. they are ancient and (relatively) unchanging;

andd. they are easily distinguishable from one

another.

Scientists, including anthropologists,contributed a great deal to the popularization of

this idea of human races through the nineteenthand early twentieth centuries. These scientistsgathered a great deal of data on human physicaldiversity and on the cultures of societies aroundthe world, but their interpretations were verymuch colored by their own prejudices. Theyfurnished what appeared to be support to thesebiological models of human races but, as a varietyof scholars have noted (Baker 1998; Barkan1992; Hannaford 1996; Jahoda 1998; Smedley1999), these researchers were themselves verymuch influenced by stereotypes of differentgroups and the relations between these groupsthat were pervasive in their own societies.

The history of scientific racism has beencovered in Chapter 2, but two things should bemade clear at this point. First, through muchof the history of anthropological studies of humanraces, such studies were concerned withhierarchy and not only with classification.Scientists who compared human populationsfrom different areas of the world were trying todistinguish such populations from one another,but they usually ranked these groups with refer-ence to one another as well. Such rankings mightbe based on notions of intellectual superiority andinferiority, of savagery and civilization, of greaterand lesser degrees of evolution, but they havealmost always placed Europeans (almost alwaysupper- and middle-class European males) at thepinnacle of human development. Africans,Asians, Native Americans, and other people hadto be content with lower rankings, at varyingdistances from those “superior” specimens ofhumanity.

Many of these scientists had never had anycontact with the people who they described intheir writings and when they did, these peoplefrom other parts of the world were most oftenservants, slaves, or objects of curiosity. Perhapsthe ultimate expression of these prejudices wasthe concept of polygenesis, which held that thehuman races actually had originated and evolvedseparately from one another—that Africans,Europeans, and Asians were, in fact, separatespecies. Such a theory seems absurd to us today,with so much more known about human


evolution and with the concept of a species as abiological population that can interbreed acceptedas commonplace. At a time when evolution wasnot well understood and when bigotry againstnon-Europeans was nearly universal, polygenesisseemed a reasonable theory of human origins anddevelopment.

These studies frequently mixed up bio-logical, behavioral, and cultural characteristicswhen defining human races, just as nonscientistscontinue to do today. In the middle of the eigh-teenth century, Carolus Linnaeus defined thedifferent races not only upon their physicalfeatures (skin and eye color, type of hair, and soon) and their temperaments (melancholy, lazy,timid, and so on), but also by the type of clothesthey wore and the characteristics of theirgovernments. The latter are cultural characteristics,and—as we know—very subject to change. Suchan approach can cause people to mistake more orless transitory cultural influences, characteristicsthat exist for a short period because of the environ-ment that people are brought up in, for permanentbiological characteristics.

We may, for example, laugh at Linnaeusfor trying to define races based on whetherpeople wear loose or tight clothing. However,we run the same risk today when, for example,we think of people of African descent as“natural athletes.” A century ago, Africans andAfrican Americans were excluded from manyathletic competitions and considered simplyincapable of playing many sports; today, thegrandchildren and great-grandchildren of thesepeople excel in sports around the world. Thereis nothing “natural”—that is, biological—in thecultural changes that have accompanied thistransformation in athletic success. We have totry and keep biological and cultural influencesentirely separate when we evaluate whethersuch population units exist.

BIOLOGICAL RACES

Advocates of “scientific” racialism sometimesclaim that questioning the existence of biologicalraces is the same as denying the existence of

biological variation among human beings. This isnonsense. Everyone, including anthropologists,knows that biological variation exists. I resemblemy brothers and sister in some ways, but there aremany physical features that distinguish us. Malesand females, and old people and young people, dif-fer physically in a variety of very significant char-acteristics—and these differences are predictable.We can make a reasonable guess about whethersomeone we see in the street comes from Norwayor Italy, or whether they are Moroccan orSenegalese, although there is often a good chanceof making a mistake in such cases. We recognizethat populations of Nuer people from the Sudan areon average much taller than are Mayan peoplefrom Guatemala. No one would argue that each of6 billion human beings is a member of his or herown private race, or that I belong to a different racethan does my daughter because I am 48 and maleand she is 16 and female, or that 6-footers belongto a different race than do people who are 5 feettall. If the term “race” is to have any meaningwithin anthropology at all, it must involve some-thing more exact than just physical difference.

The primary questions remain, then: howdo physical anthropologists define races, andwhat criteria have they used to define them? Howmany human races have been defined? What arethe origins of such human races?

The answers to these questions depend verymuch on the definitions of “race” that researchershave used when investigating human biologicaldifferences. This is a difficult problem, becauseraces are not precisely defined within biology as awhole. The species is the fundamental unit ofevolution, characterized by the ability of mem-bers of one species to successfully interbreed andthus to share genetic innovations and adaptations.There are, however, no such clearly defined unitsbelow the level of the species, and it is unclearhow researchers should divide species up intosubunits—including races. Thus, Ernst Mayr(1963:453–460) notes that a whole variety ofdifferent kinds of biological populations havebeen identified as races, and that these differentkinds of populations vary considerably in theircharacteristics.


There have been approximately as manyanthropological definitions of races as therehave been physical anthropologists who havestudied the question, but we can divide suchdefinitions up into three types, one of which isnow entirely obsolete. Polygenicists thought ofpopulations originating in different areas of theworld—Africans, Europeans, Asians, and soon—as different species of humanity, each withtheir own origins and with limited abilities tointerbreed. Africans and Native Americanswere even at various times described as speciesintermediate between “real” humans and apes(Jahoda 1998:75–76). This claim stemmed ingreat part from the vicious bigotry toward theseother people that many Europeans andEuropean Americans held in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. It would be comforting ifwe could dismiss polygenesis as a fantasy of thenineteenth century, but the well-known Britishgeneticist and racist Reginald Ruggles Gates(1948:366) still claimed that Africans, Asians,and Europeans were different species in a bookpublished just after World War II. Traces ofpolygenesis are still to be found in the writingsof racist organizations today, but no reputableanthropologist believes that such theories haveany connection with reality at all.

More recently anthropologists haveconceived of human race in one of two differentways. Some researchers have conceived ofbiological races as well-defined, stable types ofhuman beings—real biological groups in and ofthemselves. We could also call this a subspeciesmodel, because it implies that races in humans arewhat we would call subspecies among animals:populations that are isolated from one another andsomewhat different, but not so much so that theyhave lost the capability to interbreed (Futuyama1986:107–109). Other physical anthropologists, incontrast, have conceived of races as simpleexpressions of difference in the physical featuresof different populations of people. In this case, anygroup of humans that can be differentiated fromother groups based on some physical characteris-tic or characteristics can be considered a race. Apossible alternative term for this second definition

would be a statistical model of human races,because it depends on the statistical distribution ofphysical features within and between differenthuman groupings. There is no expectation ofisolation or significant difference between thesepopulations in this case.

The difference between these two conceptsis one of degree, not of kind. At the same time,these typological and population models tend toyield different views of human biologicalvariability, and they are subject to different sortsof criticisms.

