Ranthropologist

Tag: (R)anthropology Class

  • (R)anthropology Class: Revitalization Movements

    (R)anthropology Class: Revitalization Movements

    Around 1870, when colonization of the western United States by Europeans and their descendants was reaching its zenith, a movement that came to be known as the Ghost Dance began appearing in Native American communities. Taught by a Paiute spiritual leader named Wokova, the Ghost Dance was a ritual meant to cleanse the spirit, promote clean living, and reunite the living with the spirits of the dead. With the help of these spirits, the living would ultimately drive the white usurpers from the land; bring back the buffalo; usher in a time of peace, prosperity, happiness, and unity; and restore the ways of life that had been crushed by colonialism. As the Ghost Dance spread, it changed somewhat in form depending on the culture that adopted it; amongst the Lakota, it invoked the promise of a total transformation of society. Perceiving the Lakota’s wish for a new and better world as a threat, in 1890 the United States Army slaughtered at least 153 Lakota at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. Over time, the Ghost Dance slowly petered out, and although it is still practiced by a few tribes today, it is no longer with the expectation that adherence to the dance and its teachings will usher in a new era.

    Phenomena like the Ghost Dance are a part of what anthropologists call revitalization movements. Similar to millenarianism, revitalization movements generally spring up in times of extreme social unrest, such as colonialism, war, or government oppression of citizens or social groups. The purpose of the movement is to usher in a new type of society; restore social values that have been repressed or denied; or return life to the way it “used to be.” They generally involve a ritual component and special rules that are adhered to by the followers, and can sometimes manifest as cults. A modern example is the Heaven’s Gate cult, in which the followers believed that a spaceship was concealed in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet and was coming to pick them up to take them to a better life away from Earth on a heaven-like planet. Unfortunately, validating your ticket to board this heavenly ship meant forsaking your life on Earth – via suicide. In 1997, 38 cult members dosed themselves with phenobarbitol, applesauce, and vodka, and left this earthly plane. I’m going to go ahead and assume that they did NOT make it to heaven’s gate.

    Sometimes revitalization movements are successful. There’s an excellent argument that Christianity began as a revitalization movement. Unhappy with Roman rule, many citizens throughout the Roman empire looked to prophets who promised a better life; Jesus of Nazareth was just one of those prophets, but he turned out to be one of the few with tremendous staying power. He promised that by following his teachings, a better life could be had – both in this life AND in the next one. In fact, that is the trick of Christianity’s longevity: unlike the Ghost Dance, which promised change in this life, Jesus promised the ultimate reward in the heavenly afterlife. Why is that important? Because unlike the Ghost Dance, where people eventually began to realize that the change they sought was not coming, no one has returned from heaven to either refute or verify Jesus’ teachings – therefore, people can keep believing because there’s no one around to say otherwise. (I realize this is a gross oversimplification of Christianity overall, but I believe it is key to why it is still around after 2,000+ years; and the same is true for all religions that promise rewards after this life or in the next one.) What of more recent religions like Mormonism and Scientology, or even New Age spiritualism? I think there are at least some aspects of revitalization movements in all of them.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about revitalization movements recently, because I think it provides a basis for analyzing not just recent religious movements and cults but the sometimes hysterical and irrational adherence of people to their particular political ideologies. We are living in a time, believe it or not, that is actually safer and more peaceful than any other time in history (an idea explained in great detail by many authors, but to great effect by both Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature and Michael Shermer’s bookThe Moral Arc). BUT (and it’s a big but): people feel less safe. We feel threatened by conflict and violence. We fear the loss of our most cherished values. We see economic inequality, a loss of stability, a lack of trust, an increase in terrorism, a deepening of racial and cultural divides, greater political differences, more apathy, more protesting, more rioting, more destruction, more fear… In short, we see the things that the Indians saw during colonialism and that the Jews saw under the Romans. So it comes as no surprise to me that, in this election season, some people’s adherence to their candidate’s values has taken on the quality of a revitalization movement. And I admit that I’m a partisan, but I feel that this is more evident amongst conservatives – and particularly among Donald Trump’s supporters. Without doubt, it also exists amongst the die-hard Bernie Sanders supporters, or the third-party supporters of Jill Stein (Green) and Gary Johnson (Libertarian), but it seems to have reached a fever pitch on the far right of the Republican party. And it makes sense: the very dictionary definition of conservative is “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.” And is that not exactly what Trump is proposing with his slogan, “Make America Great Again“? The Ghost Dance movement sought the same thing: a return to previous conditions.

