tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post115452578340869547..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: On medieval raceCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154640276243980642006-08-03T17:24:00.000-04:002006-08-03T17:24:00.000-04:00In June, the Times reported a forthcoming study by...<I>In June, the Times reported a forthcoming study by physicist Greg Cochran, anthropologist Jason Hardy, and population geneticist Henry Harpending proposing that Ashkenazi Jews have been biologically selected for high intelligence, and that their well-documented genetic diseases are a by-product of this evolutionary history.</I><BR/><BR/>Good lord, it's depressing that this research gets credence, but why should I be surprised that the Times, which gives Reaganite hack-for-hire Charles Murray space, publishes such bad research? I read that Times piece when they published it and then tracked down the paper that the reporter so ineptly parroted. In short, the paper's garbage, at least so far as its apprehension of Ashkenazi history goes. Harpending's argument, iirc, is that Ashkenazim are smarter than other people because they were pushed into professions that required that they use their brain power, i.e., usury. How many 100s of ways is that wrong? Here's a few:<BR/><BR/>* European Jews had other professions available to them than moneylending, even in the few hundred years (say, 1150-1350) in which they were more important in this field;<BR/><BR/>* Most moneylenders were small timers, i.e., pawnbrokers.<BR/><BR/>If he wants to argue that a 'race' of people who were pawnbrokers for 200 years altered their genetic makeup for perpetuity, let him go ahead. But it's a sad, sad excuse for science. <BR/><BR/>When I brought these, and other arguments, to the attention of some of Harpending's acolytes on some blog, everyone made a lot of noise a la Pinkering, while I kept hitting them with the irritating facts.<BR/><BR/>Discouraging.<BR/><BR/>How Larry Summers, an economist who bears a heavy burden for the economic collapse of post-Soviet Russia, is thought fit to comment on neuroscience is beyond me.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154614701697753352006-08-03T10:18:00.000-04:002006-08-03T10:18:00.000-04:00I agree with JJC regarding Pinker's comments; I do...I agree with JJC regarding Pinker's comments; I don't find that stuff presuasive, either, but I provided that mainly to show that within science circles, the question of whether or not "race" is a valid scientific, or phylogenetic, category, is still somewhat of an open question.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154606852747227282006-08-03T08:07:00.000-04:002006-08-03T08:07:00.000-04:00I'm going to post something about race and genetic...I'm going to post something about race and genetics ina moment, but I want to thank Eileen for the Pinker (which I don't find all that persuasive, and "dangerous" only in a rather dull way). The excerpt from Bennett is really provocative, especially the lines about "the flawed epistemological assumption about a homogenous 'black' subject.".Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154560147819813972006-08-02T19:09:00.000-04:002006-08-02T19:09:00.000-04:00Check out all the bits of Numbers and Joshua where...Check out all the bits of Numbers and Joshua where God is telling the Israelites whom to enslave and whom merely to slaughter. It would be funny if it weren't an account of real conquest. And you'll note that more than just Catholics can use it as justification of slavery.<BR/><BR/>Western Civilization must have been deeeeelighted to have skin color and nose shape to appeal to; no more need for "But God said to." I wish I could remember when they started coloring Ham (son of Noah, not son of Piglet) as a support for slavery.<BR/><BR/>Some Latin American countries (and perhaps others, I don't know) still have nose shape as one of the identifying categories on ID cards, along with hair color and eye color.meghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04388701045008533927noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154558642197710362006-08-02T18:44:00.000-04:002006-08-02T18:44:00.000-04:00I should mention that Bennett's essay concerns its...I should mention that Bennett's essay concerns itself with the Portugese and the conquest of Guinea--i.e., with the early modern Iberian slave trade, and therefore the Catholic Church's presence was predominant.Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154558094250972612006-08-02T18:34:00.000-04:002006-08-02T18:34:00.000-04:00Still working my way through JJC's comments and ca...Still working my way through JJC's comments and came across--<BR/><BR/>"It could also be argued that a period that did not inherit the legacy of institutionalized slavery based upon skin color could not possibly have conceptualized race in our contemporary sense of the word. Perhaps, then, scholars ought to employ some other, less tainted term to describe medieval collectivities."