Races as Types

. . . A race is a great division of mankind,the members of which, though individuallyvarying, are characterized as a group by acertain combination of morphological andmetrical features . . . which have beenderived from their common descent . . .[Hooton 1946:446]

Many anthropologists have in the past claimedthat there exist (or existed) a limited number ofgeographically distinct groupings of humans,each of these groups possessing a more or lesswell-defined set of physical characteristics, andhave called these types human races. These racesare often linked with a particular continent,although their territories are not in fact contigu-ous with continents. These researchers havebelieved that these human races occupied thesedifferent parts of the world through very longperiods of time, and that they evolved theirunique physical characteristics as adaptations tothe particular environments of these regions.Thus, “Negroids” evolved in sub-Saharan Africa,and a number of physical features—dark skin,everted lips, tightly curled hair, a long skull, andso on—are characteristic of Negroid populationsand adaptations to African environments.Similarly, “Caucasoids” (Europeans, but alsopeople living in North Africa, the Middle East,and parts of Asia) evolved somewhere in Eurasiaand a limited number of physical features—light-colored skin, noneverted lips, straight or curled


hair, a narrow nose, and so on—are bothcharacteristic of “Caucasoid” populations andadaptations to the environments where the“Caucasoid” race evolved (wherever that mighthave been). The same would be the case for“Mongoloid” populations, supposedly associatedwith Asia and sometimes with the Americas.

There are two important characteristics ofthis model, and these two characteristics areclosely related. First, this model is geographical.Each race is associated with a particular regionof the world, where it is supposed to havedeveloped in relative isolation and in adaptationto the particular environments of that region.Geographical isolation is often important inbiological definitions of subspecies, populationsof a single biological species that have beenisolated from one another by some geographicalbarrier that prevents interbreeding. This geneticisolation might eventually lead to the separationof the two subspecies into separate species. Thishas not, of course, happened with humans.

Second, this model of human races viewssuch races as real biological types. As noted,these different fundamental types of humanity areheld to have evolved over very long times in thegeographical heartlands of each race. Thus, eachrace is relatively stable and long-lived, withboundaries that were in ancient times compara-tively easy to define—although they may havebecome rather more blurred in recent times. Eachrace also has a set of distinctive and essentialcharacteristics, physical adaptations to theparticular environments of the regions where thatrace evolved. The humans belonging to anyparticular race share this set of characteristics,although they may be expressed differently ineach individual. The racial identity of everyhuman is then supposed to be detectable throughan examination of these characteristics. Moregenerally, the different features of humans withinone race are supposed to occur together: we maythink of a race as a well-defined group of peoplesharing a well-defined group of traits.

In the most extreme of these typologicaltheories, race is conceived almost as a substance,the essence of a group of people, which in pure

form or when intermixed determines thecharacteristics of any individual. Joseph Deniker(1912:8) writes of race as “ . . . once met with in areal union of individuals, now scattered infragments of varying proportions among severalethnic groups, from which it can no longer bedifferentiated except through a process of delicateanalysis.” This view often led anthropologists tothe conclusion that “pure races” had existed in thepast, but that the migrations, conquests, andcolonizations that we know of through recordedhistory had resulted in the disappearance of these“pure races” through admixture. Biological raceis then an almost purely abstract concept, andhas very little to do with the actual physicalcharacteristics of humans.

Human races conceived of as subspecieswould have a number of specific features, and wecan look for those features as we try to decidewhether these models are realistic. First, if racesdeveloped more or less in isolation, then theboundaries between those races will be relativelyclear-cut and generally will fall along the obstacles(deserts, oceans, mountain ranges, and so on)that divide them. It is of course possible that morerecent population movements would have obscuredsuch clear boundaries. Second, the essential charac-teristics of each race would be widely shared,because these characteristics would be adaptiveresponses to the environmental conditions withinwhich each race evolved. Third, we would expectthat the processes of isolation, adaptation, anddifferentiation that generate races would yield afairly consistent hierarchy of such races throughtime. If human races are essentially subspecies, wecould expect that races are relatively well-defined,stable entities, and that their definition and analysisshould be a fairly straightforward process.

How well do these implications match upagainst real human variability? We can draw ondata from physical anthropology, genetics,geography, and archaeology to look at thisissue. What we find is just the opposite ofthis well-ordered model. We find that thepopulations identified by researchers as humanraces have been extremely variable, that there isa huge amount of disagreement about their


characteristics, and that even their associationswith particular regions and sorts of environ-ments are often quite weak.

Perhaps the most basic question that we canask is simply: how many human races are there?Answers to this question have been very diverseindeed. Many researchers have identified three -primary human races—the “Negroid,”“Caucasoid,” and “Mongoloid” races notedabove—although sometimes using differentand/or overlapping terms (see for exampleHooton 1946:569; Bean 1926; von Eickstedt1950:496). This definition seems to originate inthe popular typologies of race that have beenestablished in Europe and North America sincethe nineteenth century. As European andAmerican knowledge of other parts of the worldgrew, other populations were either fit into one ofthese three categories, or put forward asindependent races. Thus, a variety of aboriginalpeoples living in South and Southeast Asia werelumped together as “Negritos” and either classi-fied as part of the “Negroid” race (which assumesthat they came there from Africa at some time inthe past) or as a separate “‘Negrito” race.Australian Aboriginal people were frequentlyclassified as a separate race (“Australoids”),sometimes alongside populations from NewGuinea and sometimes not. Pacific Island groupswere sometimes classified as “Mongoloids,”sometimes as “Australoids,” and sometimes astheir own race. Anthropologists established abewildering variety of classification systems inorder to divide humanity into races and subraces,major and minor races, and so on. Hooton(1946:575–650), for example, identified three“primary” and about 20 “secondary” races ofdifferent sorts. The geneticist William Boyd iden-tified six races in Genetics and the Races of Man(Boyd 1950), but increased this number to 13some years later (Boyd 1968). Keith(1948:235–244) identified two basic humangroups, races in all but name. In 1950, three otherwell-known researchers (Coon et al. 1950) identi-fied 30 human races. Coon (1965:7) himself lateridentified “ . . . five full-sized subspecies and . . .two dwarfed subspecies” of modern humans, and

called these “subspecies” races. Differentresearchers have at one point or another identifiedbetween 2 and 200 of these “fundamental” humangroups (Garn and Coon 1968:9). Not only that,these elaborate classifications conflict with oneanother, in the number of races identified, in thecharacteristics of particular races, and in theracial affiliations of particular peoples.

Paralleling this question of race number isa question of geography: do the boundariesbetween races correlate with barriers to humaninteraction, which might isolate them? In fact, inmany cases there is no correlation between raceand geographical boundaries. Perhaps the moststriking example is on the continents of Europeand Asia, where the two races known asMongoloids and Caucasoids are supposed tohave evolved. The boundary between Europeand Asia is more or less theoretical, since bothcontinents are part of a single landmass, usuallycalled Eurasia. No substantial barrier to humaninteraction exists between Europe and Asia, aswe can see from the ancient presence in CentralAsia of people speaking Tocharian languages,related to English and other Indo-Europeanlanguages (Adams 1984), and of Asian geneticcontributions to populations in NorthwesternEurope (Zerjal et al. 1997). If “Caucasoids” and “Mongoloids” really evolved in isolation,what factors were enforcing that isolationbetween them?

