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Revision as of 19:21, 1 August 2007 by Dbachmann (talk | contribs) (what is wrong with you people? this is childish. At least keep the Georgian picture.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) For the peoples actually from the Caucasus, see Peoples of the Caucasus.The Caucasian race, sometimes the Caucasoid race, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "relating to a broad division of humankind covering peoples from Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia" or "white-skinned; of European origin" or "relating to the region of the Caucasus in SE Europe". The concept's existence is based on the now disputed typological method of racial classification.
In Europe, especially in Russia and nearby, Caucasian usually describes exclusively people who are from the Caucasus region or speak the Caucasian languages.
Origins of the term
The term Caucasian originated as one of the racial categories recognised by 19th century craniology and is derived from the region of the Caucasus mountains.The concept of a "Caucasian race" or Varietas Caucasia was first proposed under those names by the German scientist and classical anthropologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). His studies based the classification of the Caucasian race primarily on skull features, which Blumenbach claimed were optimized by the Caucasian Peoples. Blumenbach writes:
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.
The Caucasus was historically an area of fascination for Europeans; Prometheus and Jason and the Argonauts were myths featured in the Caucasus. Greek mythology considered women from the Caucasus to have magical powers. In Greek mythology, this area was thought of as a kind of hell since Zeus imprisoned many Titans who opposed him (e.g. Prometheus) there.
In physical anthropology
Caucasoid race is a term used in physical anthropology to refer to people of a certain range of anthropometric measurements .
19th century classifications of the peoples of India considered the Dravidians of non-Caucasoid stock, as "Australoid" (Thomas Huxley 1865) or a separate "Dravida" race (Edgar Thurston) 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 1969 The Living Races of Man stating that "India is the easternmost outpost of the Caucasian racial region".
With the turn away from racial theory in the late 20th century, the term Caucasian as a racial classification fell into disuse in Europe. Thus, in the United Kingdom, Caucasian is more likely than in the United States to describe people from the Caucasus, although it may still be used as a racial classification.
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." According to Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, the concept of race has all but been completely rejected by modern mainstream anthropology.
In the past, the United States National Library of Medicine used the term Caucasoid as a "racial stock". The "racial stock" categorization scheme was replaced in 2004 with Continental Population Groups which focuses on geographic origins.
United States
In the United States, Caucasian has been mainly a distinction, based on skin color, for a group commonly called White Americans, as defined by the government and Census Bureau.
The Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) decided against including people of Indian origin in the term "Caucasian" for purposes of U.S. judiciary judgements in spite of some anthropologists' classification schemes including Indians in "Caucasoid". The court argued based on common usage of "Caucasian" meaning "white", ruling that "Congress never intended for Indians to be able to naturalize". The ruling was rendered obsolete with the Luce-Celler Act of 1946.
Notes
- The Oxford English Dictionary defines Caucasoid as as noun or adjective meaning Of, pertaining to, or resembling the Caucasian race.
- http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50034773?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=Caucasoid&first=1&max_to_show=10
- http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/caucasian?view=uk
- O'Neil, Dennis. "Biological Anthropology Terms." 2006. May 13, 2007. Palomar College.
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/gill.html Does Race Exist? A proponent's perspective by George W. Gill.
- University of Pennsylvania
- University of Pennsylvania
- Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, translated by Thomas Bendyshe. 1865. November 2, 2006.
- 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).
- Caucasus, Historical Notes
- Painter, p.
- Reinhard, K.J., & Hastings, D. (Annual 2003) Learning from the ancestors: the value of skeletal study.(study of ancestors of Omaha Tribe of Nebraska). In American Journal of Physical Anthropology, p177(1).
- 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.
- http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1438.html
- Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, "Perishing Paradigm: Race—1931-99," American Anthropologist 105, no. 1 (2003): 110-13
- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd03/nd03_med_data_changes.html
- Painter, p.
References
- Leroi A., M. (2005) A Family Tree in Every Gene. The New York Times,, 14 March, p.A23.reproduced in Race and Genomics.
- Lewonin, R. C. (2005). Confusions About Human Races from Race and Genomics, Social Sciences Research Council. Retrieved 28 December 2006.
- Painter, Nell Irvin, Collective Degradation:Slavery and the Construction of Race. Why White People are Called Caucasian., Yale University. 2003. October 9, 2006.
- Risch, N., Burchard, E., Ziv, E. and Tang, H. (2002). "Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease". Genome Biology. 3 (7): comment2007.2001 - comment2007.2012.
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(help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - Rosenberg NA, Pritchard JK, Weber JL, Cann HM, Kidd KK, et al. (2002) Genetic structure of human populations. Science 298: 2381–2385.Abstract
- Rosenberg NA, Mahajan S, Ramachandran S, Zhao C, Pritchard JK, et al. (2005) Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure. PLoS Genet 1(6): e70 doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070
- Templeton, A.R. (1998). Human races: A genetic and evolutionary perspective. Am. Anthropol. 100, 632–650.Partial access to article. Retrieved 01 January 2007.
- Camberg, Kim (2005-12-13). "Long-term tensions behind Sydney riots". The BBC. Retrieved 2007-03-03.
Literature
- Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1775) — the book that introduced the concept
- Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man — a history of the pseudoscience of race, skull measurements, and IQ inheritability
- L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, The History and Geography of Human Genes — a major reference of modern population genetics
- L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages
- H. F. Augstein, "From the Land of the Bible to the Caucasus and Beyond," in Waltraud Emst and B. Harris, Race, Science and Medicine, 1700-1960 (London: Routledge, 1999): 58-79.
- Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2006)
- Paul Lawrence Guthrie, The Making of the Whiteman: From the Original Man to the Whiteman (Paperback), ISBN 0-948390-49-2
See also
- Scientific racism
- Craniofacial anthropometry
- Race and genetics
- Race (U.S. Census)
- Race (historical definitions)
- Caucasian peoples
- White people
- European people
- White American
- Caucasian-American
- European American