Visibility matters

Lipphardt, Veronika; Sommer, Marianne

doi:10.1177/0952695115607373

Cited by 34 publications

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

Single (sub)species then and now: An examination of the nonracial perspective of C. Loring Brace

Smith

2018

American J Phys Anthropol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

C. Loring Brace's writings on the concept of race have been among the most influential within anthropology. A review of the development of Brace's perspective on race shows that his philosophical approaches to fossil and modern human variation are consistent and integrated. Brace's views on race are compared with those of Ashley Montagu and Frank Livingstone, who also proposed eliminating "race" from anthropology, and with those of Stanley Garn and Alice Brues, who accepted "racial" subdivisions of humans. Carleton Coon's writings are more divergent; the aftermath of the publication of his Origin of Races highlights significant political tensions of the 1960s that intersected with scientific changes in anthropology emanating from the Evolutionary Synthesis. Recent forensic and "no race" positions are compared to explore their differences and the possibility of reconciliation, and the role of Brace and others in combating proposals of intellectual differences among human groups is discussed. While a spectrum of anthropological opinion regarding race exists, the commonalities are sufficient to allow valuable, united commentary emphasizing the complexity of modern human cultural and biological variation. Another of Brace's valuable contributions to the discipline has been as an historian, and a major focus of his historical research and writing has been an examination of the history of racial categorization.Both historical and scientific considerations led him to advocate an abandonment of the race concept. He was preceded in this view by Montagu (1941Montagu ( , 1942Montagu ( , 1951, who later became his coauthor for a general bioanthropology text (Brace & Montagu, 1965). The second edition of that text (1977) contains a chapter which details the history of the race concept, a chapter which set the foundation for Brace's later writings on the subject.In evaluating the development and influence of Brace's ideas on race, it is helpful to look at the ideas of some of his colleagues who wrote and conducted research in this area. In addition to Montagu, the main researchers targeted here will be Frank Livingstone, Stanley Garn, Carleton Coon, and Alice Brues. Montagu was a student of Boas at Columbia, Livingstone obtained his PhD from the University of Michigan, and Garn, Coon, and Brues all obtained Harvard degrees. The Harvard "bias" is easily explained. Prior to 1950, if one desired to be a biological anthropologist there was no other major institution in the United States in which to matriculate that had an established program 104

show abstract