The geographical origin of the “Negroidrace” may seem more clear-cut: after all, Africa isa continent mostly surrounded by oceans andseas. However, northern Africa is inhabited bypeople traditionally referred to as “Caucasoids”(like Europeans), but “Caucasoids” indigenous toAfrica. These are primarily Berber-speakingpeoples. The geographical factor enforcingisolation in the African case is supposed to be theSahara Desert, and “Negroids” are supposed tohave evolved in the tropical lands south of theSahara. Yet, even this is not as clear-cut as wemight think, because the Sahara is not apermanent feature of the African landscape.Eighteen thousand years ago, it was larger anddrier than it is now, but by 9,000 years ago the


desert had disappeared, replaced by grasslandsand inhabited by large numbers of people. At thatpoint, it was a fertile corridor between theMediterranean and equatorial Africa, not a barrierto interaction. Such conditions had existed inearlier times, as well, as did corridors along theNile Valley (van Peer 1998) and between Ethiopiaand Arabia.

The isolation mechanisms associated withraces in other areas of the world are equallyobscure. We might think about AustralianAboriginal people as isolated on that islandcontinent, but with the drastically lowered sealevels of the last Ice Age Australia and NewGuinea were one land mass, called Sahul. Thisisland continent was separated from mainlandAsia by quite narrow areas of open water, andAustralia was settled by at least 35,000 yearsago. The first unequivocal evidence of open-ocean voyaging, from about 25,000 years ago,comes from the Solomon Islands off the eastcoast of New Guinea (Wickler and Spriggs1988). Such seafaring culminated in the expan-sion of Austronesian populations to occupyislands as far apart as Madagascar and Hawaiiover the last few thousand years. Further to thenorth, peoples from Asia entered the Americas atsome point during the last Ice Age. Theprocesses by which the ancestors of NativeAmericans occupied the New World are not wellunderstood today, but there is some evidence formultiple immigrations in to (and possible out of)the continent over the last 10,000 years(Greenberg et al. 1986; Kozintsev et al. 1999;Starikovskaya et al. 1998). Alaska and Siberiaare not, after all, very far apart.

In all of these cases, we could probablycome up with some sort of speculations aboutancient populations being isolated at particulartimes and evolving into the ancestors of modernraces. However, we would have to test suchspeculations, and no one has ever confirmed anysuch ideas about how races were formed. Whenexamination of skeletons more than a fewthousand years old is undertaken, what we oftensee is that the characteristics of such skeletons donot fit any modern race, that they are in fact

sometimes subtly and sometimes drasticallydissimilar to the skeletons of modern peoples(see, for example, Henneberg 1988; Ozolins et al.1997; Powell and Rose 1999). This indicates that,skeletally at least, the modern races thatresearchers have talked about are not ancientsubdivisions of humanity, but rather fairly recentconfigurations of the human body in response tochanging selection pressures, which can beenvironmental and/or cultural.

More generally, the archaeological infor-mation we have all points to one overriding fact:human beings are travelers, and we have been sofor a long time. Our ancestors could not jump onan airplane and travel thousands of miles in a day,but over centuries and millennia they graduallychanged their territories, they encountered newpeoples, and sometimes they went on voyages ofexploration and migration that covered substan-tial distances. They moved around a lot, overlonger distances than we often think, and theydeveloped the technologies necessary for suchmovement further back in prehistory than wesometimes expect. If that is the case, then wherewould the isolation necessary for race develop-ment take place? We do know of a very fewpopulations that seem to have been isolated forlong periods of time. Tasmanian Aboriginalpeople seem to have been isolated on that islandthrough most of the last 10,000 years, forexample (Pardoe 1991), but such small groups areusually not considered as separate races ofhumans. Some supporters of typological racemodels recognized that the geographical isolationdemanded by these models did not exist in thepast (see, for example, Coon 1965:29–30) andinstead invoke cultural barriers to such contactbetween human communities. This explanation iseven less convincing than that of geographicalbarriers: what kind of differences in culturewould isolate people from their neighbors for notmerely centuries, but thousands of years?

This constant human movement has left itstraces in one fundamental element of our physicalbeings: our genes. Humans are quite homogeneousgenetically, which is certainly due in great part tothe constant interaction between populations in


different regions. All six and a half billion of us,spread across the continents and islands of theentire world, contain within ourselves somewhatless genetic variation than do small populations ofchimpanzees living in different parts of CentralAfrica (Becquet et al. 2007). Genetic diversitybetween human populations is low compared tothat of other large mammal species that are spreadover large areas of the world, or indeed comparedto those found in quite small areas (Templeton1999:182). When we compare the geneticvariability among human populations to that ofsubspecies in many other large mammal species,we see again that these animal subspecies are moredifferent from one another than are the most distantof human groups.

These genetic studies have also substanti-ated earlier work on human populations, whichindicated that the biological characteristics ofracial groups do not covary. Recall that if racesoriginated in the adaptation of isolated humanpopulations to particular environments, we wouldexpect to see a set of characteristics shared bymembers of that particular race but considerablymore rare outside of that group. These traits wouldderive from varying combinations of adaptationsto those environments, descent from commonancestors, and/or mutations that appeared in theisolated racial group. Biologically, members of aparticular race would, in that case, share a fairlywell-defined bundle of biological traits, bothexternally visible and invisible. These mightinclude combinations of traits for particular skincolor, hair type, facial features, blood types,genetic markers, and so on. The boundaries ofthat race’s territory would be comparativelyabrupt, although possibly somewhat blurred byinteractions and exchange of genetic material withneighboring communities of other races.

This is not what we see when we examinehuman groups. The various characteristics ofhuman populations do not form such nicely definedsets, and that characteristics that we think of aslimited to one race are often far more widelyshared. Thus, dark skin color is not only often takenas distinctive of “Negroid” peoples originating inAfrica, but is also found among “Caucasoid”

populations in South Asia and “Mongoloid”and “Australoid” groups in the Pacific. Recent,large-scale surveys of the genetic characteristics ofhuman populations in different parts of the worldshowed a very complex set of relationships,probably traceable to many episodes of long-dis-tance migration and more local populationmixture—but no evidence for continental humanraces (Hunley et al. 2009; Tishkoff and Kidd 2004).Furthermore, the distributions of these geneticcharacteristics are not very concordant: knowingthe distribution of one feature tells researchers quitelittle about the distributions of others. We see anextraordinary variety in biological features amongpopulations grouped together in particular races,and significant similarities between neighboringpopulations across what are supposed to be racialboundaries.

As C. Loring Brace (2000) has noted, ourperceptions of human racial variation isconditioned by the ways we see people in differentparts of the world. Today, we can look at picturesof people from Stockholm, Lagos, and Bangkok,and we see that they tend to be physically verydifferent. Centuries ago, European explorers andmerchants sailed around the world, but theencounters they had with different populationswere in many ways similar to our modern,electronic voyages; they simply took more time tomove from port to port. However, the very factthat such voyages move from one point to a distantpoint means that travelers do not see the gradientsof difference that separate these places. If a personcould walk from Lagos to Stockholm, or toBangkok, they would see a progressively shiftingspectrum of physical characteristics, reflecting theconstant interactions between neighboringcommunities through many thousands of years.These interactions yield biological relationshipsbetween populations that are complex, and thatare often clinal (Livingstone 1962; Serre andPaabo 2004): that is, there is a gradual transition incharacteristics between the groups involved, notany sort of sudden racial boundary between them.

