tried to identify ethnicities or ethnic groupings for the purpose of study,
soliciting the help of physical anthropology. Under the influence of Charles
Darwin’s pioneering work on evolution, the 19th century saw a wealth of racial
theories about the human species, many of which built on, or degenerated into,
unscientific racist doctrines.
The colonialist expansion had led European scholars to discover the ‘wisdom of
the Indians’, the ‘Chinese scientific genius’, and made them salute ex oriente lux
(‘out of the east, light comes’). However, their appreciation of other ‘high’
civilizations did little to undermine the general assumption of the white man’s
superiority, which legitimized the continuation of slavery, domination, and
exploitation, in spite of the Enlightenment’s ideals of freedom and equality,
which were all-inclusive only in name.
The catastrophes of the 20th century, notably the extermination of Jews in the
Shoah, discredited the most blatant forms of racism, but racialist notions proved
to be hard to eradicate completely from the investigation of humanity’s ethnic
multitude. It was only in the 1980s, when major progress in genetic research
gave rise to the monogenesis theory of a common African ancestry of humanity,
that skin colour and other physical traits were recognized as adaptive features of
discordant groups rather than distinguishing human races. Ever since, human
biologists have mostly discarded race as a meaningful category.
Ethnographers, however, sustained their project of separating groups and
subgroups, replacing race by culture, understood as the ensemble of artefacts,
customs, beliefs, and institutions accepted by a group. Small groups living in
remote areas held the promise of presenting primeval ways of life uncorrupted
by modernity and were therefore, for some time, the ethnographers’ preferred
object of investigation. They were always marginal and are more so today.
Already in the 1930s, French cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
entitled his study of the secluded Nambikwara in the wilds of Brazil Tristes
Tropiques (Sad Tropics), knowing that their way of life was doomed. Stagnation
means death.
Modern civilization has left few areas untouched. As global capitalism spreads,
commodities, technologies, and populations circulate around the globe with
increasing intensity, pushing many indigenous peoples to the brink of extinction.
This does not mean that humanity fuses into one big homogeneity or that a