Conceito de raça humana: pisando em ovos sem quebrar e não ofender a Darwin

Race Reconciled?: How Biological Anthropologists View Human Variation

Heather J.H. Edgar1,2 and Keith L. Hunley1*

1Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131

2Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131

In May 2006, the authors of this introduction had an argument about how best to describe and interpret human biological variation. The disagreement focused on whether human races exist, and, even if they do, whether we should continue to use the term ‘‘race’’ in our research and teaching. We eventually realized that we were re-hashing an argument that has no doubt taken place for generations (e.g., Mason, 1960; Montagu, 1964; Mead et al., 1968; also see Anthropology Newsletter 1997-1998 and Caspari, this issue) and that our different training, research interests, and life experiences had led us to approach the study of human biological variation from very different perspectives. One of us is a genetic anthropologist interested in the global pattern of neutral genetic variation. The other is a bioarchaeologist interested in how patterns of phenotypic variation are shaped by culture in the United States. Our exchange, coupled with our reading of recent literature from various subfields of biological anthropology, led us to suspect that our inability to communicate is widespread within our discipline and that it hampers effective collaboration. Inadequate communication and collaboration likely lead to less than optimum progress in solving important anthropological problems and send conflicting signals about human variation to our students and the public.

To address these issues, we decided to organize a meeting of scholars who had made original and important contributions to the study of human variation. The purpose of the meeting would be to outline our differences, to determine if they could be reconciled, and to explore ways to more effectively communicate our heterogeneous views within and outside our various disciplines.

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