<BR/><BR/>--and just wanted to interject briefly that, since I am also simultaneously reading that special issue of Representations [Fall 2005] on "Redress," I should also point out here that scholars of slavery in the colonial period [whether the European or American colonial period] are changing the way "chattel slavery" is understood--in other words, it may have had less to do with skin color, and more to do, as Herman L. Bennett argues in "'Sons of Adam': Text, Context, and the Early Modern African Subject," with how the Catholic church, on the basis of canon law, may have defined the African "subject." So, to whit, from Bennett:<BR/><BR/>"By ignoring the diverse laws and discourses shaping the early modern Atlantic encounters, scholars of slavery have produced a simplistic savage-to-slave scenario. Simply put, the European need for labor and its perception of Africans facilitated the transatlantic slave trade. As the reigning origin myth, the savage-to-slave trajectory still explains the African presence in the New World and confines the genesis of the transatlantic slave trade to a racial or materialist interpretation of early modern politics. But opting between the cultural and the economic or some combination thereof obscures the confluence of other discursive traditions that defined Africans and then constituted some as slaves. Such simplicity comes at a cost; it saddles social theory and our political reality with the flawed epistemological assumption about a homogenous 'black' subject."Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154555620708484952006-08-02T17:53:00.000-04:002006-08-02T17:53:00.000-04:00In JJC's post--cut from his recent book--he writes...In JJC's post--cut from his recent book--he writes:<BR/><BR/>"Race does not, scientifically speaking, exist. It belongs to the realm of fantasy, where it demonstrates a powerful ability to give substance to what is ultimately insubstantial."<BR/><BR/>JJC--can you elaborate on this, especially in relation to excerpt I shared from Pinker? I was thinking, too, especially viz. Meg's comments: do we need to define more precisely what we mean by "race"? Okay, okay--I know that in your excerpt, you do an amazing job of defining it from a medieval cultural perspective, but I feel that there is a kind of bio-spectral leftover we're still not dealing with quite adequately somehow.<BR/><BR/>[I'm still reading through JJC's excerpt, so . . . more later.]Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154551182962193822006-08-02T16:39:00.000-04:002006-08-02T16:39:00.000-04:00The main lesson I was thinking of is "The existenc...The main lesson I was thinking of is "The existence of the category is less germane than how the category was wielded by the people under discussion," followed a few steps back by "When humanists essay to work with scientific material, they should be prepared for the ground beneath their feet to shift suddenly, radically, and frequently outside their control."<BR/><BR/>But, you're right, I'm probably using a value of "we" that is far smaller than I want it to be.<BR/><BR/>One reason I suspect -- and this is merely conjecture, pulled out of my pocket along with a handful of lint -- is that we (where "we" == humanists) have science envy. Our colleagues in the natural sciences (supposedly) get all the toys, all the giant grants, and they get right & wrong answers on top of that. No need to defend one's work from charges of triviality, drum-pounding, or "reading too much into" an object of study.<BR/><BR/>Now, we ("we"==thee and me) know that's not really true -- just ask the EvBio folks. But the reality is, again, less germane than what we do with it.meghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04388701045008533927noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154548243481502622006-08-02T15:50:00.000-04:002006-08-02T15:50:00.000-04:00Meg--thanks for jumping into this conversation and...Meg--thanks for jumping into this conversation and for your recent post over at Xoom! re: the Harris, Stumpf & Harke article-excellent.<BR/><BR/>While we are talking about "ethnicity" and those "lessons" you say we have "learned" from the study of the term "race," let's keep in mind that the implications of "race"--from the biological point of view--is still very much an open and writhing can of worms [to hijack Meg's metaphor]. To whit, I will quote here some very recent writing from Steven Pinker on the subject [which I think is pertinent, not only to Meg's comment, but also to JJC's statement in his entry on "race" in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages that "Contemporary science has made it clear that there is no genetic basis for racial classification (that is, race is not ultimately a matter of discernable variation in human biology)]. This was Pinker's answer to Edge.org's 2005 question, "What is your dangerous idea?"<BR/><BR/>STEVEN PINKER: Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.