Origins of Race in Forensic Anthropology | Dr. Jonathan Bethard скачать в хорошем качестве

Origins of Race in Forensic Anthropology | Dr. Jonathan Bethard

For inquiries and comments on this video, please send an email to Dr. Jon Bethard: jbethard@usf.edu In this video, Dr. Bethard explains the origins of a focus on race in the field of physical anthropology. Transcript: Bethard: in the early days in the early 20th century, mid 20th century, forensic anthropology developed sort of by—i won't say as an accident—but as an application of what physical anthropologists of the day were doing with regard to understanding human skeletal biology from archaeological sites around the united states as well as in several areas where anatomy labs were focused on skeletal biology as well those in particular were in Cleveland, Ohio, St. Louis, Missouri and in Washington DC and of course one cannot separate the history of physical anthropology without sort of thinking about the way in which the biological race concept was rooted very firmly in the discipline where the early thinkers of the day thought that there were distinctions, biologically based distinctions, between people who would– we would refer to as black, white, whatever taxonomic label we would use or whatever folk taxonomic taxonomic label we think about. And so there was this assumption that there were skeletal differences between different groups of people that assumption was embedded into the practice of the discipline from the get-go when forensic or when the early physical anthropologists looked at skeletons in forensic contexts or contexts where people were unidentified they looked at the skeleton to provide whatever information they could we call this today the biological profile and that profile are the attributes of the skeleton like a person's age how old they were how tall they were their biological sex etc but in addition there's this other component this fourth component of the biological profile that in the early days and for much of the 20th century was called race people thought that you could look at skeletons and provide some kind of determination or estimation as to a person's racial identity and this was done in many different ways in terms of the tools that were used regarding uh the techniques that the early folks used but i think it's really difficult to get at this question without recognizing that it's really from the beginning that the estimation of race as it was called for most of the disciplines history was just part of physical anthropology and therefore by extension was part of forensic anthropology or what became to be known as forensic anthropology