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

:最近有关种族,遗传学和健康的辩论大多集中在种族的类型学概念具有生物学意义的程度上。但是,人们很少关注关于“种群”性质的假设,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。本文专门针对1930年代和1940年代的非洲,探讨了如何将流体社会转变为适合科学分析的有限单位的历史。在所谓的“人种学的黄金时代”,主要由英国和南非的受过大学训练的社会人类学家来到该领域,系统地研究,组织和整理了世界各族人民。为了创建一种科学的中立观察方法,他们取代了业余旅行者,商人,殖民地行政人员和传教士,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,语言学家们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”的概念是适合于科学采样和分类的离散单位,这是在1930年代和1940年代出现的,这是由于社会人类学的民族学转向以及西方和南非大学中语言学的专业化和制度化。一旦被美国人类学家命名并输入国际地图集和数据库,人口作为有限实体的存在就变得不言而喻,从而为将其用于大规模人口遗传研究和当代重新激发广泛的差异主张奠定了基础。根据人口识别。

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