The brilliant anthropology blog Savage Minds is a reliable source for interesting things to read or think about. Today, they link to American Ethnography Quasi-monthly which collects articles from AAA journals that have put in the public domain (though the actual status of the articles is still unclear) published before 1964. Although you wouldn’t know it (easily) from the website, it seems to be run by Martin Hoyem, an ethnographer at Pacific Ethnography.

This month, American Ethnography has two articles by Ashley Montagu on their front page which deal with race. They offer a nice peek into the history of ‘race’ concept in anthropology, and show that questioning the validity of race has been a long and constant part of the social sciences. What’s relevant to this blog is the particular way that Montagu proposes for getting past received notions of race.

In short, it is our opinion that taxonomies and terms should be designed to fit the facts, and not the facts forced into the procrustean rack of pre-determined categories. If we are to have references, whether terminological or taxonomical, to existing or extinct populations of man, let the conditions as we find them determine the character of our terms or taxonomies, and not the other way round.

Since what we are actually dealing with in human breeding populations are differences in the frequencies of certain genes, why not use a term which states just this, such as genogroup, and the various appropriate variants of this?

Reading this today, we’re sure to interpret and react to this much differently than readers in 1962 may have for many reasons, not the least of which are the changing definitions of and relationships we have with ‘gene’ and ‘race’. It is interesting to see how, at that moment in time, the new science of genetics must have looked like a way to get through the divisiveness associated with the idea of race as Montagu knew it. At the same time he was well aware that although valiant attempts may be made to pour new wine into old bottles, too often the shape of the bottle remains the same.