Ben Wallman

Potter M-9:30
08/03/2015

The Usefulness of Race as a Concept in Anthropology

Anthropology is a wide reaching scientific discipline that overlaps with many different
fields as well as having subfields of its own. One of the more complex subfields within
anthropology is the study of early human development. Not only does it require a combination of
multiple physical and biological sciences, but the subject matter often enters territory that makes
us question what the defining characteristics of a human actually are, and by extension what we
are.
Race is a particularly thorny topic when it comes to human development. Most
anthropologists support the view that modern human life (meaning homo sapiens sapiens) first
began in Africa and spread outwards from there.[Fitzpatrick] In this sense we can find a
commonality in our ancestry enough so that a fair argument could be made that we are all one
race, namely African. That of course glosses over the obvious physical differences that humans
have developed in their dispersal throughout the world. Someone who is African obviously has
many physical differences compared to someone who is Chinese. This is where it becomes
necessary to decide if these inherited traits constitute enough of a difference that these
geographically based inherited adaptations truly are useful to refer to as a different race in
anthropology.

Race on one level can be thought of as the sum total of the favorable adaptations that
natural selection has acted upon throughout the time that a population has lived in a certain area.
[Britannica] Melanin levels are a very good example. Melanin is responsible for the amount of
pigmentation is a persons skin. It also blocks the absorption of UV rays, which can be harmful
but are also necessary for the production of vitamin D in the body. So natural selection would
favor people with high degrees of melanin in very sunny areas and people with little melanin
areas with little sun. Other traits such as lung capacity, height, body type, are acted upon by
natural selection in a similar fashion, producing the common set of physical traits we associate
with race. [Coates] In this sense race is absolutely useful in anthropology. By identifying theses
physical traits, we can track the progress of humans as they went from one geographic area to
another, identifying a timetable for one they arrived based on how adapted to their environment
their remains seem.
Race then is merely a container that we have placed smaller discrete physical traits into, a
sort of genetic shorthand. These sorts of containers often lead to errors in science though. The
hard and fast groupings we strive for are often proven to be incomplete or wrong as our body of
understanding increases. Take for example the Neanderthal. For many years it was considered to
be a close relative of modern humans that we out competed or exterminated. Genetic testing now
reveals that while we certainly did out compete and likely exterminate the Neanderthal, modern
humans also interbred with it. So our former categories that showed Neanderthals as separate to
us must now account for the fact they are our ancestors as well.[Callaway] The physical
difference between modern humans and Neanderthals is so much greater than any of the physical
differences we see when assigning race as a category among modern humans. If race is simply an
aggregate of physical adaptations why not simply refer to the adaptations individually? While

obviously more challenging, it also prevents shortcuts in thinking, or rigidity to conventions and
designations that we have created in the first place.
Anthropology studies so much more than simply physical characteristics or physical
remains. The entire spectrum of human culture also falls under the auspice of anthropology. In
this case race becomes not simply a matter of physical characteristics, but the culture of the
people who share those characteristics. Again race becomes a way to chart the development of
culture throughout human history. By identifying the racial characteristics of the remains of
people found with datable archeological artifacts, we can draw conclusions about who the people
that lived there were. We can then learn things about how human culture spreads from place to
place. A new area of study that has arisen with the development of cheap digital photos and video
is the field of visual anthropology. Many of its adherents see this as not merely a complimentary
discipline to traditional anthropology, but a completely different way of looking at and studying
the field. Not only can we see the physical characteristics, but representations of the peoples
culture as well. [Glock]
On the other hand, German POWs were extensively photographed and archived during
World War I. This body of data was very influential in anthropology in Germany in the years
after the war ended particularly in an area called Rassenkunde. German anthropologists tied the
physical traits of race in with the cultural aspects of it. This was combined with their own
subjective opinions on the values of different cultures. The ultimate result of Rassenkunde was
the pseudo-scientific rationalization for the Holocaust and Germanys belief that they were the
most culturally advanced race and as such had the right to seize control over all of Europe.
[Evans]

Obviously not all associations of race with culture are destructive. Using racial
identifiers to chart a cultures development and spread through the world is a very powerful tool
in anthropology. Genetic testing of ancient remains has given insight into many of the
unanswered questions of anthropology. Including putting to rest the question of how humans
arrived in the Americas by finding some of the same genes in Native Americans as those found
in Eastern Asian people such as Mongolians.[Oh]
Increased understanding of genetics has added to usefulness of race as a classification in
anthropology. While previous designations were based on mostly visual characteristics, genetic
testing allows us to instead identify the actual markers that developed and caused the trait that we
can see. We are able to trace back modern humans to their ancestors, such as with the
identification of Native Americans as being descended originally from Asian people, or the
presence of genes first seen in Neanderthals in modern humans indicating that humans must have
interbred with them.
The role of science is to come up with a way of understanding the world around us. In
the science of anthropology it is often necessary to make distinctions and separate one from the
other. With a new scientific basis for actually identifying the genetic differences that make up
the external differences that we identify with race, this separation is now based on fact rather
than common sense which often just is used as a justification for not challenging
preconceptions or the status quo of what is actually true.
That said I believe anthropology as a disciple must recognize how decisions made in their
classifications that relate to modern humans effect people. Anthropology already has been used
as a justification for committing atrocities. Whether the justification represented sound scientific
practices or not is a more complicated question that requires an in-depth answer, though the word

no is a fair summary, but at some level the science of anthropology in confluence with a
misunderstanding of the difference between culture and genetics was used as a tool of hatred.
The danger in categorization of anything is that it leads to generalization and ranking. When
speaking about humans this means sweeping assumptions of people based on their race, often
these assumptions extoll the virtues of the rankers own race and look down upon others based on
how different they are from the rankers own. In a word, racism.
As such I believe that the concept of race in modern humans is one that anthropologists
should try to stay away from. While it is a useful shorthand, the information it represents we
now have at a much more profound, namely genetic, level. Science shapes the way we think in
our daily lives. The decision to separate populations of modern humans in anthropology makes
it easier for people making decisions today to think of people who are designated as other than
themselves in anthropology as other than themselves in daily life. Science is a pursuit of the
truth, but in this case we have the truth written in each persons unique gene sequence. The ways
in which race is useful now should instead be taken over by our genetic data. Words shape
thought and I hope that one day there is no space on a form to check a box for race, instead
perhaps a set of boxes to ask what your genotype is for a number of different alleles. I think it
would be harder to manufacture hatred for people based on whether or not they have OCA2 gene
rather than an idea we already know has serious potential for evil.

http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/6349.aspx Tony Fitzpatrick, web, 02/02/06, 07/25/15

http://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human Yasuko I. Takezawa, web, 07/31/15
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/race-intelligence-and-genetics-for-curiousdummies/276154/ Ta-Nehisi Coats, web, 05/23/13, 07/25/15
http://www.nature.com/news/modern-human-genomes-reveal-our-inner-neanderthal-1.14615
Ewen Callaway, web, 01/29/14, 07/31/15
A New History of Anthropology, Edited by Henrika Kucklick, The Anthropology of Race across
the Darwinian Revolution Thomas F. Glock. P 154
http://newsarchive.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news-199379.html Goria Oh, web,
01/27/2012, 07/25/2012
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/human_biology/v075/75.4long.pdf Jeffery C. Long Rick A. Kittles,
Human Biology, Volume 75, Number 4, August 2003, pp. 449-471,
Anthropology at War, Andrew D. Evans, p. 192