Race And Ethnicity In Anthropology Essay

Race and Ethnicity According to Anthropologists

Examining the ideas and beliefs within ones own cultural context is central to the study of Anthropology. Issues of Race and Ethnicity dominate the academic discourses of various disciplines including the field of Anthropology. Race and Ethnicity are controversial terms that are defined and used by people in many different ways. This essay shall explore the ways in which Anthropologists make a distinction between race and ethnicity and how these distinctions serve as frames for cross-cultural comparison and analysis. It is important to accurately define these coined terms before one is able to make accurate comparisons and distinctions between them, and their relation to the concept of culture.

The idea of ‘race’ is a problematic concept in various academic fields. In the discipline of Anthropology, the definition of this term carries much controversy. The concept of race that many people hold is in a sense, a social construct that changes amongst different cultures, one could look at different cultures to see racial definition as a cultural phenomenon in action (Kottak, 2000:139). King supports this idea that races are not established by a set of natural forces, rather they are products of human perception, “Both what constitutes a race and how one recognises a racial difference are culturally determined” (1981:156). Cashmore provides a brief definition of race as “a group of persons connected by common origin” (1988:235). However, Cashmore goes on to argue that the terminology of race has been used to reflect changes in the understanding of physical and cultural differences (1988:235). Cornell and Hartman argue the characteristics that constitute a definition for the concept of race are complex. The authors claim that race can be categorised in social and physical terms. Race is a “human group defined by itself or others as distinct by virtue of perceived common physical

The two terms are often misconstrued as if they have identical meaning. The term ‘race’ is based on the thought of biological and physical differences. According to Robb, “the concept of ‘race’ included any… groups of people which held them to display inherent, heritable, persistent or predictive characteristics, and which thus had a biological or quasi-biological basis” (1995:1). In the study of race, particularly during the late part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, groups of people were classified on the basis of different phenotypical characteristics determined by physical attributes such as skin pigmentation, cranial capacity and hair type or colour (Miles, 1993:59). Hannaford (1996) refutes the idea that race is a biological concept, “We assume that the racial and ethnic diversity we see all around us has always existed as a historical, social, and biological fact that needs no further interrogation” (p3). He argues that race is not a “biological transmission of innate qualities” (1996:3). Diamond supports the argument presented by Hannaford, Diamond deconstructs the concept of race and contends that “from a biological standpoint, the concept of race based on skin colour is scientifically useless…it is a cultural category, not a biological one” (1994:124).

Distinguished from the concept of race, ethnicity is a culturally derived term. Deng defined ethnicity as an “embodiment of values,