<BR/><BR/>The year 2005 saw several public appearances of what will I predict will become the dangerous idea of the next decade: that groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments. <BR/><BR/>1. In January, Harvard president Larry Summers caused a firestorm when he cited research showing that women and men have non-identical statistical distributions of cognitive abilities and life priorities. <BR/><BR/>2. In March, developmental biologist Armand Leroi published an op-ed in the New York Times rebutting the conventional wisdom that race does not exist. (The conventional wisdom is coming to be known as Lewontin's Fallacy: that because most genes may be found in all human groups, the groups don't differ at all. But patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups, and different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the major races labeled by common sense. ) <BR/><BR/>3. In June, the Times reported a forthcoming study by physicist Greg Cochran, anthropologist Jason Hardy, and population geneticist Henry Harpending proposing that Ashkenazi Jews have been biologically selected for high intelligence, and that their well-documented genetic diseases are a by-product of this evolutionary history. <BR/><BR/>4. In September, political scientist Charles Murray published an article in Commentary reiterating his argument from The Bell Curve that average racial differences in intelligence are intractable and partly genetic. <BR/>Whether or not these hypotheses hold up (the evidence for gender differences is reasonably good, for ethnic and racial differences much less so), they are widely perceived to be dangerous. Summers was subjected to months of vilification, and proponents of ethnic and racial differences in the past have been targets of censorship, violence, and comparisons to Nazis. Large swaths of the intellectual landscape have been reengineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori (race does not exist, intelligence does not exist, the mind is a blank slate inscribed by parents). <BR/><BR/>The underlying fear, that reports of group differences will fuel bigotry, is not, of course, groundless. <BR/><BR/>The intellectual tools to defuse the danger are available. "Is" does not imply "ought. " Group differences, when they exist, pertain to the average or variance of a statistical distribution, rather than to individual men and women. Political equality is a commitment to universal human rights, and to policies that treat people as individuals rather than representatives of groups; it is not an empirical claim that all groups are indistinguishable. Yet many commentators seem unwilling to grasp these points, to say nothing of the wider world community. <BR/><BR/>Advances in genetics and genomics will soon provide the ability to test hypotheses about group differences rigorously. Perhaps geneticists will forbear performing these tests, but one shouldn't count on it. The tests could very well emerge as by-products of research in biomedicine, genealogy, and deep history which no one wants to stop. <BR/><BR/>The human genomic revolution has spawned an enormous amount of commentary about the possible perils of cloning and human genetic enhancement. I suspect that these are red herrings. When people realize that cloning is just forgoing a genetically mixed child for a twin of one parent, and is not the resurrection of the soul or a source of replacement organs, no one will want to do it. Likewise, when they realize that most genes have costs as well as benefits (they may raise a child's IQ but also predispose him to genetic disease), "designer babies" will lose whatever appeal they have. But the prospect of genetic tests of group differences in psychological traits is both more likely and more incendiary, and is one that the current intellectual community is ill-equipped to deal with.<BR/><BR/>------------end of Pinker----------<BR/><BR/>So, what "lessons" have we learned again, and how "well-equipped" [or not] are we again? Of course, as regards studies of race within the medieval period, what matters is what they thought/believed then, more so than what we think we know/believe now. Or not?Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1154543044260239172006-08-02T14:24:00.000-04:002006-08-02T14:24:00.000-04:00My current peeve with the use of "ethnicity" is th...My current peeve with the use of "ethnicity" is that we have not really brought the lessons we learned from the study of the term "race" to bear on it. <BR/><BR/>Get half a dozen scholars together and they will use "ethnicity" in half a dozen different ways if not more -- <I>and all without giving much thought to what it means</I>. Most will, as you say, have a strong attachment to corporeality (probably unexamined), and at least one will mean "race" but is too afraid of worms, in or out of the can, to utter the word aloud.<BR/><BR/>I was reading another blog this morning that discussed the pitfalls of "tribe" and tribalism, but now I can't recall who it was.meghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04388701045008533927noreply@blogger.com