If our hypothetical traveler could lookbeneath the skin of the people she met, at theirblood types, at the forms that their proteins


take, and at their genetic material itself, thesituation would become even more complex.Humans have historically grouped people intoraces on the basis of visible characteristics, butof course there is no reason to exclude theseother, invisible but equally fundamental traitswhen we think about dividing humans intogroups. Human groups defined on the basis ofthese invisible traits in many cases do not,however, resemble races defined on the basis ofexternal characteristics. Plots of the frequenciesof blood types will in some cases groupparticular populations of Native Americanswith Australian Aborigines, and sub-SaharanAfricans with Central Asians. Similar plots forparticular variants of the Rh blood system willgroup Africans with Southeast Asians, withNative Americans intermediate. The gene forlactose absorption links Europeans with Africanpastoral groups, while the hemoglobin Smutation is found in West and Central Africa,Saudi Arabia, and South Asia (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). Other examples of such connec-tions and similarities across traditional racialboundaries are very common. Furthermore, thelevel of distinction at which humans areclassified into different groups, racial orotherwise, is arbitrary (Cavalli-Sforza et al.1994:19). We could, using the same geneticdata, claim that there are 2, or 3, or 5, or 9, or 21“races”—and none of those reconstructionswould be more or less valid than any others.The authors of this research are not, needless tosay, believers in the reality of human races.

The conclusion seems obvious. Whateverraces might be, they are not fundamentalbiological types of humanity. The clinal nature ofhuman biological traits, the relative genetichomogeneity of humans, and the archaeologicalevidence for ancient human population contactsdo not reflect the existence of ancient populationisolates over the periods when races were suppos-edly developing. The lack of concordance ofhuman biological characteristics does not indicatelong-term adaptation of such isolated racialgroups to particular original environments. Weshould remember that this is not a denial that

human biological variation exists: it obviouslydoes. However, the scope of human physicalvariation is far too complex to be accommodatedwithin simplistic typological race models.

Races as Populations

A race is: a division of a species whichdiffers from other divisions by the frequencywith which certain hereditary traits appearamong its members. [Brues 1977:1]

Typological models of race are still common inthe United States, but anthropologists havedeveloped more sophisticated models of humanbiological variation. In some cases, however, theterm “race” is still used for these systems. Suchmodels define human races as groups of humansthat can be distinguished from other groupsbased on the frequency of some heritable charac-teristic(s)—as distinct biological populations.For example, elevated frequencies of red hair,fair skin, and freckles (if such exist) might allowanthropologists to define an “Irish race”; shortstature, epicanthic folds, extreme hair curvature,and steatopygia might allow the definition of a“Khoisan race”; and straight dark hair, dark eyes,epicanthic folds, and comparatively short armand leg length might allow the definition of an“Eskimo race.” A huge number of suchpopulations might exist, and the features used todefine them do not have to be externally visible.The elevated frequency of Tays-Sachs Syndromeand Gaucher’s disease among Ashkenazi Jewishpopulations (O’Brien 1999), or of the MNS*M,HLAB*18 and b39-thalassemia alleles (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994:274) among Sardinians, wouldhelp define those populations as a “Jewish race”and a “Sardinian race,” respectively. The suntansfound among Australians of Europeandescent are the result of particular behaviors, notheredity, and so we could not define an“Australian race” on that basis—at least untilsuch behaviors have resulted in natural selectionfor resistance to skin cancer on that continent.

This is a very different concept of humanraces than that seen in the typological models


discussed above. It does not involve assumptionsabout the origins of races in isolated ancestralpopulations, or about the stability, age, and internalhomogeneity of those groups. Stanley Garn(1971:6) notes that “A race is a race whether it goesback unchanged for six millennia or whether itresulted from admixture after 1850.” Populationmodels of racial variability locate the definition ofraces primarily in the perceptions and goals of theobserver: what is the purpose of looking for “race,”and what choice of characteristics will best suitthat purpose? For this reason, research can beundertaken at many different levels of detail, and asingle biological characteristic might be used todefine different races for different purposes! Ingeneral, advocates of population models of raceare less interested in detecting primordial types ofhumans than they are in examining the processesby which human populations become differentfrom or assimilated to one another.

The definition of human races in popula-tion models is to some degree instrumental: onedefines races in order to do things. (Of course,people have often identified typological races inorder to do things as well—to study humanvariability or to justify racism, for example—butthe assumption in those cases was that theraces under study were primordial.) Researchersexamine human variability in order toinvestigate particular phylogenetic, biological,historical, or even medical problems. Why doBasque populations have very unusual Rh bloodgroup distributions and somewhat unusual headshapes? What accounts for the elevated levels ofbreast cancer among some Jewish populations,and how might knowledge of that fact be used inearly detection and treatment? Why do Inuit andNilotic peoples have proportionally differentlimb lengths? Why do African American mentend to have greater frequencies of high bloodpressure? The varying questions asked byresearchers will drastically affect both the levelof detail of the racial definition and thecharacteristics under examination.

Garn (1971:15–26) and Brues (1977:2), twoof the most influential American advocates ofpopulation models of races, have both emphasized

the hierarchical nature of their race definitions:researchers can define racial groupings at a varietyof population levels, from the most general andwidespread to the most specific and localized,depending on the goals of their work. An anthro-pologist might in some cases study “Caucasoids”as a major race, but could also subdivide thatgrouping and compare “European” and “SouthAsian” races, and in still other research might lookwithin Europe at the differences between, perhaps,“Italian” and “Polish” races. Garn (1971) makesthis hierarchy very explicit. He identified nine“geographical races,” including “Amerindian,”“African,” “Melanesian-Papuan,” and “European,”each of which is found over a significant area ofthe Earth. Within each “geographical race” is anumber of “local races,” including, for example,“Northwest European,” “Northeast European,”“Alpine,” and “Mediterranean” groups withinEurope. Garn (1971:168) claims that these “localraces” are true units of evolutionary change,and that thousands of “local races” exist. Withineach “local race” are again many “micro-races,”which correspond essentially to any communitiesbetween which physical and/or genetic differencecan be detected. There would presumably be tensor hundreds of thousands of such “micro-races” inthe world today.

Population definitions of race escapemany of the criticisms that can be directed attypological definitions of race. They make noassumptions about the primordial nature ofhuman races, or about the degree of theirisolation from one another, or about the limitedset of essential characteristics that typologicaldefinitions of race require. Races are conceivedof simply as the continuing results of populationinteraction, gene flow and interruption of geneflow, and adaptation, rather than as distillationsof ancient racial essences. Disagreementsbetween racial identifications made by differentresearchers are less important, if those identifi-cations are made only in order to do particularkinds of research.

