Caucasian race

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For the peoples of the Caucasus Mountains, see Peoples of the Caucasus.
For other uses of the term "Caucasian", see Caucasian.


Caucasian (or Caucaoid) race refers to the general physical type of the indigenous peoples of Europe, North Africa, Southwest Asia, and sometimes South Asia. It is roughly equivalent to the more common term white race, although in technical contexts, especially historically, it may include darker-skinned populations with similar skull structures to white-skinned populations.

The term in this context should be distinguished from "Caucasian" referring to matters and peoples of the Caucuses Mountains.

The concept of Caucasian race is controversial today. It is rejected by many academics and political activists who view any system of categorizing humanity based on physical type as an obsolete 19th Century racism[2], and human genome studies have shown that there is no single and simple genetic definition equivalent to "Caucasian"[3]. However the term continues to be widely used in many scientific and general contexts, usually with its more restricted sense of "white".

In the medical sciences, where response to pharmaceuticals and other treatment can vary dramatically based on ethnicity[4][5][6], there is great debate as to whether racial categorizations as broad as Caucasian are medically valid[7][8], but nonetheless such definitions have recently become a standard variable in clinical research protocols, for example:


Ninety Australian-born Caucasians and 72 South-east Asian (SEA) HCV patients attending a Melbourne hospital liver clinic completed a questionnaire which assessed risk factor profile ... [9]


We examined the clinical data on 3752 Caucasian patients, 451 Southeast Asian patients, 322 South Asian patients, and 319 black patients who were treated with hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis under a Universal Health Care system in Toronto ... [10]


In archaeology and anthropology, traditionally and among researchers who continue to use clear descriptions of physical type, the technical term Caucasoid is more typically found[11], however Caucasian is also in use, particularly in popular science writing such as this Canadian Press wire service article:


The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.[12]


In the United States, the term Caucasian is widely used as a more formal (and sometimes legal) term for white race, for example in police descriptions of criminal suspects.


Origins of the term

The 4th edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (Leipzig, 1885-1890) shows the "Caucasian race" (in blue) as comprising "Aryans", "Semites" and "Hamites". "Aryans" are further sub-divided into "European Aryans" and "Indo-Aryans" (the latter corresponding to the group now designated Indo-Iranians). Adjacent to the "Caucasians" are the "Sudan-Negroes" to the south (shown in brown), the Dravidians in India (shown in green) and Asians to the east (shown in yellow, subsuming the peoples now grouped under Ural-Altaic (light yellow) and Sino-Tibetan (solid yellow)).

The term Caucasian originated as one of the racial categories recognized by 19th century craniology and is derived from the region of the Caucasus mountains[1].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).[1] His studies based the classification of the Caucasian race primarily on skull features, which Blumenbach claimed were optimized by the Caucasian Peoples.[2] 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.[3]

Physical anthropology

The famed exemplary Georgian skull Blumenbach discovered in 1795 to hypothesize origination of Europeans from the Caucasus.
File:Europaeid types.jpg
Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) divides “Europäid” types into: Nordic, Dinaric, Mediterranean, Alpine, East Baltic, Turks, Bedouins, Afghans.

Caucasoid race is a term used in physical anthropology to refer to people of a certain range of anthropometric measurements [4].

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.[5]

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."[6] According to Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, the concept of race has been all but completely rejected by modern mainstream anthropology.[7]

The United States National Library of Medicine used the term Caucasian as a race in the past, but has discontinued its usage in favor of the term "European".[8]

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.[9]

Between 1917 and 1965, immigration to the USA was restricted by "national origins quota". The Supreme Court in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) decided Indians – unlike Europeans and Middle Easterners – were Caucasian but not 'white', because most common people did not consider them to be white[10].

Notes

  1. ^ a b University of Pennsylvania Blumenbach
  2. ^ Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, translated by Thomas Bendyshe. 1865. November 2, 2006.
  3. ^ 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).
  4. ^ 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).
  5. ^ 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.
  6. ^ Tishkoff SA, Kidd KK (2004). "Implications of biogeography of human populations for 'race' and medicine". Nat. Genet. 36 (11 Suppl): S21–7. doi:10.1038/ng1438. PMID 15507999. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  7. ^ Leonard Lieberman, Rodney C. Kirk, and Alice Littlefield, "Perishing Paradigm: Race—1931-99," American Anthropologist 105, no. 1 (2003): 110-13
  8. ^ "Other Notable MeSH Changes and Related Impact on Searching: Ethnic Groups and Geographic Origins". NLM Technical Bulletin. 335 (Nov–Dec). 2003. The MeSH term Racial Stocks and its four children (Australoid Race, Caucasoid Race, Mongoloid Race, and Negroid Race) have been deleted from MeSH in 2004. A new heading, Continental Population Groups, has been created with new indentions that emphasize geography.
  9. ^ Painter, p. [page needed]
  10. ^ Not All Caucasians Are White: The Supreme Court Rejects Citizenship for Asian Indians[1]

References

Literature

  • Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1775) — the book that introduced the concept
  • Gould, Stephen Jay (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-01489-4. — a history of the pseudoscience of race, skull measurements, and IQ inheritability
  • Piazza, Alberto; Cavalli-Sforza, L. L.; Menozzi, Paolo (1996). The history and geography of human genes. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-02905-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) — a major reference of modern population genetics
  • Cavalli-Sforza, LL (2000). Genes, peoples and languages. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9486-X.
  • Augstein, HF (1999). "From the Land of the Bible to the Caucasus and Beyond". In Harris, Bernard; Ernst, Waltraud (ed.). Race, science and medicine, 1700–1960. New York: Routledge. pp. 58–79. ISBN 0-415-18152-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  • Baum, Bruce (2006). The rise and fall of the Caucasian race: a political history of racial identity. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-9892-6.
  • Guthrie, Paul (1999). The Making of the Whiteman: From the Original Man to the Whiteman. Chicago, IL: Research Associates School Times. ISBN 0-948390-49-2.
  • Wolf, Eric R.; Cole, John N. (1999). The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Valley. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21681-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

See also

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