The Nordic race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. [1] [2] [3] It was once considered a race or one of the putative sub-races into which some late-19th to mid-20th century anthropologists divided the Caucasian race, claiming that its ancestral homelands were Northwestern and Northern Europe, [4] [5] [6] [7] particularly to populations such as Anglo-Saxons, Germanic peoples, Balts, Baltic Finns, Northern French, and certain Celts, Slavs and Ghegs. [8] [9] [10] The supposed physical traits of the Nordics included light eyes, light skin, tall stature, and dolichocephalic skull; their psychological traits were deemed to be truthfulness, equitability, a competitive spirit, naivete, reservedness, and individualism. [11] In the early 20th century, the belief that the Nordic race constituted the superior branch of the Caucasian race gave rise to the ideology of Nordicism.
With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. [12] In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past." [13]
The Russian-born French anthropologist Joseph Deniker initially proposed "nordique" (meaning 'northern') as an "ethnic group" (a term that he coined). He defined nordique by a set of physical characteristics: the concurrence of somewhat wavy hair, light eyes, reddish skin, tall stature and a dolichocephalic skull. [14] Of six 'Caucasian' groups Deniker accommodated four into secondary ethnic groups, all of which he considered intermediate to the Nordic: Northwestern, Sub-Nordic, Vistula and Sub-Adriatic, respectively. [15] [16]
The notion of a distinct northern European race was also rejected by several anthropologists on craniometric grounds. German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow attacked the claim following a study of craniometry, which gave surprising results according to contemporary scientific racist theories on the "Aryan race". During the 1885 Anthropology Congress in Karlsruhe, Virchow denounced the "Nordic mysticism", while Josef Kollmann, a collaborator of Virchow, stated that the people of Europe, be they German, Italian, English or French, belonged to a "mixture of various races", furthermore declaring that the "results of craniology" led to "struggle against any theory concerning the superiority of this or that European race". [17]
Other supposed "Caucasian sub-races" were the Alpine race, Dinaric race, Iranid race, East Baltic race, and the Mediterranean race.
American economist William Z. Ripley purported to define a "Teutonic race" in his book The Races of Europe (1899). [18] He divided Europeans into three main subcategories: Teutonic, Alpine and Mediterranean. According to Ripley the Teutonic race resided in Scandinavia, northern France, northern Germany, the Baltic states and East Prussia, northern Poland, northwest Russia, Great Britain, Ireland, and parts of Central and Eastern Europe, and was typified by light hair, light skin, light eyes, tall stature, a narrow nose, and slender body type. It was Ripley who popularized this idea of three biological European races. Ripley borrowed Deniker's terminology of Nordic (he had previously used the term "Teuton"); his division of the European races relied on a variety of anthropometric measurements, but focused especially on their cephalic index and stature.
Compared to Deniker, Ripley advocated a simplified racial view and proposed the concept of a single Teutonic race linked to geographic areas where Nordic-like characteristics predominate, and contrasted these areas to the boundaries of two other types, Alpine and Mediterranean, thus reducing the "caucasoid branch of humanity" to three distinct groups. [19]
By 1902 the German archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna identified the original Aryans (Proto-Indo-Europeans) with the north German Corded Ware culture, an argument that gained in currency over the following two decades. He placed the Indo-European Urheimat in Schleswig-Holstein, arguing that they had expanded across Europe from there. [20] By the early 20th century this theory was well-established, though far from universally accepted.[ citation needed ] Sociologists were soon using the concept of a "blond race" to model the migrations of the supposedly more entrepreneurial and innovative components of European populations.
By the early 20th century, Ripley's tripartite Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean model was well established. Most 19th century race-theorists like Arthur de Gobineau, Otto Ammon, Georges Vacher de Lapouge and Houston Stewart Chamberlain preferred to speak of "Aryans", "Teutons", and "Indo-Europeans" instead of a "Nordic race". The British-born German racialist Houston Stewart Chamberlain considered the Nordic race to be made up of Celtic and Germanic peoples, as well as some Slavs. Chamberlain called those people Celt-Germanic peoples, and his ideas would influence the ideology of Nordicism and Nazism.