At the same time, there are different problemsassociated with population models of race, and theseneed to be examined. First, the relationships


between different levels of the racial hierarchies inpopulation models are often not particularly clear.According to Garn’s definitions, “local races” aretrue units of evolutionary change, corresponding tohuman breeding populations. In that case, itbecomes difficult to say exactly what kind of units“geographical races” and “micro-races” actuallyare. “Geographical races” correspond to the majorcontinents and island chains (Garn 1971:18), andtheir distinctiveness is supposed to be caused bygeographical barriers to gene flow between humancommunities. At the same time, four of the nine“geographical races” (the “Asian,” “Polynesian,”“Melanesian-Papuan,” and “Micronesian” races) arescattered across island chains, which is itselfevidence of the human ability to cross geographicalbarriers. Garn’s “geographical races” seem to belittle more than relics of earlier typological classifi-cation systems. “Micro-races” would presumably bethe result of restrictions in gene flow within “localraces,” which calls into question the status of thelatter as fundamental evolutionary units.

Second, the characteristics used to defineraces are frequently difficult to determine.Population models of race tend to rely on arestricted list of traits for the definition of eachracial unit, just as typological models do. Whychoose those particular traits instead of the manyother traits that each of us humans possesses? AsI said, these traits can indeed be chosen accordingto the objectives of a particular research project—sickle-cell trait when looking at adaptations tomalaria, limb length and cold adaptations, and soon—but the racial models advanced by Garn,Brues, and other anthropologists are supposed tobe general descriptions of human variability.There is little discussion in these works about thereasons for giving priority to some traits and notothers when defining races, especially at largegeographical scales. Garn (1971:169–178) givesexamples of a variety of “large local races”that are defined according to a stew of physical,genetic, linguistic, religious, regional, andtraditional criteria, with no real indication of whythese definitions are most important.

Third, definitions of “race” that just call forthe presence of some difference in trait frequencies

between human groups also risk extending the raceconcept to impossibly local levels. In principle,races would be identifiable in any cases where anydifferences in biological characteristics—evenextremely minor changes in gene frequencies—exist between any groups of people. We can easilyimagine a situation where people living in aparticular district or neighborhood might displayvery minor differences in trait frequencies, and sowould be called a separate “race.” Such minordifferences are also the basis of many folk typolo-gies. These are informal classification systemsused in various parts of the world to assign peopleto particular groups. Thus, in the Cape VerdeIslands off the west coast of Africa, a complex folkclassification links particular islands and theirtraditions of European contact with particularphysical and behavioral characteristics (L. DeAndrade, personal communication, 2000). Thepeople of Sao Vincente, for example, are believedto have dark skin, black and very straight hair, andsharp facial features, as a result of the intermar-riage of West Africans with people from Portugaland England, while people from Brava are ruddy-skinned and fair-haired because of Frenchsettlement on that island. At the most detailedlevels of analysis, the boundary between “micro-races” and such folk typologies begin to blur: if“races” are to be defined on the basis of theirdetectability, then are such folk typologiessupposed to define races as well?

Populational models of race can designateany biological population, from continental tolocal, as races. However, this definition of “race”is so far from common understandings and fromearlier anthropological definitions of the termthat it risks causing a great deal of confusion.The idea that people living in a single neighbor-hood of a single town might be defined as a“race” implies that hundreds of thousands (ormillions) of other “races” exist in the worldtoday. As we have seen, previous anthropologicalusage, and continuing popular use in NorthAmerica, involves typological definitions of“race” that are very different indeed from thesedefinitions that designate any distinct humanpopulation as a separate race—so should we use


the same word “race” for both definitions? Theprecision required of scientific research demandsthe use of correspondingly precise terminologies.From this point of view, anthropologistsshould not use the term “race” as a synonym forbiological populations.

INTERSECTIONS OF RACE, CULTURE,AND HISTORY

Biological variability among humans certainlyexists, as anyone can see. Peoples in differentareas of the world differ in vastly differentways. Moreover, anthropologists and biologistscan group humans into populations on the basisof a variety of physical and genetic features. Onthe other hand, no rule says that we have to callsuch populations “races,” or that we have to usethe term “race” at all in any biological sense.The history of science is full of terms that havebecome obsolete, because the theories behindthem were proven false. Three centuries ago,chemists wrote about “phlogiston,” which wasthought to be a kind of essence of fire,contained within all substances that burn andreleased upon burning. Researchers eventuallylearned that no such substance existed, and theystopped using the term “phlogiston.” A centuryago, physicists used the term “aether” to denotea substance that permeated the entire universeand provided the medium through which lightwaves propagated, much as sound waves movethrough air or water. Researchers eventuallylearned that this was an inaccurate explanationof the properties of space, and they stoppedusing the term “aether”. Sentimental attachmentto an ancient term did not save either “phlogis-ton” or “aether,” and so these terms were notreused to describe the scientific concepts thateventually replaced them. From a biologicalpoint of view, “race” appears to be another oneof those terms whose time has passed, ripe forreplacement by words that carry less, and lesspernicious, historical baggage. In fact, oneresearcher, Ashley Montagu (1969:xii), calledthe race concept “ . . . the Phlogiston ofour times . . . ”

If this is the case, why does the term “race”continue to be used by anthropologists?Anthropologists continue to talk about racebecause their study is human culture in general,and because in different areas of the world peopletalk in the language of physical characteristicsand geographical origins when they are dividingother humans up into social groups. In the UnitedStates, this is done in the course of everydaysocial interaction, when terms like “black,”“white,” “Asian,” and so on are used to describe awhole range of people who are, in fact,Americans. Bureaucracies like the Census use acomplex terminology (e.g., American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, black/African American,Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, andwhite and Hispanic) that mixes ethnic affiliation,supposed physical characteristics, and geographywhen defining race and ethnicity forgovernmental purposes.

These classifications have little to do withreal biological characteristics, or human origins.Traditionally, racial identification through mostof the United States was defined according to ahypodescent, or “one-drop” rule, where a mixedrace child was identified with the racial groupingof the lower status parent—in the American case,almost always an African or African Americanwoman. Furthermore, the degree of racial admix-ture is more or less irrelevant; “one drop” ofAfrican blood was enough to identify a person asblack. This has nothing to do with actual ancestryor biological characteristics of a human being. Itwas simply a way of enforcing racial hierarchiesin the United States, and the “one-drop” rule wasa part of American legal systems until the middleof the twentieth century. In parts of CentralAfrica, populations are referred to as being“black” or “white,” exactly the terms used inNorth America. All of those people are Africans,however, coming from the same area of thecontinent. The distinction between them is madeon religious and cultural, not physical, grounds:people who are Muslim (or, increasingly,Christian) call themselves “whites” and callnonbelievers “blacks.” In some countries in SouthAmerica, racial identity is based in part on


socioeconomic status, and may vary from personto person depending on how well-off they are (daCosta 1977:297–298).

Anthropologists study the ways in whichthese classification systems work within culturalsystems, as we will see throughout the otherchapters in this book. The situation is even morecomplicated than this, however, because of theways in which biological and cultural notions ofrace are intertwined even beyond explicitsystems of classification. Anthropologists are nomore immune to confusion about thesequestions than are other people. To illustrate thecomplexity of some of these issues, I want toturn to some examples of the difficulties that wemay encounter in distinguishing biological andcultural concepts of race.

