SA 101 Lecture 12: SA 101 Race Notes

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Sociology and Anthropology
• Course: SA 101
• Professor: Natasha Ferenczi

Document Summary

Sa 101: race (week 12, november 22, 2016) Language and thought interact in multiple significant ways, but there is disagreement on the proposition of each specific language has its own influence on the thought and actions of its speakers: race is a cultural construction. This theory must be understood in its historical context, a reaction to the denigrating treatment towards unwritten languages, a part of the evolutionary view of the 19th century: perhaps over structuralist. Franz boas was a key opponent of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept, and that human behaviour is best understood through biological characteristics. Franz boas and his students (edward sapir) showed unwritten languages to be as systematic and logical as any european language: ex. A dialect of a language is less of the language. Some early europeans scholars tried to systematically classify homo sapiens into races based on geographic location and phenotypic features (skin colour, race, gender)