1

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RACE AND ETHNICITY

Raymond Scupin

Lindenwood University

In 1999, 21-year-old Benjamin Smith spent the July 4th weekend cruising in his car in Chicago

and central Indiana areas shooting at African Americans, Orthodox Jews, and Asians. In this

three-day shooting spree two were killed and nine were wounded before Smith shot and killed

himself during a police chase. The African American killed was Rick Birdsong, a former

basketball coach at Northwestern University. He was jogging with his children when he was shot

in the back. Won Joined Soon, a Korean graduate student at Indiana University, was killed

outside of a Korean church.

Benjamin Smith was a former member of the World Church of the Creator, which is currently

led by Matt Hale of East Peoria, Illinois. Hale refers to himself as Pontifus Maximus and teaches

that only white Anglo-Saxons are true human beings, descendants of Adam and Eve. Jews are

believed to be illegitimate offspring of Eve and Satan, and African Americans and other people

of color are descendants of inferior non-Adamite anthropoids called “mud people.” The church

believes that the United States should be “cleansed” of all Jews and nonwhites. The church’s

Web site features a discussion of the mental inferiority of African Americans, with a reference to

Canadian psychologist Philippe Rushton’s “scientific” research confirming this view.

Although groups such as the World Church of the Creator are small, with only a few thousand

members, their influence seems to be on the rise. For many years, most anthropologists and

other social scientists believed that racism and ethnic conflict were going to decline.
Unfortunately, however, more extremist racist and ethnic groups have emerged in many parts of

the world within the past decade. For example, in the former East Germany there has been a rise

of a neo-Nazi movement among German youth who resent the immigration of nonwhites into

their society. Recently, ethnic extremism among the Hutu and Tutsi peoples in Central Africa

has resulted in tragic genocidal policies. Conflicts among Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnians in

Yugoslavia, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Jews and Arabs in Israel, and so-called “white

Europeans” and “people of color” in the United States are ongoing. Everywhere one looks ethnic

conflicts seem to be emerging worldwide. Although the causes of these conflicts are very

complex, ethnic and race conflicts remain a continuing global problem in the twenty-first

century.

Currently, we live in societies that are becoming more globalized, with more extensive contact

among peoples of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures. Globalization refers to the

expansion and interlinking of the world’s economy through the spread of market capitalism,

communications technology, and industrialization and their consequences. One of the results of

globalization has been the transfer of capital, technology, labor, and media throughout the world.

Global migration trends have been radically transformed since the 1950s. Immigration from

Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—the so-called Third World

—to the industrial societies of Europe, the United States, Australia, and Canada has increased

substantially. For example, England and France have growing numbers of immigrants from their

former colonies in Africa and Asia. Furthermore, the societies in the Third World are also being

transformed by new trends in immigration. Refugees and migrants are becoming increasingly

mobile throughout the world. Societies that may have been very homogeneous or ethnically

similar in the past are now facing questions about their increasing multicultural and multiethnic
differences.

As we will see in later chapters, U.S. society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

faced similar issues. Immigrants flowed into the United States from many areas of the world.

Currently, the United States is again encountering the challenge of multiculturalism. For

example, a typical elementary school in Los Angeles may have as many as 20 different native

languages spoken by members of the school population. In 2000 California became the first U.S.

state where the white ethnic population became a minority. Due to the increase of Hispanic and

Asian populations, the white ethnic population was 49.9 percent. Event calendars in daily

newspapers announce ethnic festivals in major U.S. cities that originated in many nations. All of

these changes have resulted in some reservations regarding the new ethnic patterns and

multiculturalism in the United States. In 1991, the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger

wrote a book entitled The Disuniting of America, which argued that ethnic and racial separatism

was the major obstacle for a truly integrated multicultural society in U.S. society. Schlesinger

believes that extreme versions of multicultural education and what he terms the “cult of

ethnicity” are tearing apart the U.S. social and political fabric. He suggests that the growing

emphasis on multicultural heritage exalts racial and ethnic pride at the expense of social and

political cohesion. On the other hand, other scholars, such as Nathan Glazer in his book We Are

All Multiculturalists Now, argue that all children should be taught mutual tolerance and respect

for all of the various ethnic groups in U.S. society.