Madison Grant, in his 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race , took up Ripley's classification. He described a "Nordic" or "Baltic" type:
"long skulled, very tall, fair skinned, with blond, brown or red hair and light coloured eyes. The Nordics inhabit the countries around the North and Baltic Seas and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of Aryan language and culture." [21]
According to Grant, the "Alpine race", shorter in stature, darker in colouring, with a rounder head, predominated in Central and Eastern Europe through to Turkey and the Eurasian steppes of Central Asia and Southern Russia. The "Mediterranean race", with dark hair and eyes, aquiline nose, swarthy complexion, moderate-to-short stature, and moderate or long skull was said to be prevalent in Southern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. [22] [23]
Only in the 1920s did a strong partiality for "Nordic" begin to reveal itself, and for a while the term was used almost interchangeably with Aryan. [24] Later, however, Nordic would not be co-terminous with Aryan, Indo-European or Germanic. [25] For example, the later Nazi minister for Food, Richard Walther Darré, who had developed a concept of the German peasantry as a Nordic race, used the term 'Aryan' to refer to the tribes of the Iranian plains. [25]
In Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Science of the German People), published 1922, Hans F. K. Günther identified five principal European races instead of three, adding the East Baltic race (related to the Alpine race) and Dinaric race (related to the Nordic race) to Ripley's categories. This work was influential in Ewald Banse's publication of Die Rassenkarte von Europa in 1925 which combined research by Deniker, Ripley, Grant, Otto Hauser, Günther, Eugen Fischer and Gustav Kraitschek. [26]
Carleton S. Coon in his book of 1939 The Races of Europe subdivided the Nordic race into three main types, "Corded", "Danubian" and "Hallstatt", besides a "Neo-Danubian" type [27] and a variety of Nordic types altered by Upper Palaeolithic or Alpine admixture. [28] [29] [30] Types found in "places distant from the present northwestern European center of Nordic concentration" that he determined to be morphologically Nordic, were called "Exotic Nordics". [31]
Coon took the Nordics to be a partially depigmented branch of the greater Mediterranean racial stock. [32] This theory was also supported by Coon's mentor Earnest Albert Hooton, who in the same year published Twilight of Man, which stated: "The Nordic race is certainly a depigmented offshoot from the basic long-headed Mediterranean stock. It deserves separate racial classification only because its blond hair (ash or golden), its pure blue or grey eyes". [33] [32]
Coon suggested that the Nordic type emerged as a result of a mixture of "the Danubian Mediterranean strain with the later Corded element". Hence his two main Nordic types show Corded and Danubian predominance, respectively . [34] A third "Hallstatt" type Coon took to have emerged in the European Iron Age, in Central Europe, where he said that it was subsequently mostly replaced, but "found a refuge in Sweden and in the eastern valleys of southern Norway." [35]
Coon's theories on race were widely disputed in his lifetime, [36] and are considered pseudoscientific in modern anthropology. [37] [38] [39] [40] [41]
The depigmentation theory received notable support from later anthropologists, thus in 1947 Melville Jacobs noted: "To many physical anthropologists Nordic means a group with an especially high percentage of blondness, which represent a depigmentated Mediterranean". [42] In her work Races of Man (1963, 2nd Ed. 1965) Sonia Mary Cole went further to argue that the Nordic race belongs to the "brunette Mediterranean" Caucasoid division but that it differs only in its higher percentage of blonde hair and light eyes. The Harvard anthropologist Claude Alvin Villee Jr. also was a notable proponent of this theory, writing: "The Nordic division, a partially depigmised branch of the Mediterranean group." [43] Collier's Encyclopedia as late as 1984 contains an entry for this theory, citing anthropological support. [44]
The Swedish anthropologist Bertil Lundman introduced the term "Nordid" to describe the Nordic race in his book The Races and Peoples of Europe (1977) as:
"The Nordid race is light-eyed, mostly rather light-haired, low-skulled and long-skulled (dolichocephalic), tall and slender, with more or less narrow face and narrow nose, and low frequency of blood type gene q. The Nordid race has several subraces. The most divergent is the Faelish subrace in western Germany and also in the interior of southwestern Norway. The Faelish subrace is broader of face and form. So is the North-Atlantid subrace (the North-Occidental race of Deniker), which is like the primary type, but has much darker hair. Above all in the oceanic parts of Great Britain the North-Atlantic subrace is also very high in blood type gene r and low in blood type gene p. The major type with distribution particularly in Scandinavia is here termed the Scandid or Scando-Nordid subrace."