Race in Forensic Anthropology

Many of us have at one point or another watchedTV shows like the CSI series or read novels aboutforensic anthropologists, where experts are ableto tell a great deal about a dead person from thecharacteristics of his or her skeleton: his or hersex, age at death, stature, physical condition, andsometimes even the person’s occupation or thediseases and chronic conditions that he or she hadendured during life. It always seems veryimpressive, an illustration of the power andsophistication of research techniques. Very often,such analysis will include determination of therace of that individual, as well. Prominentforensic specialists, physical anthropologists whostudy human skeletal remains in order to provideinformation for legal proceedings, have affirmedthat human biological races exist, and stated thatthe race concept is fundamental to their research(see, for example, Gill [1990, 1998]). Surely suchexperts must be taken at their word?

In fact, the circumstances in which race isidentified in forensic research are very complex.Forensic anthropologists, more than most otherpractitioners of anthropology, function incooperation with nonspecialists: law enforcementofficers, legal specialists, and members of juries.These people for the most part do not have a

background in anthropology, and so their viewsof biological variation tend to be those of theNorth American public—they accept traditionalracial divisions, and they hold typological viewsof race. Forensic anthropologists must report theirresults in terms that are meaningful to theirnonanthropological audience, and they haveadopted traditional race categories as the mosteffective way of doing that. As Gill (1990:viii)says, “Providing answers for the attribution ofrace solves cases just as much as providing a use-ful age bracket or living stature for the individual.Law enforcement agencies know this, and requestsimple, straight answers. Any anthropologist whocontends that races do not exist and provides avague answer as to ancestry of an unidentifiedskeleton, or launches into a discourse on ‘ethnicgroups,’ will likely never be called upon again toassist in solving a case.” A major reason for theuse of racial categories by American forensicanthropologists is thus pragmatic: their targetaudience wants to hear about race.

Forensic anthropologists in other countriesdo not seem to feel the same need to talk about“race,” and to avoid mentioning “ethnic groups”in forensics (see, for example, Evison 1999). Theauthor of an important British textbook on theanalysis of the human skeleton (Mays 1998)managed to go through the whole book withoutreferring to race once; he wrote about humanpopulations instead. Even some Americanforensic anthropologists seem less than commit-ted to the concept (Kennedy 1995; Sauer 1992).More to the point, the “races” that forensicanthropologists identify vary according to localdemographic and social conditions. Thus, in thesouthwestern United States a great deal ofattention has been given to distinguishing theskeletons of Native American people from thoseof people of European descent, while inthe southeast differentiation of Americans ofAfrican descent is at least as important. Amongsouthwestern American samples that includepeople of European descent, Rhine (1990)distinguishes between “Anglo” skeletons andthose of “Hispanics.” That distinction might wellbe of importance to law enforcement and other


government agencies in that area, concerned withthe accurate identification of local people in termsthat local people recognize—but no physicalanthropologist would argue that “Anglos” and“Hispanics” are separate biological races.

Similarly, forensic anthropologists try todistinguish skeletons from Southeast Asian, EastIndian, and Nubian populations, not becausethese groups are ancient “races” but becausemodern North American urban populationsinclude people from these groups (Brooks et al.1990:45). In other cases, the variability inskeletons of particular races (Native Americanpeoples, for example) has confounded attemptsby forensic anthropologists to develop techniquesfor archaeological identification (Fisher and Gill1990). In Britain, forensic anthropologists workat differentiating people of Western Europeandescent from South Asians, while in France theforensic identification of peoples of WesternEuropean, North African, and Southeast Asiandescent might attract comparable amounts ofattention. In all of these areas, investigators areconcerned that the increasing mobility andmultiethnic backgrounds of peoples from all overthe world will make their job more complex.

Forensic anthropologists examine theskeletal variability of different humanpopulations. They investigate a variety of traits,recognizing that not all of these characteristicsare distributed in the same way through thedifferent populations under study, and that thereliability of their results may vary drasticallydepending on the relations between thosepopulations and available comparative samples.These different identifications are not madebecause these groups are fundamental biologicaltypes of humans (Relethford 2009). They aremade because human populations are physicallyvariable in all kinds of detectable ways, becausethe remains that are found often reflect themakeup of local populations, and because bothlaw enforcement agencies and communities atlarge need to know the identities of the dead. Wemight argue that forensic anthropologists shouldbe trying to educate their clients about thecomplexities of human physical variation and

the difficulties of grouping humans into well-defined populations, but they in turn could (anddo) as well argue that the necessity of providingwell-understood information to everyone fromlocal sheriffs to war-crimes tribunals takesprecedence. Far from substantiating a view ofhuman races as important biological groupings,as the claims of some researchers would imply(Gill 1998, 2000), the work of forensic anthro-pologists actually testifies to the complexity andrange of variation in human populations—andto the important ways in which social classifica-tions and social pressures can mold theoutcomes of scientific enquiries.

Race and Running

The United States is a nation obsessed by sports,as well as by race, and it is no surprise that racerelations in this country have often been playedout in the arenas of amateur and professionalathletics. International sport has equally acted asa field for competition between societies, nations,and political systems. (The constant sportsmetaphors—e.g., “played out” and “field ofcompetition”—demonstrate just how much sportpervades our everyday life.) Probably any of uscan think of famous images and slogans that havebrought race into athletics, and athletics into race:Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics in 1936,Jackie Robinson as the first black player in majorleague baseball, “white men can’t jump.” In all ofthese cases, and many others, people makeassumptions about the physical and intellectualabilities of the athletes in competition, and byextension about the communities that theseathletes come from. Some of these—like the earlytwentieth-century idea that Jewish people are“natural” basketball players and boxers—arequite unfamiliar to us today, while others—theidea that black American men do not have theintellectual ability to play quarterback in football,for example—are more recent.

We can look at some of these issues throughthe lens of a book published some years ago, JonEntine’s (2000) Taboo, which examines therelations between race and athletic success around


the world today. The book is a controversial one:Entine takes the stance that race is a biologicalreality, that biological differences between racesare reflected in differential success in particularsports, but that many Americans do not talk aboutthese differences because they fear a slipperyslope down to the vicious racism that hasbedeviled so much of the history of the UnitedStates. The book is also a polemic, examining theissue from just one point of view; the authorbegins it convinced of the existence andimportance of biological races, discounts anyarguments made against the concept, and ends thebook with, again, the conclusion that white men(and so presumably white boys) can’t jump. At thesame time, Taboo is somewhat different frommany of the works written on the topic fromearlier in this century. Entine devotes a good dealof attention to the pernicious effects of traditionalracist thought, in sports and in society in general,

and he also rejects the widespread assumption thatathletic and intellectual ability are inverselyrelated to one another—a destructive idea that hasparticularly followed people of African descent.

The usage of race language in the book is,however, quite interesting. Entine (2000:341)writes about “black athletic superiority,” but itseems that this superiority is actually a verycomplicated phenomenon. In the first place, itessentially encompasses two different sets ofabilities. Entine claims that West Africans aregood at sprinting and, it appears, at a variety ofprofessional sports that use similar abilities,while East Africans are good at middle- andlong-distance running. These appear to call forquite different forms of musculature andcardiovascular development, so the idea of oneunitary kind of athletic superiority seems to bewrong. Neither of those geographical terms isentirely accurate, either. “West African” in thiscase encompasses not for the most part peoplefrom West Africa, but instead anyone born inthe New World or Europe who has any notice-able African descent, on the assumption that allof their enslaved ancestors must have been fromWest Africa.