As societies become more multicultural and multiethnic, they confront new challenges. In

many circumstances, ethnic groups may be in competition with each other over political and

economic resources. In other cases, they may be at odds over religious or other cultural

differences. Conversely, some people are benefiting from the multicultural trends in their society
by learning from one another’s cultures, thereby discovering that multicultural environments can

enrich one’s experience and can be extremely rewarding.

In any case, many people are seeking answers to basic questions regarding these new changes

in race and ethnic trends within their societies in the twenty-first century. What are the reasons

for these continuing race and ethnic conflicts and problems? Do the claims of people like Matt

Hale and the World Church about superior and inferior racial groups have any scientific

validity? What are the significant distinctions among the races? What is the difference between

race and ethnicity? What is the basis of one’s ethnic identity? Why do some societies and

countries have less race and ethnic conflict than others? Why has there been a recent increase in

racial and ethnic conflict around the globe? Have these racial and ethnic conflicts always

existed? Under what conditions do increases in race and ethnic conflict occur? Under what

societal conditions do race and ethnic prejudice and discrimination develop? In what interracial

and interethnic situations can race and ethnic prejudice be reduced? Under what conditions do

different ethnic groups live peaceably together and benefit from each other’s experience?

Anthropologists are currently engaged in major research efforts in an attempt to answer some

of these questions. In fact, anthropology as a discipline has an intimate acquaintanceship with

questions about race and ethnicity issues. Anthropology was the first field devoted to systematic

scientific investigations into questions about race and ethnicity. These questions persist as one of

the fundamental priorities within the research efforts of contemporary anthropologists.

This textbook will cover some of the most important research on race and ethnicity by

anthropologists. But, first, we will discuss the interrelationship between these questions about

race and ethnicity and the discipline of anthropology.

ANTHROPOLOGY: THE FOUR FIELDS AND RACE AND ETHNICITY

 ISSUES

The word anthropology stems from the Greek words anthropo, meaning “human beings” or

“humankind,” and logia, translated as “knowledge of” or “the study of.” Thus, we can define

anthropology as the systematic study of humankind. The field of anthropology emerged in

Western society in an attempt to understand non-Western peoples. Europeans, including

Christopher Columbus, had been exploring and colonizing the world since the fifteenth century.

They had encounters with non-Western peoples in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and

Asia. Various European travelers, missionaries, and government officials had described some of

these non-Western societies, cultures, and races. By the nineteenth century, anthropology had

developed into the primary discipline and science for understanding these non-Western societies,

races, and cultures. The major questions that these early nineteenth-century anthropologists

grappled with had to do with the basic differences and similarities of human societies, cultures,

and races throughout the world.

The predominant explanation that nineteenth-century anthropologists offered to explain the

differences and similarities among human societies, cultures, and races became known as

unilineal evolution. Charles Darwin had developed his theory regarding the evolution of life in

1859, with the publication of his book The Origin of the Species. Many anthropologists of the

nineteenth century were influenced by Darwin’s thesis, and attempted to apply these

evolutionary concepts to the study of human societies, cultures, and races. These early

anthropologists took the descriptions of early historians, archaeologists, classical scholars,

travelers, missionaries, and colonial officials for their basic data. Based on these data, they

proposed that all societies and cultures had developed from early, original “savage” stages

through a stage of “barbarianism,” and eventually some evolved into “civilized” stages. Thus,
these early anthropologists developed models of the stages of humankind’s universal history

using the concept of unilineal evolution.1 They constructed a model of a hierarchy of societies

that could be ranked from savage to civilized based on differences in society, culture,

technology, and race.

Since the nineteenth century, anthropology as a field has continued its research efforts of

different societies, cultures, and “races.” However, beginning in the twentieth century, many of

the ideas of nineteenth-century theorists were thoroughly criticized and debunked through

systematic and scientific research techniques. The efforts of nineteenth-century anthropologists

need to be understood within their own historical setting. These early anthropologists did not

have a very precise understanding of the concept of “culture,” nor did they comprehend the roles

of genetics and heredity. The development of a more thorough concept of culture and a scientific

understanding of heredity and genetics did not develop until the twentieth century. Because of

their limited understanding of culture and heredity, they labored under many misconceptions

about non-Western societies, cultures, and races. One of the basic underlying assumptions was
1
The British Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917) is one of the best known nineteenth-century anthro-

pologists. Tylor’s major anthropological and theoretical works are Primitive Culture, 2 vol. (vol-

ume 2 is titled Religion in Primitive Culture, part II of Primitive Culture, Harper Torchbooks,

