Science is supposed be objective and free of the scientist’s values, but Franz Boaz turned Anthropology into an ideology: an ideology is a set of ideas that incorporate value judgements. In the Soviet Union everything was presented as they wished it was and not a reflection of reality. All policies were introduced ostensibly for the workers but the elites were rich and lived in exclusive areas like our elites; it explained everything in economic or material terms and other aspects of life are left out.
Ideology is reasoning from the orthodox belief rather than from empirical evidence and the subjects are slotted into it. There are two sides good and bad people like the war with The Devil in Christianity.
Boas changed the object of the racial bias in anthropology from tribes onto Europeans. He taught that theories should be treated as works in progress, until proven beyond doubt. His grounding in the natural sciences made him aware that the difference in the study of humans from geography or zoology was the study of “culture.” He did not see culture as linear progression, until it reached the level European civilisation and rejected the attendant notion that those who were behind were inferior.
Boas was the first scientist to state that the White and the Negro were fundamentally equal and he actively supported African American organizations. (1) As an anthropologist he sought to use science, including his studies of tribal peoples, to seek out and document the truth about the significance of race. It was his hope that people could learn to be tolerant of difference, and to see so-called primitives not as inferior or less developed, but as a source of diversity that had much to offer.
Researchers had noted differences in height, cranial measurements, and other physical features between Americans and people from different parts of Europe and to many this showed innate biological difference between races. Boas’s primary interest was the study of processes of change; he set out to determine whether bodily forms are also subject to processes of change. This was in his mind when he studied 17,821 people, divided into seven ethno-national groups. The problem with that is diet: the cranials of Japanese immigrants grew bigger because of nutrition. People grow bigger now and there are fewer bandy-legged people because of less rickets.
For 90 years Boas 1912 study on the plastic nature of the human body in response to changes in the environment was taken as evidence of cranial plasticity but the biological validity was just accepted without proper examination. By using pedigree information in Boas’ data, narrow sense heritabilities are estimated by the method of maximum likelihood. In addition, a series of tests and regression analyses are performed to determine the statistical validity of Boas’ original findings on differentiation between American and European-born children and the prolonged effect of the environment on cranial form. Results show the relatively high genetic component of the head and face diameters despite the environmental differences during development.
In 2002, anthropologists Corey S. Sparks and Richard L. Jantz, claimed that differences between children born to the same parents in Europe and America were insignificant, and that there was no detectable effect of exposure to the American environment on the cranial index in children. Their results contradicted Boas’s findings and showed they could not be used to support arguments of plasticity in cranial morphology.
The ideological approach led to massive damage to our way of life when Margaret Mead adapted her findings to her ideology. Her book Coming of Age in Samoa(1928) undermined Western civilisation. The book is based on nine months of anthropological fieldwork in which she claimed that Samoan teenage girls experienced neither the sexual restrictions nor the psychological problems of Western women. The claim was presented, and widely accepted, as significant evidence in the debate between biological determinism and cultural relativism. Published in 1928, it is one of the most influential books of the twentieth-century.
The book influenced Dr. Benjamin Spock and Bertrand Russell and changed people’s attitudes on adolescence and its crises, free love, feminism, sexual diversity, child rearing and libertarian education. The media loved pictures of this young woman scientist and the cover of the first edition had a half-naked couple gamboling hand in hand among palm trees. She used her research as propaganda and following a suggestion by her publisher added chapters on “what all this means to Americans”. The result was a change in Western society’s self-perception and attitudes to sexuality. She ignored and played down data that did not fit the ideology she wanted. (4)
A follower of Boas was one of the most influential people of the twentieth-century, Claude Levi-Strauss. After the Second War the UN set up a cultural and scientific body, UNESCO. They held a series of conferences to get away from Nazism and return to the values of The Enlightenment. Never again must a people be imprisoned within their culture. (5)
He presented a paper to the UNESCO meeting in London in 1951 and claimed that “a tribe” was no less sophisticated than Westerners. To present them as equal the content of culture must be disregarded and only the structure considered. To explain: a folk story from Africa or anywhere, is equal to our cultural productions like Hamlet because it can be shown that they have similar structures. As someone who has studied scriptwriting, play writing and is familiar with the mythological writings of Joseph Campbell, I am well aware that the enjoyment of a film or play, needs things to occur in the right order. The simplest order is beginning, middle and end. You can not omit the content because then you would not be watching anything. It is the content of Hamlet or Pride and Prejudice that we enjoy. How often do you hear one say: “Wasn’t it marvellous the way the film got the chase scene in the right place?”
Levi-Strauss also criticised the way we see everything from our point of view - “Ethnocentrism.” This is seeing our own culture as best and prejudiced to regard other cultures as less advanced than European: yet, it is self-destructive to see other cultures as better than ours. Prejudice had to be destroyed and the method was, not to advocate our reason to others but to adopt their reason.
In Race and History Levi-Srauss denied that the concept of race explains anything and the differences between human groups were because of:
“geography and society, not to aptitudes having any clear link with the anatomy or physiology of blacks, yellows or whites.... It was not enough to distinguish social heritage from biological, to separate life-styles from all genetic determinism, or biological explanations of culture. One had also to fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically. The multiple variations of the human race in time and space must not be classified in terms of a sequential movement towards perfection. They were not, as it were, so many markers of a triumphal progression.”