Some forensic scientists, pathologists and anthropologists up to the 1990s continued to use the tripartite division of Caucasoids: Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, based on their cranial anthropometry. The anthropologist Wilton M. Krogman for example identified Nordic racial crania in his work "The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine" (1986) as being "dolichochranic". [45]
A popular internet meme most often referred to as the "Yes Chad" or "Nordic Gamer", which depicts an idealized Nordic-looking man as a masculine and confident "chad", originated in alt-right memes on 4chan's /pol/ imageboard in 2016. The earliest forms of the meme, which echoed obsolete racial anthropology tropes, depicted the character in competition with a "Mediterranean" figure. The meme crossed over into mainstream culture by late 2020. It has been used in a wide variety of contexts, including the expression of leftist politics and support for diversity and inclusion, despite its roots. There has been discourse about whether the usage of the character serves as tacit normalization of racist symbols, similar to controversies about other internet memes like Pepe the Frog and wojaks. [46] [47] [48] [49]
Carleton Stevens Coon was an American anthropologist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is best known for his scientific racist theories concerning the parallel evolution of human races, which were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific by modern science.
The Dinaric race, also known as the Adriatic race, were terms used by certain physical anthropologists in the early to mid-20th century to describe the perceived predominant phenotype of the contemporary ethnic groups of southeast Europe. According to the discredited theories of physical anthropologist Carleton Coon, the Dinaric race was most commonly found among the populations in the Balkans and Carpathians, such as Montenegrins, Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats, Ghegs, Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians, Western Ukrainians, and Southern Poles. Additionally, in Northern Europe, the South Germans were also identified as having Dinaric characteristics.
Australo-Melanesians is an outdated historical grouping of various people indigenous to Melanesia and Australia. Controversially, some groups found in parts of Southeast Asia and South Asia were also sometimes included.
The Caucasian race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. The Caucasian race was historically regarded as a biological taxon which, depending on which of the historical race classifications was being used, usually included ancient and modern populations from all or parts of Europe, Western Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.
Aryanism, is an ideology of German racial supremacy which views the supposed Aryan race as a distinct and superior racial group which is entitled to rule the rest of humanity. Initially promoted by racial theorists such as Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Aryanism reached its peak of influence in Nazi Germany. In the 1930s and 40s, the regime applied the ideology with full force, sparking World War II with the 1939 invasion of Poland in pursuit of Lebensraum, or living space, for the Aryan people. The racial policies which were implemented by the Nazis during the 1930s came to a head during their conquest of Europe and the Soviet Union, culminating in the industrial mass murder of six million Jews and eleven million other victims in what is now known as the Holocaust.
Joseph Yegorovich Deniker was a Russian-French naturalist and anthropologist, known primarily for his attempts to develop highly detailed maps of race in Europe.
Jan Czekanowski was a Polish anthropologist, statistician, ethnographer, traveller, and linguist. He was one of the first persons to use quantitative methods in linguistics.
The Mediterranean race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on the now-disproven theory of biological race. According to writers of the late 19th to mid-20th centuries it was a sub-race of the Caucasian race. According to various definitions, it was said to be prevalent in the Mediterranean Basin and areas near the Mediterranean and Black Sea, especially in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, North Africa, most of West Asia, the Middle East or Near East; western Central Asia, parts of South Asia, and parts of the Horn of Africa. To a lesser extent, certain populations of people in Ireland, western parts of Great Britain, and Southern Germany, despite living far from the Mediterranean, were thought to have some minority Mediterranean elements in their population, such as Bavaria, Wales, and Cornwall.