1871/1958); Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization

(John Murray, 1881); and Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man (D. Appleton,

1881/1898). The other well-known nineteenth-century anthropologist is the American Lewis

Henry Morgan (1818–81). Morgan did an early anthropological work entitled League of the Ho-

De-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois (2 vols., New York), a detailed description of one group of Seneca

Indians living in upstate New York. Morgan’s later work included a cross-cultural analysis text

called Ancient Society (1877), which had an enormous influence on nineteenth-century thought.
that their own society and culture were superior to those of any other. This is an example of

what is known as ethnocentrism, the belief that one’s own society and culture are superior to any

other. In addition, during the nineteenth century most of these early anthropologists were

convinced that their own so-called “race” was superior to that of any other “race.” This is known

as racism, the belief that there are distinctive biological “races” and that one can rank and

categorize superior and inferior biological “races” within the human species.

It was only after twentieth-century anthropologists absorbed the new findings of genetics and

heredity, developed a more sophisticated comprehension of the concept of culture, and had a

better appreciation of concepts of “race” and “ethnicity” that these earlier views could be

criticized exhaustively. One of the major anthropological projects that critiqued these early

views was associated with the efforts of Franz Boas (1858–1942). Boas had been born, educated,

and trained in physics in Germany. Later he became interested in geography and culture and did

research among the Eskimo in the Canadian Arctic. Through these experiences he turned to the

study of anthropology, immigrated to the United States, and taught for many years at Columbia

University. While at Columbia, Boas and his students carried out extensive research in physical

anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology (or ethnology), providing the

contemporary foundations for the systematic investigation of such topics as race, culture, and

ethnicity (Degler 1991; Stocking 1968). One of the primary aspects of research that Boas

emphasized was the “fieldwork” experience in anthropology. Instead of speculating on various

theories about the evolution of culture based on written materials, anthropologists had to go into

the “field” and do empirical research among the people in different societies.

In the United States, Boas’s research activities developed into what has become known as the

“four-field approach” within anthropology. Most U.S. anthropology programs feature four
subdisciplines, or subfields, that bridge the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the

humanities. These four subdisciplines—physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistic

anthropology, and ethnology—give anthropologists a broad, holistic approach to the study of

humanity through space and time. In addition, all four of these fields have enabled contemporary

anthropologists to contribute significantly toward the study of race and ethnicity. Though these

four subfields demarcate the fields within which most anthropological research is conducted, we

need to emphasize that within these four fields anthropologists draw on the findings of many

other disciplines, such as biology, history, psychology, economics, sociology, and political

science to examine race and ethnic relations. These four fields, however, offer anthropologists a

unique perspective for assessing questions of race and ethnicity.

Physical Anthropology

Physical anthropology (or biological anthropology) is the branch of anthropology most closely

related to the natural sciences. Physical anthropologists conduct research in two major areas:

human evolution and human variation. The majority of physical anthropologists focus on human

evolution. Some investigate fossils, the preserved remains of bones and living materials from

earlier periods, to reconstruct the evolution and anatomical characteristics of early human

ancestors. The study of human evolution through analysis of fossils is called paleoanthropology

(the prefix paleo means “old” or “prehistoric”). Paleoanthropologists use a variety of

sophisticated scientific techniques to date, classify, and compare fossil bones in order to

determine the links between modern humans and their biological ancestors. For example,

paleoanthropologists are studying the relationship of early populations of Homo erectus and

Neandertals to determine their precise connections with modern humans.

As we will see in Chapter 2, on race, paleoanthropologists have been doing basic research on
the evolution of physical characteristics of ancestral populations in all parts of the world.

Paleoanthropologists have developed elaborate techniques to measure observable physical

characteristics of humans based on their fossil remains, primarily fossil bones and teeth. Early

paleoanthropologists tried to establish clear-cut criteria for distinguishing the evolution of

various “races” in different regions of the world. However, modern paleoanthropologists have

concluded that these early attempts were based on simplistic categories of racial differences.

Today, paleoanthropologists have much more sophisticated methods and techniques for

differentiating ancestral human populations, and they exercise extreme caution when evaluating

the evolution of different races.

