Description
Write an essay that describes the historical origins of the concept of race. You must use
at least six of the terms below from the readings in Module 1. You should clearly define
and describe the terms (don’t assume the reader knows anything about the subject) and
place them in the appropriate historical context. The best approach is to follow a logical
chronology based on the information provided in the essays. The goal is to explain how
natural scientists conceived of the concept of race and why it was a useful tool for
understanding human biological differences.
Be thorough and clear. Explain as if you’re talking to someone who has not done the
reading. If you quote directly from a source (and you should keep this to a minimum),
make sure you provide a citation. Recommended length: 800-1,000 words, exclusive of
quotations.
Monogenesis
Polygenesis
Samuel George Morton
George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
“Caucasian”
Dr. Benjamin Rush
Louis Agassiz
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
Carolus Linnaeus
Samuel Cartwright
Phrenology
Great Chain of Being
Pre-Adamite theory
Citations: In a short essay you should keep quotations to a minimum, using them to
enhance your exposition. For our purposes, you only need to cite direct quotations, not
information that is paraphrased. Quotations should not substitute for your own writing.
If you do quote directly from a source, you must indicate it by placing the entire
quotation in quotation marks and including a citation (a footnote or in-text citation)
immediately after it. (Please refer to the “Sample Document” posted on D2L under
“Writing for LSP 200.”)
You may use in-text citations or footnotes that follow the Chicago Manual of Style. I
have provided you the correct source information, so you only need to cut and paste this information into your bibliography. For further instructions on how to cite, please refer
to “Citation Guidelines” posted on D2L under “Writing for LSP 200.
Module 1 Sources:
Elizabeth Ewen and Stuart Ewen, “Hierarchies of Humanity.” In Typecasting: On the
Art and Science of Human Inequality. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008.
Paul Finkelman, “Theories of Race.” Encyclopedia of African American History 1619-
1895 From the Colonial Era to the Age of Frederick Douglass. Oxford African
American Studies Center.
“Interview with Stephen Jay Gould.” Race: The Power of an
Illusion. http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-backgroun…
Jonathan Marks, “Racism: Scientific.” In Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, 2nd ed.,
edited by Patrick L. Mason. Vol. 3. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2013
https://www.racepowerofanillusion.org/interviews/interview-stephen-jay-gould-2002
Unformatted Attachment Preview
•ART THREE-TAXONOMIES OF HUMAN DIFFERENCE
~8
The French I am least able to characterize.-They have no traits so
bold as the English, nor so minute as the Germans. I know them
chiefly by their teeth and their laugh. The Italians I discover by the
nose, small eyes, and projecting chin. The English by thei r foreheads
and eyebrows. The Dutch by the rotundity of the head, and the weakness of the hair. The Germans, by the angles and wrinkles round the
eyes, and in the cheeks. The Russians, by the snub nose, and their
light-coloured, or black hair. 10
For Lavater, the question of “national physiognomy” was pivotal. In an
expanding world, where interactions between European and non-European
societies were intensifying, the ability to draw a global map of physiognomic
distinctions, a new hierarchy of inequality, had become an essential priority.
Philosophers, businessmen, and men of contemplation alike must be educated
in “the natural history of national physiognomy,” he implored. It contained
“profound, indestructible, and eternal” truths. To deny it, would be “equal to
denying the light of the sun at noon day.”
Read today, Lavater’s work seems wildly opinionated. Though he claimed
to be articulating a body of laws and principles, his subjective ramblings lack
the aura of systematic thinking that one tends to associate with Enlightenment
science. Nonetheless, Lavater’s contribution helped to legitimize discriminatory evaluations of other people as an essential element in the emerging field
of natural history and science. While many of those who inherited the physiognomic enterprise would criticize the imprecision of his work, Lavater’s fixation on the conclusive moral significance of facial features-noses, brows,
chins, eyes, ears, teeth, and the like-would mark popular and scientific understandings of human difference for centuries to follow. So, too, would his visual
strategy of persuasion, which juxtaposed divergent portraits of humanity in
order to communicate ideals of good and evil, intelligence and feeble-mindedness, civilization and savagery, beauty and ugliness.
8
HIERARCHIES OF HUMANITY
On July I I, 2002, the journal Nature published a report on the recent discovery of an
early human male fossil, a partial skull unearthed by French paleontologists in Chad, in
Central Africa. The story, heralding this event as “one of the most important fossil fi nds
in the last Ioo years,” appeared on front pages around the world.’
Using the standard binomial naming procedure invented by a Swedish botanist
named Carl von Linne (more generally known as Carolus Linnaeus, 1707-1778), the
scientists labeled their specimen Sahelanthropus tchadensis but generally refer to him
as Tournai, meaning “hope of life” in the Goran language. Declaring their find “the
oldest and most primitive known member” of the human family, the French team predicted that the fossil would “illuminate the earliest chapter in human evolutionary history.”> VVith a face and teeth that appear distinctly human and a small brain case like that
of a chimpanzee, this nearly seven-million-year-old ancestor shattered basic assumptions
about the lineage and development of the human species, previously estimated to be no
more than four million years old. In an editorial appearing in the New York Times on July
I 2, the writer announced that, beyond his age, Tournai’s appearance had thrown into question the widely held scientific belief that people had evolved, as a single species, along
a neat “highway leading from the past to the present.” Perhaps, the editorial suggested,
present-day hominids are not the inheritors of a common line, but rather a diversified
group, assembled out of several “closely related species.”J
Man or ape? One species or many? Questions such as these, regarding the origins
and diversity of humankind, were obsessive preoccupations of eighteenth-century European science. Encountering or, more often, relying on travelers’ accounts of people
with varying skin tones, hair textures, facial structures, and body types, Enlightenment
scientists, philosophers, and dilettantes strained to construct intricate, well-ordered systems of classification in order to situate each particular variant within its “proper place”
in the natural order of things. Within such systems, or ta-xonomies, organisms were
assigned specific places, each in relation to all others, providing an ostensibly objective
scientific map, a modern reconfiguration of the Great Chain of Being. This impulse
an imates the great contradiction within Enlightenment thinking. ·w hile radical
democrats claimed nature and its laws as the bedrock upon which notions of human
equality and “The Rights of Man” rested, others looked toward systematic scientific
99
ART THRE E – T AXONOMIE S OF H UMAN DIFFERE NCE
schemas as a new refuge for upholding principles of hierarchy, as a rationale justifying the control of lesser beings by their superiors.
One common feature of eighteenth-century taxonomy was its dogmatic
commitment to the idea that each life form occupied a distinctive place within
an overall system, that each species embodied a specific ideal type and could be
distinguished by a unique set of identifiable characteristics. There was li ttle room for ambiguity.
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things. Stephen Jay Gould, perhaps the most
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