It's Like a Freakin' Country Bear Jamboroo Around Here!
This is very interesting — especially (white supremacists/racists take note!) the inclusion of Ashkenazim and Sephardim in the southern group (the one that also contains the descendants of the Romans and ancient Greeks).
What this means, for those who didn't already know it, is that there is no such thing as a "European/white" race that is distinct from a "Jewish/Hebrew" race. There just isn't. The A. and S. are Europeans, who happen to be Jewish.
Now of course, in terms of population-genetic history, what this means is that the Southern (or Mediterranean) European sub-population is a mishmash of historical circum-Mediterranean community-populations (Greeks, Romans, Jews, Turks, Spaniards, &c., &c.). Moreover, given that the Spanish fit comfortably into the Southern European sub-population, I would expect that said "Southern European" sub-population will also turn out to be part of a more general circum-Mediterranean (sub-?)population. After all, the Moors ended up in Spain via the whole of North Africa. So on the one hand, we would have a circum-Mediterranean population (probably with clinal, or a continuum of, frequency distributions of genetic markers) that could be cosntrued as its own discrete population with as much legitimacy as, say, the European population around which the study was organized. But on the other hand, it can clearly be divided (into, say, north and south Mediterranean coastal sub-populations) and redistributed equally well among other populational groupings (e.g., European, for one). The "southern European/northern Mediterranean" sub-group would be both European and Mediterranean. At the same time.
The point is that our folk taxonomies of human populations are not isomorphic with genetic, historical, and geographic boundaries all together and at the same time. We like to think it does, we base much of our politics on the assumption that they do, but they so do not. We lump together groups of people however the lumps best suit our interests. And most of our folk lumpings have only a tangential relation to genetics and/or history. Our favorite lumpings are geographic (African, European, Asian, &c.) or cultural (Muslim). Take, for example, the rhetoric about the Middle East. Is there any acknowledgment that Iranians are not Arabs? They're actually Persians. But when we want to speak of all Middle Eastern Muslims as a single group, we have to turn to the only thing they have in common, which is Islam, so that's the category we use (sometimes, depending on whether it's useful to our argument or not, even acknowledging the divisions between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims). But then our careless, uncritical thinking takes over and we conflate "Middle Eastern Muslim" with "Arab." Those are not the same thing, though, nor is one completely a subset of the other; and their genetic and historical boundaries have changed through time.
As with any biological classification unit above the population, groups of human populations are abstractions. The higher order you get, the greater the degree of abstraction. We forget, though, that the common descriptive traits we use to characterize abstractions are merely descriptive: they are not prescriptive, and when it comes to deciding who's a member of a group and who's not, they are not proscriptive, either.
What this means, for those who didn't already know it, is that there is no such thing as a "European/white" race that is distinct from a "Jewish/Hebrew" race. There just isn't. The A. and S. are Europeans, who happen to be Jewish.
Now of course, in terms of population-genetic history, what this means is that the Southern (or Mediterranean) European sub-population is a mishmash of historical circum-Mediterranean community-populations (Greeks, Romans, Jews, Turks, Spaniards, &c., &c.). Moreover, given that the Spanish fit comfortably into the Southern European sub-population, I would expect that said "Southern European" sub-population will also turn out to be part of a more general circum-Mediterranean (sub-?)population. After all, the Moors ended up in Spain via the whole of North Africa. So on the one hand, we would have a circum-Mediterranean population (probably with clinal, or a continuum of, frequency distributions of genetic markers) that could be cosntrued as its own discrete population with as much legitimacy as, say, the European population around which the study was organized. But on the other hand, it can clearly be divided (into, say, north and south Mediterranean coastal sub-populations) and redistributed equally well among other populational groupings (e.g., European, for one). The "southern European/northern Mediterranean" sub-group would be both European and Mediterranean. At the same time.
The point is that our folk taxonomies of human populations are not isomorphic with genetic, historical, and geographic boundaries all together and at the same time. We like to think it does, we base much of our politics on the assumption that they do, but they so do not. We lump together groups of people however the lumps best suit our interests. And most of our folk lumpings have only a tangential relation to genetics and/or history. Our favorite lumpings are geographic (African, European, Asian, &c.) or cultural (Muslim). Take, for example, the rhetoric about the Middle East. Is there any acknowledgment that Iranians are not Arabs? They're actually Persians. But when we want to speak of all Middle Eastern Muslims as a single group, we have to turn to the only thing they have in common, which is Islam, so that's the category we use (sometimes, depending on whether it's useful to our argument or not, even acknowledging the divisions between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims). But then our careless, uncritical thinking takes over and we conflate "Middle Eastern Muslim" with "Arab." Those are not the same thing, though, nor is one completely a subset of the other; and their genetic and historical boundaries have changed through time.
As with any biological classification unit above the population, groups of human populations are abstractions. The higher order you get, the greater the degree of abstraction. We forget, though, that the common descriptive traits we use to characterize abstractions are merely descriptive: they are not prescriptive, and when it comes to deciding who's a member of a group and who's not, they are not proscriptive, either.
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 09:34
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