Another group of physical anthropologists focuses their research on the range of physical

variation within and among different “modern” human populations. These physical

anthropologists study human variation by measuring physical characteristics such as body size,

by comparing blood types, and by examining differences in skin color or hair texture. Human

osteology is the particular area of specialization within physical anthropology dealing with the

comparative study of the human skeleton and teeth. Physical anthropologists are also interested

in evaluating how disparate physical characteristics reflect evolutionary adaptations to different

environmental conditions, thus shedding light on why human populations vary. Noting how

specific physical traits have enabled these populations to adapt to different geographic

environments, these anthropologists reveal how human populations have developed. Early

physical anthropologists wanted to use biological attributes to classify various living populations

throughout the world into distinctive “races.” Eventually, however, physical anthropologists

developed advanced research techniques and methods that led to the abandonment of simplistic

constructions of “race” among human populations. As physical anthropologists have learned

more about physical variation among human populations, they became more aware of how

difficult it was to classify humans into distinguishable “racial” populations. They discovered that

traditional biological characteristics such as skin color did not necessarily correlate with other

physical characteristics that demarcate one “race” from another. In fact, the vast majority of

anthropologists have rejected the concept of “race” as a useful scientific concept. Thus, today,

physical anthropologists have learned to be extremely careful with their assessment procedures

in attempting to study biological characteristics and classifications among human populations.

An increasingly important area of research for some physical anthropologists is genetics, the

study of the biological “blueprints” that dictate the inheritance of physical characteristics.

Research on genetics examines a wide variety of questions. It has, for example, been important

in identifying the genetic sources of some diseases such as sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and

Tay-Sachs disease. Genetics has also become an increasingly important complement to

paleoanthropological research. Through the study of the genetic makeup of modern humans,

geneticists have been working on calculating the genetic distance among modern humans, thus

providing a possible means of inferring evolutionary relationships within the species. For

example, genetic studies have been used to determine the physical and evolutionary connections

between Native American Indians and Asian peoples.

Archaeology

Through archaeology, the branch of anthropology that seeks out and examines the artifacts of

past societies, we learn much about the lifestyles, history, and evolution of those societies.

Artifacts, the material remains of former societies, provide tangible clues to the lifestyle,

environments, and political economies of extinct societies. Some archaeologists investigate past

societies that did not have written documents through which to leave a record of their past.
Known as prehistoric archaeologists, these researchers study the artifacts of groups such as

Native Americans to understand how these people lived. Other archaeologists, called classical

archaeologists, conduct research on ancient civilizations such as Egyptian, Greek, and Roman,

in collaboration with historians and linguists. Another group of archaeologists, known as

historical archaeologists, pursue research with historians and investigate the artifacts of societies

of the more recent past. For example, many historical archaeologists are probing the remains of

plantations in the southern United States to gain an understanding of the lifestyles of slaves and

slave owners during the nineteenth century.

Only after intensive analysis do archaeologists cautiously interpret the data they have

collected and begin to generalize about a past society. Unlike the glorified adventures of

fictional archaeologists, the real-world field of archaeology thrives on the intellectually

challenging adventure of careful, systematic, detail-oriented scientific research that enhances our

understanding of past societies.

Modern archaeologists have developed a greater in-depth understanding of past societies in

various parts of the world, and have shown how environmental circumstances and prehistoric or

historic conditions have influenced the societal development of human populations in different

regions. They have illuminated through careful research how nineteenth-century archaeologists

were misled by their simplistic categorizations, and racist and ethnocentric beliefs, in assessing

the societal developments of other cultures. Thus, recent archaeological research has refuted

racist and ethnocentric views about non-European or non-Western societies.

Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistics, the study of language, has a long history that dovetails with the discipline of

philosophy, but it is also one of the integral subfields of anthropology. Linguistic anthropology
focuses on the relationship between language and culture, how language is used within society,

and how the human brain acquires and uses language. Franz Boas was the founder of linguistic

anthropology in North America, and his pioneering linguistic research revolutionized the study

of language, culture, and ethnicity.

As do researchers in other fields within anthropology, linguistic anthropologists seek to

discover the ways in which languages are different from each other as well as how they are

similar. Two wide-ranging areas of research in linguistic anthropology are structural linguistics

and historical linguistics. Structural linguistics explores how language works. Structural

linguists compare grammatical patterns and other linguistic elements to learn how contemporary

languages mirror and differ from one another. Structural linguistics has uncovered some

intriguing relationships between language and thought patterns among different groups of

people. Do people who speak different languages with different grammatical structures think and

perceive the world differently from each other? For instance, do native Chinese speakers think or

view the world and life experiences differently from native English speakers? This is just one of

the questions that structural linguists attempt to answer. Such questions bear on the relationship

among language, culture, and ethnicity.

