| 5. Race Ideology in North America |
| SMEDLEY, Audrey (Dept of Sociology and Anthropology, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA, asmedley@mail1.vcu.edu) |
| In the last two decades of the 17th century colonial
settlers in North American unknowingly began a process of transforming the
way the people of the world looked at human differences. In the concept of
"race" they invented an idea of natural inequality among human groups that
was to ramify around the world in the next two centuries. Race originated
as a folk concept to express already existing social inequalities, and gradually
evolved to magnify human group differences over the next two centuries. By
the 19th century it had a number of critical ingredients. Race denoted 1)
separate, exclusive and distinct human groups; 2) that belief the such groups
are naturally unequal and must be ranked; 3) the belief that external physical
features are linked with behavioral, intellectual, moral, and temperamental
features; 4) the belief that both physical features and behavioral ones are
inherited; 5) the belief that differences, created by God or nature, are
so great that they cannot be transcended. This paper will explore some of
the social consequences of this belief system. It is the thesis of this paper that "race" was not universal. No where else in the world prior to the 18th century did similar ingredients come together to form such a worldview. But once established and its utility demonstrated, race literally spread around the world and subsequently underwent many incarnations, often incorporating existing ethnic folk ideas in the process. |
| SMEDLEY, Audrey Professor, Dept of Sociology and Anthropology, Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. In social anthropology my interests broadly are in social organization, with an focus on women and patrilineal systems. Teaching the history of anthropology led me to discover the history of@the concept of race and I continue to research historical materials@that relate to the origin of the idea. |