Again, if we read or watch Hamlet or Pride and Prejudice, the vocabulary, dress and manners are strange to us but not the basic human nature of falling in love, wanting status and money. This is not the “one Race” of Progressives, but a common humanity, common to all peoples. The difference is not in the structure of their minds but in the content: the propensity to common traits like belonging, loyalty, enmity, grudges etc are directed to their own respective peoples, not all people.
If we go back far enough, everyone came from somewhere else. Such kinship instincts are straight-forward in wild animals but become confused in domesticated animals and humans.
Richard Dawkins argues that altruism towards non-kin is a misfiring of a genetic urge to help bodies that contain a high proportion of our own alleles. Hamilton’s rule implies that such misfiring (insufficiently discriminating altruism) on a large scale will cause the very allele for altruism itself to be phased out of the gene pool - and make it genetically advantageous to be an exploiter of others’ generosity until such “goodness” disappears as a trait in the population.(6) That scientific statement is similar to Edmund Burke’s definition of a nation as involving a shared identity, history and ancestry, and continuity:
“… it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living and those who are dead, but between those who are living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
I see no reason why we should need to demonstrate scientific evidence of our being a race. This our White British country(ies) We have possession by long occupation which is sanctified by time and emotional bonding. We have the opposite imposed on us and it has been discovered that increasing genetic diversity in a population causes altruism to become proportionately less common (Professor Putnam).
Our would-be disposessors use a trick to de-humanise us as “mongrels”, “no such thing as the British” or “were all immigrants.” It is to reduce us to an “unpeople” and to dispossess us of our country and communities. It prevents the elites having to feel any conscience at their wicked behaviour because we don’t really exist and therefore have no claim to the territory. It belongs to anyone and everyone.
The fact that scientists have refrained for decades from describing, defining or categorising people by their morphological characteristics is a reflection of the flight from Hitler that has been imposed than it is a demonstration that race is not a scientific concept. (7)
If we consider the peoples of the world in their native settings, it is easy to define those peoples who are distinctly ‘European’ or of ‘white race’. In doing so, we should not worry that no-one has absolutely white skin, because the term ‘white’ when used in the context of race is simply a taxonomic term. This taxonomic term refers to the paleness of the skin of people people of white race, it is not a literal chromatological description in the same way that when we refer to negros (’negro’ being derived from the root word meaning ‘black’), we are describing people who fall into a taxonomic group characterised in part by the darkness of their skin colour. The term ‘negro’ is again a taxonomic term in this context, and again, not a literal chromatological description.
The defining or racial groups is therefore a matter of taxonomy, i.e. based upon a process of classification, and the discussion of race should not be clouded by the disingenuous use of semantics.
In Race(1974)J.R.Baker classifies human races as animal subspecies are classified. He looked at the nature of civilisation and gave 23 criteria by which civilizations may be identified. He explores the relationship between the biological traits and the cultures of five civilizations. Based on these criteria, Baker declared no indigenous civilisations ever appeared in Africa. He rejected the methodological relivatis used in anthropology since Boas and reverted to hereditarianism and cultural evolution. He used the Latin term stirps for a line
of descendants from an ancestor; stock or strain. When people refer to the ‘white race’, they usually mean the bulk of the people who form the Caucasian group, but excluding those that have significantly altered characteristics as a result of racial admixture. Albeit that these excluded groups might still fall within the ‘Caucasian’ group for taxonomic purposes, they would not normally be regarded as ‘white’ from an ethnic, social or political perspective.
of descendants from an ancestor; stock or strain. When people refer to the ‘white race’, they usually mean the bulk of the people who form the Caucasian group, but excluding those that have significantly altered characteristics as a result of racial admixture. Albeit that these excluded groups might still fall within the ‘Caucasian’ group for taxonomic purposes, they would not normally be regarded as ‘white’ from an ethnic, social or political perspective.
It is not possible for most people to trace each ancestral line back beyond the 1800s, as the first census of England, Wales and Scotland was not conducted until 1801. Beyond this there are only parish records which are very laborious and time consuming to research and which are often incomplete or inconclusive and which can result in a ‘dead end’ where there was illegitimacy in the family, when a mother’s name may be recorded in a birth certificate, but not the father’s.
Genealogical records only record genealogy and genealogy should not be confused with genetics.
We should not confuse geography with race. For example the E1b1b1 Haplogroup does originate in North East Africa (Egypt), but that was c.20,000 years ago during the height of the last ice age, when the climate of Egypt would have been much more temperate than at present and when North Africa was inhabited by people of Cro-Magnon or Proto-European. As the ice age subsided and the ice sheets retreated northwards, so people from southern Europe migrated northwards and people from North Africa migrated up through the Middle East into the Balkans. The presence of the E1b1b1 Haplogroup therefore provides no conclusive evidence of non-European ancestry, it simply shows that one of a person’s ancestral lines originated in Egypt 20,000 years ago.
(1) Boas’s talk on racial equality was delivered in 1911
(3) UNESCO http://www.comminit.com/en/node/2471/36
