From Race to Ethnic Group: A Historical perspective

Authors

Golam Mostapha Mondal

Abstract

The “Era of Expolaration” i.e during the 15th,16th and 17th centuries marks the discoveries of many new lands and people .For example ,in the year 1492 ,Christoper Columbus discovered the New World and the American Indians of that place. Following these discoveries ,people of America ,Africa and Asia-Pacific regions became known to the world .These people were classified along with Europeans into broad racial categories on the basis of physical characteristic.
From 18th century onwards Historians and Anthropologists became interested to study human physical variation and on the basis of that various attempts were made to classify the world population into different categories called ‘race’. The term ‘race’ was first used by Buffon, a French Naturalist in the 18th century. Prior to World War II,most studies of human variation focused on racial differences or phenotypic variation that are readily observable such as skin color, hair form ,body build, and stature between large, geographically defined population. The criteria that were used to classify the world population are some observable metric (eg Stature) and other biological characters (eg Blood groups andenzymes). For example , Blumenback ,a German scientist who first classified the world population into five varieties primarily on the basis of skin colour- F rom Human Race to ethnic group:A Historical Perspective.

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From Race to Ethnic Group: A Historical perspective. Golam Mostapha Mondal. 2023. IJIRCT, Volume 9, Issue 1. Pages 1-4. https://www.ijirct.org/viewPaper.php?paperId=2401013