Much of the recent debate over race, genetics, and health has focused on the extent to which typological notions of race have biological meaning. Less attention, however, has been paid to the assumptions about the nature of "populations" that both inform contemporary biological and medical research and that underlie the concept of race. Focusing specifically on Africa in the 1930s and 1940s, this paper explores the history of how fluid societies were transformed into bounded units amenable to scientific analysis. In the so-called "Golden Age of Ethnography," university-trained social anthropologists, primarily from Britain and South Africa, took to the field to systematically study, organize, and order the world's diverse peoples. Intent on creating a scientific methodology of neutral observation, they replaced amateur travelers, traders, colonial administrators, and missionaries as authoritative knowledge producers about the customs, beliefs, and languages of indigenous peoples. At the same time, linguists were engaged in unifying African languages and mapping language onto primordial "tribal" territories. We argue that the notion of populations or "tribes" as discrete units suitable for scientific sampling and classification emerged in the 1930s and 1940s with the ethnographic turn in social anthropology and the professionalization and institutionalization of linguistics in Western and South African universities. Once named and entered into international atlases and databases by anthropologists in the U.S., the existence of populations as bounded entities became self-evident, thus setting the stage for their use in large-scale population genetic studies and the contemporary reinvigoration of broad claims of difference based on population identification.

译文

最近关于种族,遗传学和健康的许多辩论都集中在种族类型学概念在多大程度上具有生物学意义。然而,人们对 “人口” 性质的假设的关注较少,这些假设既为当代生物学和医学研究提供了信息,又为种族概念奠定了基础。本文特别关注20世纪30年代和20世纪40年代的非洲,探讨了流动社会如何转变为适合科学分析的有限单位的历史。在所谓的 “民族志的黄金时代” 中,主要来自英国和南非的受过大学训练的社会人类学家进入该领域,系统地研究,组织和秩序世界上的各个民族。为了建立一种科学的中立观察方法,他们取代了业余旅行者,商人,殖民地管理者和传教士,成为有关土著人民习俗,信仰和语言的权威知识生产者。同时,语言学家致力于统一非洲语言并将语言映射到原始的 “部落” 领土上。我们认为,人口或 “部落” 作为适合科学采样和分类的离散单位的概念出现在20世纪30年代中,并与社会人类学的人种学转向以及西方和南非大学语言学的专业化和制度化20世纪40年代。一旦被美国人类学家命名并进入国际地图集和数据库,种群作为有界实体的存在就变得不言而喻了,从而为它们在大规模种群遗传研究中的使用奠定了基础,并在当代重振了广泛的主张基于种群识别的差异。

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