CONCEPT OF RACE

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 257, 29 July 1942, Page 6

CONCEPT OF RACE

Illusions Of Master Groups CLASSES AND CASTES . “AH that we admire on this earth — science, art, technical skill, and invention —is the creative product of only a small number of nations, and originally, perhaps, of one single race, the. Aryan.” Sc quoted Dr. Ernest Beaglehole, of Victoria College, when opening a lecture to the Wellington branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand. "The author of this quotation is a certain Adolf Hitler. Though there is no such race as an Aryan race, Hitler is now bending his best energies to the task of putting into practice his theory of race superiority,” said Dr. Beaglehole. Dr. Beaglehole was dealing with the subject "Concept of Race,” and proceeded to analyse how the theory of race superiority had grown into being,. and how it was falsely based. He pointed cut that psychologists and sociologists lave tested and measured the mental capacities of different ethnic groups without so far discovering any inherent differences that cannot be plausibly accounted for by imperfection of measuring instruments and extreme variation in the socially inherited nature of mens culture. , ~ , Examining the contact of widely-separ-ated ethnic groups such as occurs between the English and Indian in India, between the negro and white in the United States, and between the pakeha and Maori in New Zealand, Dr. Beaglehole pointed out that the kind of general relationship pattern governing the contacts varied. Tn some cases it was ot caste nature, in others it more nearly approximated to a formalized set of class relations. . . , Taking India as a classic instance ot the caste system, Dr. Beaglehole pointed out that the membership of any of the five principal castes resulted solely from the fact of being born into it, movement and intermarriage, between the castes being forbidden. This caste system was also represented in the United States, where the whites assumed the superior caste and the negroes were relegated to the inferior. Intermixing was almost' a crime, except that the whites expected the privilege of relations with negro women, while the reverse relation was considered one of the most shocking of all crimes. The United States differed from India in its application, of the caste system, however, in that within their separate cells the whites and negroes might rise and fall in status. Maori and Pakeha. Dealing with the relation of the races in New Zealand, Dr. Beaglehole said that they were more nearly governed by the development of a still amorphous, yet nonetheless very real, class structuring of New Zealand society. The factors governing a class system, Dr. Beaglehole said, might be roughly outlined as these: the society was hierarchically ordered; upward mobility was permissible, but downward mobility from one stratum to the next was possible but not praised; intermarriage between classes was not forbidden, though the higher classes disapproved and lower classes approved. Relative homogeneity of attitudes, ideas, beliefs and practices appeared among members of each class. Thus there was . a class consciousness, a factor in which income or wealth might be one, but not necessarily the only, factor. In comparison with England, Dr. Beaglehole pointed out, New Zealand class lines were not so strictly or openly defined, but there was plenty, to remark on when the Dominion was viewed from this angle. The position in New Zealand was that each of the ethnic groups ordered itself ou a well-defined class system. The key point' which defined the problem of culturally determined group relations was'the fact that Maori classes and white classes did not coincide. White practice, Dr. Beaglehole said, showed a tendency to rank most Maoris in a group which coincided with that of the lowest class white group. Dr. Beaglehole remarked, however, that the incidence of this classing varied ,in various parts of the Dominion according to the wealth and relative numbers of each ethnic group in the particular local-

itySumming up the question of race concept, Dr. Beaglehole said that it was a tool for the physical anthropologist and the human biologist, but a matter to be avoided by the social scientist. The social scientist needed to work with concepts of class relations and caste rather than with race concepts if he was to estimate truly the social processes involved in the contacts of ethnic groups.