Dr C.M.W. Tang writes from Georgetown, Guyana, to say that an English lady professor of his acquaintance was perplexed when she was admitted to a hospital there and had to tick her race as ‘Caucasian’. She wondered what connection she was supposed to have with a mountain range.
She might well. We are all familiar from American cop shows on television with Caucasian as a racial label. But as far as I can tell, a German was to blame for the category. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) thought that the ‘white’ races came from the Caucasus region, and he was acknowledged as the founder of physical anthropology. Actually, that is what a late-20th-century edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica said. The 11th edition (1911) calls him the founder of anthropology, not physical anthropology. In those days social anthropology was the younger sister, while now anthropology is ordinarily taken to mean social anthropology.
Blumenbach was a doctor by training, and I often like to guy my husband on the fickleness of science, which one minute tells us that a theory is ‘scientifically proven’, and that old-fashioned arty and religious types should move on.
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