In fact, West Africans themselves have notbeen notably successful in Olympic sprinting andrelated sports, even though the population of thatarea is about the same as that of the entire UnitedStates. Ironically enough, although Entineand similar authors claim a “West African”biological superiority in sprinting and relatedsports, their only explanation for the lack ofsuccess of West Africans is cultural: people fromWest African countries have not had the benefitsof the training and coaching that would allowthem to excel. In Entine’s (2000:241) book, thebest-known “West African” sprinter actuallyfrom Africa is Frankie Fredericks, who has wona number of Olympic medals and run the 100 mdash in less than 10 seconds 27 times. However,Fredericks is from Namibia. Namibia shares aborder with the Republic of South Africa, andboth countries are—unsurprisingly—in southernAfrica. Namibian populations, environments,and economies are very different from those


found in the countries of West Africa. One mightequally call Moroccan or Egyptian runners“West Africans.” All of the intervening countriesof Central Africa appear to have been eliminated,perhaps because they do not appear to haveproduced any elite track-and-field athletes.

Similarly, most East Africans are notchampion distance runners. Success at middle-and long-distance running is concentrated intwo countries, Kenya and Ethiopia, and amongparticular ethnic groups. In Kenya, Kalenjincattle pastoralist populations are especially wellrepresented among elite distance runners,although Kikuyu, Kamba, and Kisii runners arealso significant. Ethiopian runners have comefrom a variety of different populations, with, forexample, a number of successful Amhararunners. Of these particular communities,the Kalenjin peoples—among whom distance-running success has been most marked—haveonly been considered a distinct ethnic groupsince the 1940s; before that, and still today, theterm “Kalenjin” referred to a group of relatedlanguages. (The distinction is important,equivalent to that between “the English” as apopulation and “English-speakers” as a popula-tion. The fact that a Sri Lankan, a Nigerian, anda Scotsman all speak English does not meanthat they are members of one ethnic group).

Entine (2000:47–50, 285–286) usesKalenjin running success as a central argumentfor the existence of black athletic superiority, andthus for the reality of biological differencesbetween racial groups as traditionally conceivedof in North America. He argues that Kalenjindomination of distance running is so great that itcannot be completely explained by environmentalfactors: the availability of good coaches and goodtraining, cultural practices that encourage youngpeople to run a lot, the example of earlier runners,and so on. Instead, running success amongKalenjin speakers is supposed to be due to somegenetic advantage, possibly related to selectionfor speed on foot when engaged in cattle raiding,or to the altitude at which Kalenjin people run. Aswith West Africa, cultural factors can be kept inreserve, however; Entine (2000:325–326) uses

such factors to help account for the lack of domi-nation of women’s distance running by Kenyans.

These explanations seem, on the face of it,rather unlikely. There are a number of other groupsof people in East Africa who engaged in cattleraiding, but who have not generated championrunners. Kalenjin-speaking communities areknown to have exchanged group members, throughmigration and intermarriage, with many surround-ing, non-Kalenjin populations; we would expectthis to disperse any “genes for running” overneighboring areas in Kenya, but so far this does notappear to have happened to any great extent. Morethan that, other Kenyan peoples who have hadsuccess in international distance running—theKikuyu and Kamba, for example—are Bantu-speaking farmers, not Kalenjin-speaking cattlepastoralists, and they live some distance away fromthe latter group. To the degree to which EastAfrican running success is concentrated amongKalenjin-speaking people, it is probably mostrealistic to think of it as the results of culturalfactors. The specific biological adaptations that aresupposed to contribute to “West African” sprintingsuccess are never really addressed at all.

That being said, there is no reason to thinkthat biological differences between populationscould not contribute to success (or failure) inparticular sports. At the extremes, this is obvious.It is not likely that people from groups with ashort average height, like Guatemalan Maya orAka people from southern Cameroon, wouldsucceed as professional basketball players;people from populations that are on average verytall, like the Dinka of Sudan, are more likely to doso. (Manute Bol, former center for theWashington Bullets, is a Dinka.) Anthropologistshave documented a huge variety of physicaldifferences between populations in different partsof the world, and it is quite conceivable that theheight of Nilotic peoples like the Dinka, or theoxygen uptake capacities of some Tibetanpopulations, might have implications for athleticsuccess. The likelihood of more subtle effectsmay be even greater, especially given thatextremely minor differences in performance canspell success or failure in elite athletics—but such


effects must be demonstrated to exist, not merelyassumed. It may be that at some point some suchbiological adaptations will be proven to have agenetic basis among Kalenjin people (Larsen2003; Saltin 1996)—although this has nothappened to date.

The question remains: what does all this haveto do with race? The scale of human groups underanalysis shifts back and forth constantly in Entine’sbook, from “black athletic superiority” at the mostgeneral level, to “West” (in fact, mostly AfricanAmerican) and East African abilities in a variety ofsports, to the tremendous successes of Kalenjin run-ners. But does one of these imply the others? Canwe say that, because Kalenjin are very successfulmarathoners, all East Africans will be very success-ful marathoners, or all Africans? Of course not.These are very different kinds of human group-ings—yet all of this variability is supposed to besimply biological, and each level is supposed toimply the others. No one would seriously claim thatthe Kalenjin comprise a separate race from otherEast Africans, and the particular kinds of athleticsuccess that Entine examines are in fact veryunevenly distributed among populations of Africandescent, within and outside of the continent (Entine2000, Figure 4.1). Entine gives no explanation for“black athletic superiority,” apart perhaps fromsome fairly vague musings on the history of huntingand cattle herding on that continent—much ofwhich is simply proof that the geneticists thatEntine uses as sources are not very well-informedhistorians. Success in particular athletic events isassociated with fairly specific groups of people, andit appears to be traditional, typological views ofrace that lead Entine to generalize innateathleticism to all Africans and all people of Africandescent. Unfortunately, this view can lead to a lackof interest in the conscious commitment andplanning that play a central role in so much of eliteathletics. Chapter titles in Taboo like “Nature’sexperiment: the ‘Kenyan miracle’ ” and “Winningthe genetic lottery” illustrate this danger, with theirimplication—consciously made or not—thatAfrican athletic success is not due to the effortsof athletes themselves but to some unearnedgenetic legacy.

Anthropology and the Politics of Race

In the early twenty-first century, the concept ofrace retains its central place among Americanpreoccupations, in society at large, and inanthropology more particularly. Publication ofcontroversial books like The Bell Curve(Herrnstein and Murray 1994) and Race,Evolution and Behavior (Rushton 1995) hasfocused renewed attention on questions of race inAmerica, and fuelled debates about thebiological and cultural meanings of the word.These books attempt to resurrect the racehierarchies of the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies, primarily through varying claims thatAfricans and especially African Americans areon average less intelligent, more violent, andgenerally less civilized than people from Europeor Asia. At the same time, some anthropologistscontinue to argue that biological races are realand important entities, usually claiming thatdisbelief in the existence of such biological unitsamounts to nothing more than “political correct-ness.” “Political correctness” is rarely defined insuch claims, but one of two general meanings isusually implied. It means either an inappropriateinterest in the experiences of women, people ofcolor, and the disadvantaged, or an inappropriatewariness about the objectivity of certain kinds ofscientific research.

