Other Definitions
caucasian race (dict)
|
Caucasian RaceThe term Caucasian race, is used almost exclusively in North America to mean "white", especially in government and census forms; see Caucasian type. It is a distinction based solely on skin color, and popularly is used for people of northern European origin, as distinct from those of Mediterranean origin. Another, earlier use of the term, originally based on craniology, refers to various ethnic groups thought to have been originally from the region of the Caucasus mountains, itself imagined to be the location of Mount Ararat (where Noah's Ark eventually landed according to Biblical legend). In Europe, "Caucasian" refers almost exclusively to people who are from the Caucasus. History of the concept The concept of a "Caucasian race" or Varietas Caucasia (sic) was first proposed under those names by the German scientist 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 Georgians, a people living in the Southern Caucasus. Populations, formerly called "varieties," are no longer distinguished by Latin names, according to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The reason the Caucasus had such an attraction to Blumenbach and other contemporaries was because of its (imagined) proximity to Mount Ararat, where according to Biblical legend Noah's Ark eventually landed after the Deluge. Later anthropologists, including W.Z. Ripley in 1899 and Carleton Coon in 1957, have further expanded upon the classification of the Caucasian race proposed by Blumenbach, and have subdivided the group into Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, and at times Dinaric and Baltic subdivisions. Nordicism, the belief that the blond Nordic sub-division constitutes a "master race", was influential in Northern Europe and the United States during the early twentieth century, eventually becoming the offical ideology of the Nazi state. It was used to justify eugenics programs and the persecution and extermination of so-called "inferior" races then living in Europe, such as Jews and Roma. The concept of Caucasian race and its stated or implied superiority over other races was often used as a moral excuse for colonialism by Western European countries, in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Europe, usage of the term declined in the 19th century as it did not allow for enough distinctions as required by the new forms of nationalism which were emerging, but in the United States it enjoyed a use which continues to the present. It has been (and is still) used to justify social discrimination in many other places of the world, such as against descendants of Native Americans, African slaves, and immigrants in the Americas and South Africa, and many more. Current views It is clearly observable that many people do not correspond easily to one racial/subracial type or another. There is currently extensive debate on the scientific validity of racial classifications, and many people reject systems of racial classification as inherently arbitrary and subject to wide divergences in most populations. Indeed, the advances in biochemistry over the past 30-40 years have revealed that the traditional racial divisions have extremely little genetic basis. Its relevance is debatable as a physical anthropological, ethnic/cultural or socio-political concept. See also Books - 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.
|
 |