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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (85032)	8/8/2000 9:41:28 AM
From: jbe	Respond to of 108807

Blue, I did some googling on the definition of "Caucasian," and I discovered that the story I told about the German scientist is not as apocryphal as I thought. Apparently, however, he was in love not with a living woman from the Caucasus, but with a dead woman's skull, and with an entire ethnos. THE MOST BEAUTIFUL "RACE" IN THE WORLD? A GEORGIAN SKULL, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE "CAUCASIAN RACE" Caucasian Variety. I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially the southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; ...That stock displays...the most beautiful form of the skull, from which, as from a mean and primeval type, the others diverge...Besides, it is white in color, which we may fairly assume to be the primitive color of mankind, since...it is very easy to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white. --Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, "On the Natural Varieties of Mankind" (1775) Of all the odd myths that have arisen in the scientific world, the "Caucasian mystery" invented quite innocently by Blumenbach is the oddest. A Georgian woman's skull was the handsomest in his collection. Hence it became his model exemplar of human skulls, from which all others might be regarded as deviations; and out of this, by some strange intellectual hocus-pocus, grew up the notion that the Caucasian man is the prototypic "Adamic" man. ----Thomas Henry Huxley, "Methods and Results of Ethnology" (1868) Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), one of the founders of modern anthropology, ranked "races" on the basis of aesthetic judgment. He thought that the Georgians, a people who are native to the Caucasus mountain region, were the most "beautiful" people in the world. The "beauty" of each "race" was ranked by how close each one came to an "ideal" skull that Blumenbach found in Georgia. He therefore assumed that "whites" in general originated in the Caucasus because "white" features were closest to Blumenbach's aesthetic ideal. Because of Blumenbach's obsession with Georgian "beauty," the word "Caucasian" became a "scientific" synonym for "white." However, Blumenbach's ranking was based more on facial features as opposed to skin color. This is why anthropology texts have usually claimed that "Caucasian" skin color can range from the fairest Swede to nearly "black" natives of India - as long as the features are sharp, the eyes "round," and the hair is straight, wavy or curly. This idea that "Caucasians" are the "beautiful race" beside whom all others fall short has never gone away. webcom.com

To: Ilaine who wrote (85032)	8/8/2000 1:11:26 PM
From: cosmicforce	Respond to of 108807

I feel somewhat troubled that, as a Caucasian, the fate of these Caucasians matters more to me than that of non-Caucasians. Don't feel bad, even infants respond better to people who look like their mother. They don't know what "they" look like cause they aren't self aware yet. It's a preprogrammed survival mechanism. The implications aren't ugly in and of themselves unless you equate the desire to be with "others like yourself" truly evil. I don't and I believe all of us have that desire at an emotional level. This general notion is pervasive and as you get more educated it is sublimated into a more general definition. Funny, most of my friends are engineers or scientists (of varying skin colors and genders). Are we a "race"? Non-techies seem to treat us that way.