Linguistic anthropologists also examine the connections between language and social behavior

in different cultures. This specialty, called sociolinguistics, focuses on both how language is

used to define social groups and how belonging to particular groups leads to specialized

language use. For example, a number of linguists have been doing research on Ebonics, a

distinctive variety of American English spoken by some African Americans. The term Ebonics is

derived from the words “ebony” and “phonics,” meaning “black speech sounds” (Rickford

1997). These linguistic anthropologists find that Ebonics is no more a lazy form of English than
Italian is a lazy form of Latin. Instead, Ebonics is a different language with systematically

ordered grammar and pronunciation usages. Linguistic research such as this has helped to undo

racist and ethnocentric assumptions about various ethnic minorities.

Another area of research of interest to linguistic anthropologists is historical linguistics.

Historical linguistics concentrates on the comparison and classification of different languages to

discern their historical links. By examining and analyzing grammatical structures and sounds of

languages, researchers are able to discover rules for how languages change over time, as well as

which languages are related to each other historically. This type of historical linguistic research

is particularly useful in tracing the migration routes of various groups through time, confirming

archaeological and paleoanthropological data gathered independently. For example, historical

linguistics has been used to confirm the migration of the Navajo Native American Indians from

Canada down into the southwest region of the United States.

Ethnology

Ethnology, more popularly known as cultural anthropology, is the subfield of anthropology

that examines contemporary societies. Contemporary ethnologists do fieldwork in all parts of the

world, from the tropical rain forests of Africa and Latin America to the Arctic regions of

Canada, from the deserts of the Middle East to the urban areas of China. Until recently, most

ethnologists conducted research on non-Western or remote cultures in Africa, Asia, the Middle

East, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands, and on the Native American populations in the

United States. Today, however, many anthropologists are doing research on their own cultures in

order to gain a better understanding of their institutions and cultural values. In fact, as will be

seen in chapters in Part II, which focuses on the United States, ethnographers have been actively

engaged in research on ethnic groups in the United States for decades.

 Cultural anthropologists, or ethnologists, use a unique research strategy in conducting their

fieldwork in different settings. Unlike the early nineteenth-century “armchair” anthropologists,

contemporary ethnologists live for an extended amount of time within the societies that they

study. The American Franz Boas and the Polish-born British Bronislaw Malinowski are two

examples of those who used this important research strategy in twentieth-century anthropology.

They knew that the early studies relied too heavily on superficial, nonquantifiable descriptions

and comparisons from classical scholars, travelers, missionaries, and colonial government

officials.

Boas and Malinowski promoted and institutionalized the practice of doing intensive fieldwork

in the various societies around the world—a research strategy called participant observation,

which involves learning the language and culture of the group being studied by participating in

the group’s daily activities. Through this intensive participation, the ethnologist becomes deeply

familiar with the group and can understand and explain the society and culture of the group as an

insider. Presently, many anthropologists use the term etic to refer to the description of the

culture by the anthropologist, and emic to refer to the natives’ point of view of their culture. 2

The results of the fieldwork of the ethnologist are written up as an ethnography, a description

of a society. The typical ethnography describes the environmental setting, economic patterns,

social organization, political system, and religious rituals and beliefs of the society under study.
2
The terms etic and emic are derived from the words “phonetic” and “phonemic,” as used in lin-

guistics. Phonetics refers to the different types of sound units in languages. Thus, there is an In-

ternational Phonetic Alphabet used to designate various sound units of languages throughout the

world. In contrast, a phoneme is a sound unit that is understood to have a meaning within a par-

ticular language. Phonemics refers to the sound units understood by the native speaker of a spe-

cific language.
However, some ethnographies concentrate on particular areas such as religious beliefs and

practices, whereas others may focus on environmental conditions or political institutions. The

description of a society is based on what anthropologists call ethnographic data. The gathering

of ethnographic data in a systematic manner is the specific research goal of the ethnologist or

cultural anthropologist. Some anthropologists use ethnographic data to do comparative cross-

cultural studies of different societies. These comparative studies are extremely important in

discovering both differences and similarities among people throughout the world—one of the

major objectives of the anthropological project.