Recently, a well-known anthropologist anda journalist published a book entitled Race: TheReality of Human Differences (Sarich and Miele2004), one that linked these two threads of debatein ways that illustrate some of the complexitiestouched upon in this chapter. The authors arguethat races are real biological entities, designatingthem as “ . . . populations, or groups of popula-tions, within a species, that are separatedgeographically from other such populations orgroups of populations, and distinguishable fromthem on the basis of heritable features” (Sarichand Miele 2004:207). They note the multilevelnature of this definition: races are “fuzzy sets,”and the exact number of races defined depends onthe level of detail into which individuals andgroups are sorted, and the goals of the sorting


exercise (pp. 209–211). This is, of course, a quiteconventional populational definition of biologicalrace, similar to those put forward by Garn andBrues (see above). Fair enough, so far.

The question becomes, however, what dothe authors actually do with that unexception-able definition of race? In fact, the treatment ofrace in the modern world throughout the rest ofthe book is almost entirely typological. JohnEntine is quoted approvingly on race andsports—and so again Kalenjin people fromKenya become bearers of the “racial essence”of African running ability (Sarich andMiele 2004:174–184). Kalenjin people winmarathons; Kalenjin people live in Africa;therefore, Africans are natural athletes. This isa logical fallacy, and a pretty straightforwardone. Similarly, the authors’ primary sources onrace and behavior are academics like PhilippeRushton and Richard Lynn, both of whom havemarried denigrating images of Africans andAfrican Americans with entirely typologicalmodels of race. The last half of the book dealswith modern racial characteristics, and in thatsection the conventional, continental racialtypes—Asians, Europeans, and Africans—aretreated as homogeneous units of humanevolution. Historical sources are quoted toclaim that these continental racial types areprimordial (Sarich and Miele 2004:34–56), asif we would not expect that ancient peopleswould be as likely to note any kinds of physicaldifference as we are, and ignoring the factthat—usually negative—descriptions of allsorts of foreigners are common in such texts.The Sahara is supposed to be a “geographicalfilter,” an “ancient boundary,” between“Caucasians and Negroes” (pp. 209–210)—even though the authors themselves note that itwas in the relatively recent past fertile, andinhabited by large game and humans (p. 56).

This seems perplexing: why do we finda populational definition of race in thisbook, accompanied by an entirely typologicaldescription of variation between races? In fact,the explanation for this is quite straightforward. Itis hard to see how the sorts of disparities in ability

and intelligence that the authors claim existcould have arisen without recourse to highlytypological, differentiated racial groupings,evolving in relative isolation from one anotherover extended periods of time—no “fuzzy sets”here, in practice. If brain size, intelligence, andathletic ability vary among modern human racesaccording to the cultural and environmentalbackgrounds within which these races evolved,and if the difference in these factors is as great asthe authors claim, then presumably those racesare supposed to have evolved in very differentenvironments and in considerable isolation fromone another. As we have seen in Chapter 2,however, claims that these differences exist arenot well supported by the data.

Thus, the segue from populational definitionto typological treatment is necessary for theauthors’ broader argument. On the one hand,research has demonstrated that human biologicalvariability is clinal and multivariate, with asubstantial lack of concordance between a varietyof biological characteristics. On the other hand,traditional concepts of race hierarchy in theUnited States require that races be relatively welldifferentiated from one another, so that they canbe talked about, compared, and used as a founda-tion for political action essentially as monolithic,homogeneous things. In Race: The Reality ofHuman Differences, the authors’ political agendabecomes evident at the end of the book, when theydiscuss the policy implications of their under-standings of race—taking the American situationas representative of the whole world as they do so(Sarich and Miele 2004:233–262). They claimthat three possible approaches to public policyconcerning race exist: a future meritocracy, wherepeople are judged as individuals—and individualsand groups “find their place” in social andeconomic hierarchies; a future of race quotas and“levelling down,” as governments try to boost thefortunes of inferior groups; and a future ofresegregation. Unsurprisingly, given their thesis,the authors prefer the first of these visions of the future.

Central to all of these scenarios is theassumption that race is fundamental to all aspects


of human interaction, with the characteristics ofdifferent groups permanent for the long term. If,however, it turns out that many of the differencesbetween racial groups listed by Sarich and Mieleare rooted in historical circumstance and modernenvironments—as many examples from thisbook suggest that they are—and not in inevitablebiology, then a different set of imperativessuggest themselves. A claim that all is biology—Sarich and Miele’s ultimate thesis—is anexcellent crutch for people who would prefer notto occupy themselves with the plight of peoplewho are poor, powerless, and disadvantaged. Ifwe admit the likelihood that people often findthemselves in such circumstances because oftransitory conditions in the modern world, then itbecomes incumbent upon us to change thoseconditions for the better.

CONCLUSION

“Race” is, as I noted at the beginning of thisessay, a word, and it is a word that admits of awide variety of meanings. The history of theUnited States of America has meant that someof these meanings of “race” are laden with animmense significance. This perhaps masks thefact that American definitions and Americanrelations of race are not necessarily universal—although the power of the United States todaymeans that social and cultural debates aboutrace around the world are increasingly debatedusing American meanings. The continuingAmerican preoccupation with and debate aboutrace and race relations is in some ways a testa-ment to the ideals of the Republic, implying atleast a theoretical commitment to the equalityof all its citizens. Americans may disagreevigorously on whether such equality has beensubstantially attained—as a noncitizen, myoutsider’s perspective is that it has not—butthere is broad agreement that the question itselfis important. This has not been the case in all ofthe countries where important issues of racerelations exist.

One central element in these debatesinvolves decisions about when “race” is a useful

and appropriate concept to be used in particularkinds of analysis, and when it is not. To whatdegree can differences in educational attainmentbetween different groups in the United States beascribed to racial discrimination? Are theresignificant differences in the way elections arehandled in predominantly black and predomi-nantly white districts across the country, and isthis due to these variations in population? Is raceor socioeconomic status a better proxy forstudent needs in affirmative action programs?Active argument surrounds all of these issues,and hinges on the meaning, scope, and utility ofsocial concepts of race, and on the relations ofthose concepts to other ways of characterizingAmerican society.

The same situation holds in anthropology:we can (and must) investigate the variousdimensions of race, describing and critiquing theconcept as we do so. This involves, among otherthings, examining whether biological raceconcepts are appropriate models for investigatingvariability among human beings. This has beenone preoccupation of physical and biologicalanthropology for more than a century now, and itappears that the answer to this question is “No.”The typological race models that had held sway inanthropology through most of the existence of thediscipline are not good descriptions of how humanbiological variability works. The implications ofpopulational models, on the other hand, are so farremoved from popular understandings of the term“race”—with hundreds of thousands or perhapsmillions of “micro-races” dotted around theglobe—that use of the term in such cases doesnothing more than risk needless confusion.Science is not an exercise in nostalgia: when aterm progresses from being burnished by long useto being made obsolete by increasing knowledge,it needs to be discarded. The concept of biologicalrace in anthropology is at that point.

This does not mean that anthropologistswill stop studying human biological variability,either in individual or populational terms. Suchresearch will obviously continue, benefitingespecially from the extraordinary advances ingenetic research that have taken place over the


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