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Week 12 · Module overview

Week 12 — Race, Ethnicity, and Human Variation

Cultural Anthropology Free sample edition

Welcome to your Week 12 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A nursing student filling in a clinic intake form and a business student designing a job application both meet this week's question: whose categories are the boxes on a form, and how do they relate to the way people vary?

In plain language

People differ in skin color, height, and body shape, but those differences shade into one another from place to place instead of falling into neat boxes. This week you will learn that human variation (the biological differences among people) is continuous, and that most of it lies inside groups rather than between them. You will meet race (a classification of people that a society makes, with real effects) and set it apart from ethnicity (a shared identity based on ancestry, language, religion, or customs). Then you will read the race and ethnicity boxes on a real government form as the categories of the office that wrote them.

  • Already covered: Week 7 gave you authority and the stratified society; Week 11 gave you sex and gender.
  • This week: human variation; race and ethnicity; census categories.
  • How they connect: race, like gender, is organized around the body.
  • Where we're going next: Week 13, Religion, Ritual, and Worldview.

Focus

Are the boxes on a form found in nature, or drawn by people?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • [ ] explain human variation as continuous
  • [ ] state each within-group figure with its source
  • [ ] keep race and ethnicity apart
  • [ ] read census categories as the issuing body's own

To-do

Plan your week

  1. Read Chapter 12 (about 35 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
  2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
  3. Do the Ethnography Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
  4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: say whose categories a form's boxes are.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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