    I believe the revitalization movement concept also applies to terrorist groups such as ISIS (see here for other names for the group; some have started using the term Da’esh or Daesh specifically because ISIS doesn’t like it). Clearly, ISIS wants to see a different kind of world and intends to usher it in not through a dance or by committing suicide and boarding a spacecraft, but by terrorizing the world into accepting their extreme interpretation of Islam (one which, I am compelled to note, is not shared by the vast majority of Muslims). ISIS adherents tend to be disillusioned young men who feel ignored or unappreciated by their families, friends, and/or cultures, so they are easily drawn in to ISIS’ promise of a new and better life. I can’t think of a much better description of a revitalization movement.

    So why all these revitalization movements now? Some of these ideas deserve posts of their own, but in general, I think there are a few things at play. For one, human groups tend to operate at maximum efficiency with maximum communal cooperation at the hunter-gatherer level, when everybody knows everybody else, and the survival of the group and the individual are inextricably intertwined (I wrote more about this idea, and the overall concept of cultural collapse, here). With global population fast approaching 7.5 billion people, the hunter-gatherer model is all but extinct (there are still foraging groups, but they are heavily influenced by the modernized world in which they live). Plus, as noted above, people are living in fear, and it’s a fear that I think is massively exacerbated by the internet and social media and the ease of global information exchange we now have. We hear about everything that happens now, good and bad, which leads to the mistaken assumption that bad things happen more than they actually do. Finally (and trust me, this paragraph is not meant to be exhaustive of all the potential causes of revitalization-movement-like behavior), we are living at a time of economic and social inequality that has not been seen for generations. Many, if not most, historical revitalization movements have arisen in similar times. Put all this together, and we have no reason to be surprised that it’s happening again.

  • (R)anthropology Class: Cultural (Mal)adaptation

    (R)anthropology Class: Cultural (Mal)adaptation

    There are about as many different definitions of culture as there are cultural anthropologists. Much ink has been spilled by people attempting to refine the concept to make it account for all the detail and nuance of the human experience. In my classes, though, I don’t have that kind of time, so we keep things simple: culture is the ideals, values, and standards of behavior shared by a group of people. I spend most of the semester explaining and illustrating how this simple definition can encompass everything from the most extraordinarily complex group behaviors at the macro level to the smallest, most (seemingly) insignificant behaviors at the individual level. There is a reason that cultural anthropologists choose a specialty; it is impossible to be an expert in the culture of everything.

    I could write pages and pages on this, but the point of this post is not to exhaustively analyze the concept of culture. Instead, I want to discuss the broad strokes of what defines a successful culture, and then talk about what happens when cultures start to break down – that is, when they become maladaptive. First, a few main points about the general defining characteristics of culture:

    • Culture is shared. This means that everybody within a particular cultural group has internalized the same ideals, values, and standards of behavior  The shared nature of culture also means, vitally, that we are able to predict what other members of our cultural group are likely to do in a given situation. It’s like driving – imagine how terrifying it would be if we had no idea what the person in the next lane was about to do as we whizzed past each other at 70+ miles per hour in our 3,000 pound glass, metal, plastic, and hot fluid-filled machines! But we drive with no fear most of the time because we can (usually) safely predict that the other drivers are going to follow the same rules that we follow. The rules of culture operate in much the same way.
    • Culture is learned. Through the process of enculturation, we are taught what the shared rules of our culture are by our parents, family members, teachers, peers – basically, by every person we encounter, whether intimately as a parent or fleetingly as a stranger. Obviously, as children, we don’t know all of the rules yet – which is why we chuckle with amusement when a toddler runs naked across a public beach, but gasp in shock when an adult does it. By the time we are young teens we have learned all the basic rules.
    • Culture is symbolic. This is best illustrated through the example of language, although almost every aspect of culture is symbolic. Language is a system of arbitrary sounds that, through learning and sharing, we all agree serve as stand-ins for particular concepts. There is nothing necessary or natural about the fact that the set of shared sounds we call English have to symbolize the things that they do; but English speakers have learned, collectively, what those sounds symbolize and can thus use them to communicate ideas about our world. Many other symbolic cultural systems – economic, religious, political, artistic – operate in the same way.
    • Culture is integrated. This means that all the parts of culture work together, like gears in a machine. No part is independent of the other parts. And if something changes in one of the parts, it can affect the rest of the machine. Sometimes these changes are small and have limited effect; sometimes they are enormous and have a tremendous effect throughout the machinery of culture. The recent recognition that gay marriage is legal is an example of a cultural change with far-reaching reverberations.
    • Culture is all-encompassing. This one is simple. It means that no aspect of human behavior is insignificant enough to not be a part of culture. Everything from the food we eat to the complexities of our economic system are a part of culture.
    • Finally, culture changes. This can happen through new inventions (how to use fire; agriculture; television; the internet) and it can happen through disagreements between members of the culture (again, gay marriage makes a good example). A lot of cultural change can be easily illustrated if you think in terms of generations. What kinds of things did you do as a teen or young adult that you thought were okay but that horrified your parents? I vividly remember my grandpa, who was born in 1920, bashing me on the head with an empty plastic soda bottle when he spied my first tattoo as I sat lounging by the pool. He was furious because to him, a woman with tattoos was a woman of loose morals. Today, tattoos are everywhere and are generally accepted. Remember, back in the Victorian era, a woman who showed her ankles (GASP!) was a woman of ill repute – a concept my grandpa would have laughed off but that his grandparents may well have taken seriously!

    These are the main characteristics of culture, but they don’t define whether or not a culture can be deemed successful. Fortunately, that definition is simple: a successful culture is one that meets the needs of most of its members in a satisfying way most of the time. Successful cultures meet every member’s need for water, food, shelter, and material resources. They develop strategies for the production, distribution, and consumption of resources. They provide guidelines for appropriate social interaction. They make sure that the members of the group are protected from threats and harm, from within and without. They have a system for making sure every person has a role to fill in the group’s maintenance, and for sanctioning members when they do not adequately fill their role. They are flexible in adapting to individual needs and find ways to accommodate difference. They find ways to comfort and soothe their members in the face of difficulty, tragedy, and doubt. They provide a story for how the culture came to be and where its members will go. They provide cohesion, organization, stability, and purpose. They ensure survival.

    A culture that is unable to secure these things for its members in a satisfying way most of the time is in danger. The danger of a maladapted culture can be acute; maladaptation can result in the extinction of the culture and its members. And that leads us to the problems of today. The adaptive strategies of culture have worked extraordinarily well for over 100,000 years – but they are strategies designed for small groups of people who know and depend upon one another. Cultures have certainly adapted to changes – bigger groups of people find ways to manage the larger population in a satisfactory way; hunter-gatherers who began to grow food and domesticate animals adapted to the new lifestyles of horticulture and pastoralism; even the larger populations that developed as intensive agriculture began to take hold still, mostly, managed to find ways to accommodate to change. But as history shows us, the larger and more technologically advanced human cultures have a frightening tendency to collapse as they become increasingly maladapted to the needs of the majority of the members.

    So the question is: is culture today – and now by culture I mean not just specific small groups or even countries, but global culture – adapting? Consider these symptoms of a maladapted culture:

    • crime and violence
    • mental illness
    • substance abuse
    • suicide
    • alienation
    • warfare
    • revolution

    Any of this sound familiar?

