Chapter 9 Student Activities

A “What Is Race?” Activity

For this activity interview your roommate or someone you know fairly well on campus. (Best to interview someone who has not had an anthropology course.) Ask the person to describe what the biological differences are between people from two “racial” categories. Then ask the person what differences in behavior there might be between the two individuals. How are these two sets of physical traits and behaviors related?

A Thought Activity: The CSI Effect

If race is really just a “social construction,” why can forensic anthropologists (as shown in television shows like CSI and Bones) identify, with an astonishing degree of accuracy, the “race” of human remains? The answer, of course, is that such TV shows are fiction. But real forensic anthropologists can identify with a strong degree of reliability whether the dead person is African American, Asian American, or European American. The reason for this is that because of segregation for two or three hundred years, and because immigrants came from concentrated areas; Americans are not a random selection of people from all communities around the globe. How does the fact that immigration to what is now the United States is only about four hundred years old (not counting Native Americans, of course, who have been here much, much longer) shape the physical characteristics of the American population so we can see patterns that appear to be physical races?