Most contemporary cultural anthropologists do their research in a much more different

manner than Boas or Malinowski did in the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, in the

twenty-first century, many of the so-called natives with whom ethnographers interact are

combining their traditional understanding of their own culture with formal education, and some

are even choosing to become anthropologists themselves. Thus, cultural anthropologists are

becoming more like colleagues with the people they are studying, collaborating on research

projects together. Instead of the “lone ranger” cultural anthropologist doing research alone on an

island among isolated tribal populations, contemporary anthropologists are more likely to reside

in urban areas and work with teams of people from the native population to comprehend the

effects of globalization and related processes and change within local regions of the world. And,

as we will see in this text, many present-day cultural anthropologists are working with ethnic

groups within their own society and collaborating on research projects to gain insights into

ethnic interaction and cultural change within multicultural societies.

Most U.S. anthropologists are exposed to all four subfields of anthropology in their education.

Because of all the research being done in these different fields, however, with more than three
hundred journals and hundreds of books published every year dealing with anthropological

research, no one individual can keep abreast of all the developments across the discipline’s full

spectrum. Consequently, anthropologists usually specialize in one of the four subfields. Though

the four-field approach tends to be an ideal for anthropology in this age of proliferating

information and research data, the research in these different disciplines has been important in

establishing basic conclusions regarding race, culture, and ethnicity.

As emphasized earlier, anthropology does not limit itself to its own four subfields to realize its

research agenda. Although it stands as a distinct discipline, anthropology is interdisciplinary and

has strong links to other fields of study. Cultural anthropology, for instance, is closely related to

the fields of history, cultural studies, and sociology. In the past, cultural anthropologists

examined traditional, whereas sociologists focused on modern societies. Today cultural

anthropologists and sociologists explore many of the same societies using similar research

approaches. For example, both rely on statistical and nonstatistical data whenever appropriate in

their studies of different types of societies. In later chapters, we will see how basic sociological

research has informed ethnographic studies of ethnicity. A recent, allied field that has influenced

anthropology is cultural studies, which combines a number of disciplines with the concept of

culture to do research on a number of topics related to ethnic and race relations. Likewise,

anthropology dovetails considerably with the field of history, which, like anthropology,

encompasses a broad range of events. Studies of ethnicity could not be conducted without a

comprehensive historical perspective. These fields, as well as others, which will become evident

throughout this textbook, have contributed to the anthropological perspective on race and ethnic

relations.

Through the four subfields and the interdisciplinary approach, anthropologists have
emphasized both a holistic and a global perspective. The holistic and global perspectives enable

anthropologists to consider the biological, environmental, psychological, economic, historical,

social, and cultural conditions of humans at all times and in all places. Anthropologists do not

limit themselves to understanding a particular ethnic group or set of societies but, rather, they

attempt to demonstrate the interconnections among different societies. This combined holistic

and global perspective is used throughout this text to demonstrate how different ethnic groups

have developed unique interrelationships and patterns throughout the world.

In this age of rapid communication, worldwide travel, and increasing economic

interconnections, young people preparing for careers in the twenty-first century must recognize

and be able to deal with the cultural and ethnic differences that exist among peoples while at the

same time also understanding the fundamental similarities that make us all distinctly human. In

this age of cultural diversity and increasing internationalization, sustaining this dual perception,

of underlying similar human characteristics and outward cultural differences, has both practical

and moral benefits. Although nationalistic, ethnic, and racial bigotry are rife in many parts of the

world, our continuing survival and successful adaptation depend on greater mutual

understanding and cooperation. Anthropology promotes a cross-cultural perspective that allows

us to see ourselves as part of one human family in the midst of tremendous diversity. Our society

needs citizens that have skills in empathy, tolerance of others, and an understanding of a

complex interlocking world. We need world citizens who can function in inescapably

multicultural and multinational environments to work cooperatively and become productive

citizens, as well as helping to solve humanity’s pressing problems of bigotry, poverty, and

violence.

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DARWINISM IN AMERICAN SOCIAL THOUGHT. OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.

RICKFORD, JOHN R. 1997. SUITE FOR EBONY AND PHONICS. DISCOVERY 18(2):82–87.

STOCKING, JR., GEORGE W. 1982 [1968]. RACE, CULTURE, AND EVOLUTION: ESSAYS IN THE

HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY. CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.