From Blumenbach to Howells

The slow, painful emergence of theory through forensic race estimation

Bibliographic Data

ID5803458
AuthorsStephen D Ousley (0000-0001-8210-2665, Mercyhurst University), R L Jantz (0000-0003-1382-196X, University of Tennessee at Knoxville), Joseph T Hefner (0000-0001-5535-4410, Michigan State University)
Year2017
Pages65-97
Publication date2017-12-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeOTHER
VenueForensic Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2573-5020 • E-ISSN: 2573-5039
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1002/9781119226529.ch5
OpenAlexW2773634489
ISBN9781119226529
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited88

There are deep disagreements in several scientific disciplines, including anthropology, regarding patterns of human variation and their relationship to social or biological races. Some scientists assert that human races are real, while others emphasize that any races cannot be real. Race is a controversial and charged topic, especially in the United States, given its history of slavery and anthropology's racist past. Police forces have enforced American institutional racism before, and relations between American blacks and the police are especially strained, as reflected in the Black Lives Matter movement. For decades, Alan Goodman and the American Anthropological Association (AAA) have branded virtually any discussion of patterned human variation as typological and racist. The nineteenth-century typology was racist and determinist, depending on pseudoscience and the practice of verification to "prove" theories. Franz Boas was among the first to break with the prevailing views of racial determinism in anthropology and American society and stressed that race, language, and culture should be studied separately as different phenomena. Interpretations of human variation and races changed after the genocide of World War II and with the rise of the civil rights movement. "Race doesn't exist" became the battle cry of antiracist anthropologists, which was often interpreted as "human variation doesn't exist." Unfortunately, the anthropologists battling racism, a moral and ethical failure, tried to use science to show that races do not exist and that, therefore, there was no justification for racism. The methods the anthropologists resorted to, pseudoscience and verification, were the same methods the typologists had used and produced propaganda rather than scientific arguments and conclusions. Forensic anthropology was a target for antiracist anthropologists because forensic anthropologists were still using the same typological terms that biological anthropologists had largely abandoned. Though typological terms were being used, determinism was not part of any implicit race theory, and using the same labels was not inherently racist. But how forensic anthropologists assessed race from human remains did not involve reproducible methods, and a consensus theory of race or even definition of race was lacking. Norm J. Sauer's (1992) article aptly titled "Forensic anthropology and the concept of race: if races don't exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?" (Social Science and Medicine, 34, 107-111) was the first recognition that there was a connection between skeletal morphology and social race, according to the American folk taxonomy, at least in American blacks and whites. A testable hypothesis was born, and after data collection efforts led by Richard Jantz, it was tested and supported by S. D. Ousley, R. L. Jantz, and D. L. Freid (2009) ("Understanding race and human variation: why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race," American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 139, 68-76). Differences between American blacks and whites represented their different continental origins and subsequent institutional racism that prevented panmixia, though further morphological subdivisions within them were also indicated. An appreciation of the differences between social races and biological variation has led to studies of how each influences each other by forensic anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists. The antiracist anthropologists have been left behind at a time when they are needed the most, for future studies of the complicated interactions between biology, history, and culture

Pseudoscience · Variation (astronomy · Forensic and Genetic Research · Race, Genetics, and Society

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub