5 - Biology

Summary

It's very simple. We are social beings. We are also animals. Problems begin when we try to tie those two statements together. The knot becomes tighter when nationalism is involved. Indeed it tends towards the Gordian when there appears to be a well-grounded biological basis to a certain ethnic identity, and questions of ‘race’ and thus of course accusations of ‘racism’, start to raise their head. The Basques are such a case. In this chapter, rather than lunge for a sword, metaphorical or otherwise, I wish to untie this particular knot piece by piece, and to assess the evidence as I go.

Anthropologists were for long interested in ‘race’. In fact in the nineteenth century, some of them were instrumental in providing it with a supposedly scientific status. But in the first decades of the twentieth century, American cultural anthropologists led by Franz Boas successfully championed the academic dismantling of scientific racism. In 1930s Germany however, some anthropologists were all too ready to advance the Nazi agenda by adding academic respectability to its virulently racist programme. The complete discrediting of their work, when details of the Holocaust began to emerge, plus a decade and a half later a vigorous debate in the United States about the biology and social significance of ‘race’ led many anthropologists to turn away from the study of both ‘race’ and racism. Instead, some of those interested in social identities researched ethnicities. This did not mean that racism went away, simply that it went uninvestigated. By the early 1990s many anthropologists had come to realize how inappropriate this shift in focus was, and how popular versions of ethnic identities were often bound up with contemporary forms of racism. The sum consequence is that ‘race’ and racism re-emerged as important objects of anthropological study.