Nordicism is an ideology which views the historical race concept of the "Nordic race" as an endangered and superior racial group. Some notable and influential Nordicist works include Madison Grant's book The Passing of the Great Race (1916); Arthur de Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853); the various writings of Lothrop Stoddard; Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899); and, to a lesser extent, William Z. Ripley’s The Races of Europe (1899). The ideology became popular in the late-19th and 20th centuries in Germanic-speaking Europe, Northwestern Europe, Central Europe, and Northern Europe, as well as in North America and Australia.
The Alpine race is an obsolete racial classification of humans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. It was defined by some late 19th-century and early 20th-century anthropologists as one of the sub-races of the Caucasian race. The origin of the Alpine race was variously identified. Ripley argued that it migrated from Central Asia during the Neolithic Revolution, splitting the Nordic and Mediterranean populations. It was also identified as descending from the Celts residing in Central Europe in Neolithic times. The Alpine race was described as having moderate stature, neotenous features, and specific cranial measurements, such as a high cephalic index.
The Armenoid race was a supposed sub-race in the context of a now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races which was developed originally by Europeans in support of colonialism. The Armenoid race was variously described as a "sub-race" of the "Aryan race" or the "Caucasian race".
William Zebina Ripley was an American economist, lecturer at Columbia University, professor of economics at MIT, professor of political economy at Harvard University, and anthropologist of race. Ripley was famous for his criticisms of American railroad economics and American business practices in the 1920s and 1930s, and later for his tripartite racial theory of Europe. His contribution to the anthropology of race was later taken up by racial physical anthropologists, eugenicists, white supremacists, Nordicists, and racists in general, and it was considered a valid academic work at the time, although today it is considered to be a prime example of scientific racism and pseudoscience.
The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History is a 1916 racist and pseudoscientific book by American lawyer, anthropologist, and proponent of eugenics Madison Grant (1865–1937). Grant expounds a theory of Nordic superiority, claiming that the "Nordic race" is inherently superior to other human "races". The theory and the book were praised by Adolf Hitler and other Nazis.
Various attempts have been made, under the British Raj and since, to classify the population of India according to a racial typology. After independence, in pursuance of the government's policy to discourage distinctions between communities based on race, the 1951 Census of India did away with racial classifications. Today, the national Census of independent India does not recognise any racial groups in India.
The Irano-Afghan race or Iranid race is an obsolete racial classification of human beings based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. Some anthropologists of the 20th century classified the populations native to the Iranian plateau as belonging to this race, which was usually seen as a subrace of the Caucasian race or the Mediterranean racial subtype of that race, depending on the authority consulted.
Mongoloid is an obsolete racial grouping of various peoples indigenous to large parts of Asia, the Americas, and some regions in Europe and Oceania. The term is derived from a now-disproven theory of biological race. In the past, other terms such as "Mongolian race", "yellow", "Asiatic" and "Oriental" have been used as synonyms.
The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study is a 1899 book published by American economist, lecturer, and racial anthropologist William Z. Ripley. The book grew out of a series of lectures he gave at the Lowell Institute at Columbia in 1896. Ripley believed that race was critical to understanding human history, though his work afforded environmental and non-biological factors, such as traditions, a strong weight as well. He believed, as he wrote in the introduction to The Races of Europe, that:
The Atlantid race or North-Atlantid is an obsolete racial classification of human beings based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. In the early 20th century, it was described as one of the sub-races of the Caucasoid race, a blend of the Nordic and Mediterranean races.
The history of anthropometry includes its use as an early tool of anthropology, use for identification, use for the purposes of understanding human physical variation in paleoanthropology and in various attempts to correlate physical with racial and psychological traits. At various points in history, certain anthropometrics have been cited by advocates of discrimination and eugenics often as part of novel social movements or based upon pseudoscience.
The Indid race is an obsolete racial classification of human beings based on a now-disproven theory of biological race. In anthropological literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, the populations of the Indian subcontinent were classified as belonging to this race, which was categorized as belonging to the Mediterranean type of the greater Caucasoid race.
Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.
The term Neo-Danubian has been used in this work to designate a general class of central and eastern European blond or partially blond brachycephals who seem to be derived in a racial sense from a de-Corded Nordic (and hence Danubian) prototype brachycephalized by Ladogan admixture.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link){{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link){{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link){{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: postscript (link)