    I am convinced that our current culture is maladapted to the modern world. I am also convinced that this maladaptation is a driving force behind so much of the trouble we see today. Individuals are alienated. They don’t feel recognized or important. They see themselves as tiny gears in a vast, impersonal machine controlled by people who don’t care about them. Unlike in the small groups of prehistory or the close-knit small towns and villages of recent centuries, we have no possible way to know and recognize every single member of our group; it’s not uncommon for people to not even know their neighbors – I don’t know mine. We don’t have to depend upon each other as individuals any more, but we do have to depend on this enormous, teetering edifice that is struggling to fulfill the needs of nearly 7,500,000,000 – that’s 7.5 billion – people, and growing, with adaptations designed for populations that number in the hundreds. Is it any wonder that we have ISIS? Is it any wonder that we have global terrorism? Is it any wonder that we have refugees swarming all over the globe in the terrified hope that somewhere, they will find welcome and respite from hunger, hardship, and violence? It is any wonder that disaffected young men have formed online groups where they fantasize about exacting revenge on the women who ignore them? Is it any wonder that some people turn to guns and spray bullets at innocent people in public places? Is it any wonder that there are protests in our cities over systemic inequality, violence, oppression, and racism? Is it any wonder that there is a whole subculture of people who are preparing themselves for Armageddon? Is it any wonder that people turn to magical thinking and conspiracy theories? Is it any wonder that so many people are living in fear? I still believe most people are good. I still believe we can turn back from maladaptation and find a way. But it’s still not a wonder to me.

  • (R)anthropology Class: The Culture of Religion

    (R)anthropology Class: The Culture of Religion

    It is no secret to my students that I am an atheist. It usually comes up early in my classes when I have to talk about cultural universals like religion, or when I have to explain why I don’t teach intelligent design (the secret code name for Christian creationism). I am also quick to reassure them that I have no interest in turning them into atheists; however, I do nurture a secret hope that by helping them become better critical thinkers, they may come to embrace agnosticism, if not outright atheism, on their own. But, I do not want to browbeat them – dare I say convert them? – into atheism. When I give my lecture on religion, I’m trying to explain it to them from an anthropological perspective. Religion is a cultural universal – every culture has one – so my students need to know the basic outlines of what constitutes religion.

    I teach the concepts mostly from a functionalist perspective. Anthropologically, religion can be simply defined as beliefs or rituals that revolve around or involve supernatural beings or forces. What is the function of religion in society? First and foremost, it serves to answer unanswerable questions: WHY are we here? WHAT happens after we die? WHERE do we go? WHY do bad things happen to good people? WHY isn’t God a Charger fan? And so on. These questions cannot be answered by science. God/the supernatural, as encompassed in the myriad religious practices of the world, serve to help people answer the unanswerable, and explain the unexplainable. Of course, in the earliest religions, many of the unanswerable questions were things that science has now explained: why does the sun rise and set? What are stars? What makes a volcano erupt? Yet, as long as we have existential questions such as why are we here, then we will still have religion.

    Religion also provides comfort during anxious times. When a person has suffered a devastating loss, they can turn to their religious beliefs for solace. I think for many people, it is much easier to believe that God has a plan for them than it is to believe that bad things happen for no reason at all. It is terrible to imagine that, say, losing your child to cancer has no greater meaning. So, people pray, or talk about God’s plan, or say that little Junior is with the angels in Heaven. Of course, suffering great pain or loss can also make people question their faith, but that anxiety-reducing function of religion keeps people returning to their supernatural or spiritual beliefs. As an atheist, I am comfortable with the knowledge that there is no greater purpose to life; it doesn’t make my life any less meaningful, and in fact in some ways makes it more meaningful, because I’m convinced that this is the only chance I’ll get and I’m going to make the most of it (the multiple fallacies that people hold about atheists, such as the idea that people who don’t believe in God eat babies because without God you can’t be moral, is a subject for another post).

    Along with the comfort and anxiety reduction functions, religion has an important role to play in educating people about correct behavior and what the consequences will be if they step out of line. Having a religion that offers rewards or threatens punishment is a very useful tool for regulating individual and group behavior. It’s even better if people believe that God is always watching them; even if you are alone, God sees you masturbating! So you’ll follow the rules even when no one else is around. Religion also provides the rules themselves. For the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – yes, I tell my often surprised students, Yahweh, God, and Allah are all the same guy), those rules are codified in holy texts such as the Talmud, Torah, Bible, and Koran. All three of these religions share the Old Testament, but their theologies are differentiated in their independent holy books. The Bible is filled with rules of conduct and stories with examples of the consequences if you don’t comply – just look at Lot’s poor wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt because she disobeyed God by looking back as she and Lot fled Sodom and Gomorrah (aside – if I was Lot, I’d be thrilled that my wife got turned into a woman-sized salt block. Salt was extremely valuable in those days!).

