Culture, ‘Race’ and Racism

Culture, ‘Race’ and Racism The Study of a Cultural Category and its Effects

Evolution of the Human Species • Thought to have originated in Africa 2 1/2 million years ago. • Followed a long, dry period: Bipedalism, opposable thumbs evolved that gave early homo sapiens an adaptive advantage in hunting on the savannah. • Australopithecus was an early forerunner of homo sapiens, with homo erectus being an intermediate species. • All three originated in central, eastern Africa and from there migrated to Asia and Europe and finally to North and South America.

Archeological Evidence Supports the Hypothesis that there was a single origin of humankind, and that similar adaptive pressures over the millennia have produced a single human species. The selective pressures have been uniform throughout the presence of homo sapiens on earth. Homo sapiens practised hunting-gathering until b.p. 14,000: adaptive pressures on hunter-gatherers are similar to wolves and both consist of a single species.

Migration, Language, Culture • The main anatomical indicator of the species homo sapiens sapiens is the presence of a cranial capacity of 1200 cc, a doubling of the brain size over the austropithecenes. • Enabled the emergence of a sophisticated form of language, as compared with the great apes. • Language enabled the communication of learned behaviour to a much greater extent, and provided the basis for the major adaptive feature of homo sapiens, i.e. culture.

‘Race’ has been shown to be an unscientific concept • In the 19th century, there was a common classification of people into 3 or 4 major ‘races’: mongoloid, caucasoid, negroid. • Attempts were made to show a different origin for each and to attribute different characteristics to each, e.g. intelligence. • Subsequent studies have disproved this repeatedly.

Fallacies of the ‘racial’ concept • No correlation between skin colour, blood type, shape of nose, or any other superficial physical characteristic. • Traits such as skin colour are not good indicators of who is related to whom, and who is descended from whom. • There is between 8 and 9 times greater variation within ‘races’ than between them and about the same variation within regions than between them.

Born in the late 18th century in eastern Cape province of South Africa. Became a servant for an English family there.Persuaded by her employer to go to England, where she was exhibited nude in a cage in Picadilly circus. Later, she was ‘exhibited’ nude before a group of zoologists and physiologists, and was painted in the nude. Died in 1816 at 27 of pneumonia. George Cuvier, a noted anatomist, dissected her remains, paying special attention to her buttocks, ears and sexual organs. Her genitalia and buttocks were described as much larger than those of middle-class European women, and Cuvier hypothesized that they were ‘typical’ of all African women. European prostitutes, i.e. deviant women, often from poor families, were also thought to be genetically ‘hypersexual’ and to possess the same anatomical characteristics as Sarah Bartmann. Her remains lay in the Musee de L’Homme in Paris until 1995, when the post-Apartheid government protested to the French government. Her remains were finally returned to South Africa in 2002.

How Culture Influences ‘Biology’: Menopause in North America and Japan • Studies of menopause cross-culturally have become important as populations of industrialized countries age. • Very different experiences of menopause in North America and Japan. • Japanese women in the 1990s reported very few of the symptoms of menopause that North American women did, esp. hot flashes, irritability, and night sweats. • Indeed, menopause was not a known ‘physical’ disorder in Japan until western doctors introduced the concept in the 1920s. • Different biological symptoms are related to different cultural expectations of what menopause means in the two cultures.

Culture, ‘Race’ and Racism