Race and racism / Ruth Benedict ; foreword by John Rex.

  • Ruth Benedict
Date:
1983
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Race and racism / Ruth Benedict ; foreword by John Rex. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/212 page 9
    Count de Gobineau. I have declared again and again,” Max Müller writes, 4 ‘that when I say Aryas (Aryans) I mean neither blood nor bones nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who spoke an Aryan language. When I speak of them I commit myself to no anatomical char acteristics. To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic [narrow-headed] dictionary or a brachycephalic [broad headed] grammar.” 1 Nevertheless, as we shall see in discussing the history of racism in Europe, the list of sinners has increased rather than diminished since Max Müller’s time. 2 The fundamental reason why language cannot be equated with race is that language is learned behaviour, and race is a classification based on hereditary traits. Language is only one special instance of how learned be haviour varies in mankind without relation to physical type. It was not only the Chinese language that the Manchus learned in China; they took over Chinese architecture, the forms of Chinese family life, Chinese ethics, Chinese literature, Chinese food. It is not only the English language that American Negroes use; they become Baptists and Methodists and Pullman car porters. Instead of learning, as in Africa, the elaborate technical ities of “throwing the bones” for divination, they learn the technicalities of reading and writing; instead of the complexities of mankala , the intricate peg-game of Africa and the Near East, they learn to shoot craps. Their culture becomes American. For culture is the sociological term for learned be haviour: behaviour which in man is not given at birth, 1 Biography of Words and the Home of the Aryans. London, 1888, p. 120. 2 I have myself in this volume used Slav , which refers to languages, as a racial term. There is no word in popular usage which designates this group in biological terms.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3