Why White People are Called Caucasian, lecture by Professor Nell Irvin Painter. [youtube/watch?v=8iZDapgQdFo] Nell Painter combines the discursive meanings of scholarship with the visual meaning of painting, to answer, literally, why white people are called Caucasian, what that looks like, and how they all relate to our ideas about personal beauty. Series: UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures. The lecture is based on Painters book The History of White People (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010). Nell Irvin Painter is an American historian and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. [Tip received from our friend Nart Sholakh, with much appreciation] The terms Caucasian, White, and European have become synonymous due to the German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), who identified the peoples of the Caucasus as the embodiments of his ideal of physical beauty and named the European race after them. According to him, Mount Caucasus was the cradle of humanity, with inhabitants still adhering to the primeval paragon, and non-white races being degenerations from the ideal. This theory has been discredited, yet the association between the terms has lingered in popular tradition.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 19:45:47 +0000
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