Race

This paper examines the views and research on race held and performed by Franz Boas, one of the preeminent members of the profession in its first professional decades and still a major shaper of our (anthropological) ideas about what race is and what race means. Boas spent a good deal of his time as an anthropologist refining and even perhaps reforming his ideas about the importance and constitution of race and this paper examines how his views changed over the course of his life and looks briefly at the legacy on race that modern anthropology owes to Boas.

It is tempting to think that an interest in race was part of BoasÆs birthright, although to make such an assumption may simply be giving into vulgar stereotypes. But it is true that Boas was born in Prussia in 1858 and thus born to a time and place wher

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he fluidity of races, making them simply incidents in the long history of human existence. And because we have such a clear understanding of the randomness and fluidity of the biology of race we have perhaps an even clearer understanding than was allowed to Boas how badly the concept of race has been misapplied. One of the most telling arguments against classifying people into races from a cultural point of view û and this is certainly something that Boas understood û is that persons in various cultures have often mistakenly acted as if one race were superior to another. Although, with social disadvantages eliminated, it is possible that one human group or another might have some genetic advantages in response to such factors as climate, altitude, and specific food availability, these differences are small. There are no differences in native intelligence or mental capacity that cannot be explained by environmental circumstances. Rather than using racial classifications to study human variability, anthropologists today define geographic or social groups by geographic or social criteria. They then study the nature of the genetic attributes of these groups and seek to understand the causes of changes in their genetic makeup, and as
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3929
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)

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