Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present

What is race? As the introduction to Histories of Race and Racism reminds us, recent scholarship approaches this question via different routes and arrives at quite varied conclusions both as to what race is and when it came into existence. The advent of racial thinking has been dated from as early as the fifth century BC to as recently as the nineteenth century. Race itself, in turn, is most often defined as a classificatory system based on the belief that different groups of people are characterized by distinctive, intrinsic, heritable characteristics. Whether these characteristics are believed to originate in a biologized understanding of the human body, in the ambient culture, or in a dynamic interaction between the two, race is generally understood to rest on a foundation of heredity. For this reason, in my own work on the origins of race I’ve found it useful to explore how the concept...