    One of the things I find to be the most interesting about religion is that religions always reflect the cultures from which they are derived. This is an obvious statement, but it’s not one that is often scrutinized. Religion provides an orderly model of the universe in that it gives a supernatural origin story for why the world is the way it is. Where did we come from? God made us from clay and breathed life into us. Why do we suffer? Because first Eve, then Adam, disobeyed God by eating the apple. Why do we follow the rules we follow? Because God told Moses the rules and bade him share those teachings with his followers. Think about what this does for the people following the rules of their culture, as codified in their religion: it provides a supernatural mandate for doing things a certain way. It removes from groups and individuals the burden of being responsible and puts the burden on God. It allows people to say, “Hey, I didn’t make the rules. God did.”

    I have been using mostly Christian examples here for convenience, because it is the religion with which my readers will be the most familiar, but these ideas apply to all religions, from the simplest animatism to New Age spiritualism to the most complex polytheism to the mainstream, widespread Abrahamic religions and all their different denominations and sects. And every one of these religions is a proxy for the culture they come from.

    I have heard some people argue that religion is the root of all evil. I don’t entirely disagree, but I don’t think that’s really the problem. It makes sense to say that religion is the root cause of many of the world’s conflicts, both past and present; many people have gone to war in the name of their religion. Obviously a deeply fundamentalist interpretation of Islam drives groups like the Islamic State today, just as a particular interpretation of Christianity drove the Crusades. People fight and kill and destroy and die for their beliefs, so you could argue that if there were no religions there would be no war. But I think that is completely wrong. The fact that religion is a proxy for culture is the reason why I believe we will never be free of conflicts that people are willing to die for. Religion is just the supernatural explanation for culture. That’s why I can say I’m an atheist, yet I live by the largely Judeo-Christian morals of my culture. I don’t have to believe in God to be a good person; I’m a good person because my parents, my family, and my culture have taught me to be. If my way of life was threatened to the degree that I felt the need to take up arms to defend it, I would, but God would have nothing to do with it.

    The conflicts we are experiencing around the world may seem to be based on religion, but really, they’re based on ideology. Many people in the United States believe our way of life is the best way and the right way, and many US Christians will say it’s because we are a country based on the Bible (the fact that this is not historically accurate does not change the fact that our overall ethics and morality generally derive from Judeo-Christian principles). The terrorists of ISIS explicitly attribute their motivations to Islam, but they are also fighting for a way of life. The Sunni and Shiite conflicts that rage throughout the Middle East, or the Israel-Palestine division that seems impossible to bridge, or the Hindus in India fighting with Muslims in Pakistan; these are all fights for culture and ideology. Even if you took religion completely out of it and made all these people atheists, they would still believe that their way of life was the right way, and they would fight. Religion isn’t the root of all evil. People are.

  • (R)anthropology Class: The Myth of Race

    (R)anthropology Class: The Myth of Race

    I have decided to start a new series that I am calling (R)anthropology Class. I draw on my anthropological training in so many different ways, and I know that this training is what has helped me view the world in a critical and objective way. Because I know that most people have never taken an anthropology class – or if they have, it was long ago – I have decided to focus some of my posts on some of the most basic, but important, anthropological concepts. These usually occur to me when I am in the midst of trying to make sense of some new idea or trying to explain my point of view to others. That was the case recently when I was trying to explain to someone why DNA ancestry tests can be extremely misleading for people who don’t know much, if anything, about population genetics. So with this inaugural (R)anthropology Class rant, I will sketch in the basics of why a commercial DNA ancestry test cannot tell you your race.

    There is no question that race is a real thing. All we have to do is look at the people around us to know that this is true: different skin colors, hair textures, facial characteristics, even height and body type show us that people are different from one another. Yet, from a genetic standpoint, race is not a real thing at all. Instead, what we call race is a cultural construct that reflects the human need to seek and identify patterns in our surroundings that help us to understand and categorize our world. Race, in other words, is cultural rather than biological.

