Another Look at Ethnicity as a Biological Concept

Abstract

Montagu referred to race as ‘man’s most dangerous myth’, while Lévi-Strauss called it ‘the original sin of anthropology’. Although persuasive arguments against the concept of race were made throughout the 20th century, race remains a particular problem for anthropologists who deal in the classification of human populations. Racial terminology has been perpetuated within anthropology largely owing to the fact that, historically, race formed the very core of anthropological study. Despite the conceptual inadequacy of race, the anthropological enterprise has yet to move beyond it as an explanatory tool for understanding human biological variation because of the lack of a conceptual and/or methodological replacement. This article re-analyses historical anthropological literature on ethnicity and biocultural interaction as a replacement for the race concept, and recasts it in the context of modern philosophical and psychological perspectives on population variation.