Anthropologist Jennifer Raff argues that race is culturally created, but has biological consequences.人類學(xué)家珍妮弗·拉夫認為,種族的概念是由文化創(chuàng)造的,但也具有生物學(xué)的影響。 撰文\播音:史蒂夫·米爾斯基(Steve?Mirsky) 翻譯:邱燕寧 審校:張清越 “So humans are really really good, or at least Western traditionally educated humans are really,?really good at categorizing things into types.”? “西方傳統(tǒng)教育下的人類真的很擅長對事物進行歸類。” Jennifer Raff. She’s an anthropologist at the University of Kansas. Raff spoke last month at?New York University’s Journalism Institute. Jennifer Raff說。她是勘薩斯大學(xué)的人類學(xué)家。Raff上個月在紐約大學(xué)新聞學(xué)院發(fā)表了講話。 “And if you go back through the history of physical anthropology, which we now call ourselves biological anthropologists to distance ourselves from that history, we as a discipline have a lot to answer for. Because we were the ones who measured crania, measured skulls, to try to come up with…we called it the Caucasoid, and the Negroid and the Mongoloid types, right, this ideal specimen of a cranium that fit these perfect measurements. And that was the type. And we tried to fit in then every other person into one of these categories, and that…really?influenced eugenics.? “如果你回顧一下人類生理學(xué)的歷史就會發(fā)現(xiàn),作為一門學(xué)科,我們需要對很多問題負責(zé)。我們現(xiàn)在稱自己為人類生物學(xué)家,以便與那段歷史保持距離。我們是那些測量了頭蓋骨的人,并基于此把人類分為高加索人種,黑人和蒙古人種,對吧,這個理想的頭蓋骨樣本符合這些完美的測量,我們就把它稱為一種類型。我們試著把每個人都歸入這些類別,這直接導(dǎo)致了優(yōu)生學(xué)的出現(xiàn)。 “We still have that notion, are you this group, are you that group, when in reality we’re mixtures,?most of us are very mixed. We have lots of ancestry from lots of populations. So if we can stop thinking of these categories as these fixed entities, we’ll get somewhere.”? “我們?nèi)匀挥羞@樣的想法,‘你們是這個群體嗎?你們是那個群體嗎?’而實際上,我們都是雜合體,我們大多數(shù)人都混雜了不同的血統(tǒng)。我們有很多來自不同族群的祖先。因此,如果我們能停止將這些類別視為這些固定實體,我們才能有所突破。” Raff later noted that race does involve biology—but as an effect. ? 拉夫后來指出,種族確實涉及到生物學(xué),但這是一種對生物學(xué)的影響。 “But that doesn’t mean that these racial categories aren’t real in some sense. And what I mean by that is, yes, they are culturally constructed categories, but they actually have biological effects…when we create the race ‘black’ or ‘African-American’ or whatever we’re going to call it, we put people into that category regardless of their genetic background, right?? 這并不意味著這些種族類別在某種意義上是不真實的。我的意思是,是的,它們是文化建構(gòu)的類別,但它們實際上具有生物效應(yīng)。當(dāng)我們創(chuàng)造出“黑人”或“非洲裔美國人”或其他我們稱之為“黑人”的種族概念時,我們把人們歸入這一類,而不管他們的基因背景如何,對吧? “So, I always come back to this example: President Obama is just as much Irish as he is African-Am-, but we code him as black, right…, when we do that, when we categorize and classify people—that can have biological effects. We know that stress levels in African-Americans are chronically high, because of racism, because of structural racism, these categories that we’ve created, right? That is biological, that’s real. It may not be because of the genetic variants that they had or there may be some complicated interaction there, but these categories that we create, these social categories, have biological effects.”? “所以,我總是會想起這個例子:奧巴馬總統(tǒng)既是非洲裔美國人,也是愛爾蘭人,但我們把他定義為黑人,對吧……當(dāng)我們這樣做,當(dāng)我們對人進行分類和分類的時候,這些做法可能真的具有生物效應(yīng)。”我們知道非裔美國人的壓力水平長期處于高位,這是因為種族主義,因為結(jié)構(gòu)性種族主義,因為我們創(chuàng)造了這些類別,對吧?這種影響是生物學(xué)上的,是真實的。這可能不是因為他們有基因變異或者可能有一些復(fù)雜的相互作用,而是因為我們創(chuàng)造的這些類別,這些社會類別具有生物效應(yīng)。