    How can I say such a thing? All you have to do is look at someone to know what race they are – right? Dark skin = African. Epicanthic folds in the eyelids = Asian. Blue eyes = European.** And if a person happens to have parents of two different races, then that person will show a blend of different racial characteristics from his or her parents. Or if a person is descended from several different races, they will still show some traits that help you identify those ancestral races – or so we like to think. But ask any person who identifies as mixed race and you will find that their lives are full of mistaken assumptions about what their race is – and concomitantly full of different types of treatment depending on what people might unconsciously assume their race to be. Again, this is all entirely based on cultural categories, and is part of what anthropologists call ascribed status. An ascribed status is a status that a person can’t do anything to change – such as age, gender, or in this example, race. But people make mistakes in the statuses they ascribe to others all the time. When I teach my students about this in my lecture on race, I ask them if they have ever been mistaken for a race other than the one they assign to themselves. The hands of my students of color always, without fail, shoot into the air. And, sometimes, my students who look white raise their hands, too – and they surprise their classmates by identifying as having African-American, non-white Hispanic or Latino, Asian, or some other non-white racial ancestry.*** I have Filipino students tell me they are mistaken for Latino or Middle Eastern; I have Asian students describe how they are always ascribed to the Japanese or Chinese category when they are actually Korean or Vietnamese or Thai; I have students with roots in countries throughout South America tell me that nobody seems to know that there are countries other than Mexico south of the US border.

    Here’s the deal, biologically: humans are 99.999% genetically identical. That means that only one out of every 1000 DNA nucleotides is different between any two individual humans. But that tiny .001% difference is reflected in some very recent, visible physical differences between human populations. Human physical traits – called phenotypes – have evolved based on adaptation to specific geographic regions and the pressures of natural selection within those regions. So, natural selection results in phenotypic variation in traits like skin color. Skin color has evolved in response to sun exposure and vitamin D metabolism – the further north a population lives, the less sun they get, which means the less essential vitamin D they are able to metabolize. So by virtue of natural selection, lighter skin color that allows for more efficient vitamin D absorption has evolved in human populations that live in low-sunlight areas, whereas the melanin that causes darker skin has remained abundant in populations closer to the equator. Hence, populations in equatorial Africa are very dark, whereas populations in far northern Europe are very light. This same sort of natural selection has operated on other genes as well, resulting in a wide variety of phenotypes throughout the world. And naturally, those phenotypes remain clustered within the populations where they evolved, which makes it simple for pattern-seeking humans to use those phenotypes to categorize people into the physical types that we have labelled “races.”

    Another important point about phenotypic variation is that it is continuous. In other words, there is no sharp, clear dividing line between different types. If you were to line up every person in the world in order from palest skin to darkest, where would you draw the line between dark and light? Or even if you came up with more categories – pale white, medium white, light tan, dark tan, light brown, etc. – where would you put those lines? It’s like trying to pinpoint the exact spot in a rainbow where the color turns from red to orange – it can’t be done! And yet the rainbow continuously shifts in colors until you go all the way from red at the beginning to violet at the end. Continuous human phenotypes operate in exactly the same fashion. Consider, also, that if you were to draw skin color lines in the human rainbow, you would find individuals from several different races or ethnicities within a single skin color category – Australian aborigines, east Indians, and sub-Sarahan Africans could all be found within one dark-skinned group! A bottom-line way of putting it is this: there is no single trait that can be found in one so-called racial group that does not also exist in some other so-called racial group. You can find dark skin in several groups, epicanthic folds in several groups, and blue eyes in several groups. Race as biology is a cultural fiction.

    So, what does this have to do with DNA ancestry tests? I have serious misgivings about the way these tests are marketed because they trade on people’s lack of knowledge about the biological fiction of race and give them the impression that they are finding out about their own supposed racial ancestry. In fact, if not strictly unethical, I think that the companies who peddle these tests are at best taking advantage of people’s forgivable ignorance about the complexity of genetics. Now, I’m not saying that people can’t or even shouldn’t research their ancestry if it interests them; it would be fascinating to find out that what you thought was your completely European ancestry actually had, say, a branch from a part of Asia. But when I say that, I’m talking about genealogical, not genetic, ancestry research. Genetic ancestry research cannot tell you that you have an Asian ancestor; it can only tell you if you have genetic markers that are associated with particular broadly-defined genetic populations.

