Racial Theories is a book that talks about historical and typological overview of academic theories of race. The author Michael Banton touches on the critical issues such as ethnicity and discrimination. It consists many racial theories and would be of interest to a person who has a liking for this topic.
Banton begins with some general terminological issues, such as differences between folk and analytical terms and alternatives to "race". In "Race as Lineage" he then covers early modern concepts of race, based on the creation stories in Genesis and then on the work of naturalists such as Linnaeus and the German naturphilosophie school. Cuvier's confusion of lineage and variety provides a bridge to "Race as Type", where Banton sketches the theories of writers such as Morton and Nott in the United States, Gobineau in France, Smith and Knox in Britain, and Vogt in Germany.
Darwinian population thinking and the rejection of essentialism took some time to influence racial theories. "Race as Subspecies" describes early applications in the theories of Beddoe and Sumner, Park's social ecology, and some general issues with reductionist explanations. It was not till the modern evolutionary synthesis brought a more sophisticated understanding of human genetic variation that the need for a biological concept of race disappeared entirely.
The final chapter presents Banton's own ideas on how to build a "bottom up" theory of race. He argues that race should be considered a social construct within broader theories of group and category construction: socialisation, individual choice, political mobilisation, ethnicity, and nationalism. And he suggests that race will eventually be replaced as a social concept in the same kind of way it was made redundant as a biological one.
Read more theories and collection of biographies by Navtej Kohli. Also get to know more about Navtej Kohli here.
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