    DNA ancestry tests use what are called haplogroups to assess genetic ancestry. A haplogroup is a group of similar genes – called haplotypes – that reflect single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) mutations. What is important about SNP haplogroups is that they can be used to broadly delineate genetic populations. This goes back to the discussion above about phenotypic traits that arise in particular geographic regions in response to specific selective pressures. These haplogroups can be traced in two ways: either on the Y chromosome, which is only present in males; or in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is a separate set of DNA from the nuclear DNA that codes for our particular physical traits. Mitochondrial DNA is only found in our cells’ mitochondria, and we get it only from our mothers. Both Y haplogroups and mtDNA haplogroups are very stable and have a very slow rate of mutation, so they remain relatively unchanged for long periods of time. This means that we can compare these haplogroups in people today to ancient haplogroups associated with particular regions and populations. Commercial DNA ancestry tests look at an individual’s haplogroups and compare the results to known population haplogroups.* These results are used to complete a statistical analysis of a person’s possible ancestry. So, if you have a haplogroup associated with Asia, your DNA test results will say so.

    Here’s where things get problematic. Most people don’t know all the things about DNA and populations genetics that I am writing about in this post, so when they see a result of, say, 12% African, they think it means they are “part Black.” I can’t stress enough that this is not what these results mean. What it means is that the person has a haplogroup that is associated with known ancestral African genetic populations. It’s a statistical correlation, not an absolute. And things get even trickier when you realize that Y and mtDNA haplogroups can be incredibly diverse even within a seemingly homogenous regional population. In fact, population geneticists know that there is more variation within the groups we call races than there is between the groups we call races. I am just as likely to share identical mtDNA ancestry with someone from Asia – where I have no ancestors that I know of – as I am to share it with someone from Sweden, where I know my immediate ancestors came from. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we can’t learn anything from comparing haplotypes – we can. But it is completely wrong to say that you are “part Black” or “part Native American” or “part Asian” based on DNA ancestry testing. All it tells you is that you have a haplogroup that could have entered your genetic lineage thousands of years ago that derived from that part of the world.

    This has been a long post, and it is a complicated subject. I have no doubt that some people will read this and misunderstand. Let me part with this: if you want to get a DNA ancestry test, feel free. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it is telling you anything about your race – it’s not. And finally, never forget that even though what we think of as race is not biologically real, it is still a complex, vital, and unmistakable social reality. We continue to treat people differently on the basis of it; and some people even still insist that the behaviors we associate with race and ethnicity have a genetic basis. We are not that far from the days when the civil rights of African Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color were denied because of the belief that they were genetically inferior to white people. In that sense, race is historically, culturally, and painfully real.

    *Since I wrote this post in February 2015, the technology used by commercial testing companies has expanded to include autosomal DNA haplogroups. Autosomal DNA is the DNA found in the nucleus of all your body’s cells. You get 50% of your autosomal DNA from your mother and 50% from your father. Using autosomal DNA allows a DNA test to see your results from both your maternal and paternal lineages, but it does not automatically mean you will get a more accurate picture; because of the process of meiosis, which is how sperm and eggs are made, each sperm or egg only has half of a person’s DNA. That means that every sperm and egg is essentially unique, and does not contain every possible haplogroup that is part of a person’s autosomal DNA. So, the sperm and egg that made YOU does not have every one of your parents’ haplogroups; and if you have kids, they won’t have all of your haplogroups, either. This is why even full siblings often will not have the exact same results, because each person carries a unique combination of DNA. (Edited January 27, 2018)

    **A comment from a reader pointed out that there are problems with the use of the term Caucasian – problems, embarrassingly, that I had never considered, but which seem obvious to me after a little bit of reading and reflection. I have edited the post to replace the word Caucasian with European or white. This article by Yolanda Moses provides a compelling and succinct explanation for why we need to stop using the term. (Edited February 13, 2018)

    ***A comment from a reader pointed out a lack of clarity here, given that there is a subset of Latino and Hispanic that falls within the white European racial category. (Edited January 8, 2019)