Maggie's Farm

Geoff ... I stumbled across a book review site on the Internet where one of the people posting tried to define the Amish as an "ethnicity" because the Amish community lives separately from the rest of Americans and observes certain rules the rest of us civilians don't. That sounded absurd to me , since Amish, or Episcopalian, or Methodist, or Greek Orthodox are religious affiliations, not "ethnicities."

There are black Americans, Caucasian Americans, Asian Americans, and so on. All of them are Americans. That's a citizenship affiliation. You can postulate members of an Amish group as being of more than one race, although the original religious affiliation began in Germany.

Having taken an Anthropology course in college, I assumed, as you do here, that ethnicity was an alternate term for defining racial identity [a term perhaps less annoying to some who feel that racial identity is too rude a term]. But when I looked it up in several of our dictionaries, including dictionary.com on the Internet, I found that most definitions of "ethnicity" included the sharing of common "cultural ties" Well, shucks, there you go. If you drag cultural ties into the definition, that blows it as an alternate term for "racial identity." Guess we're going to have to bite the bullet and call it racial identity after all.

Anthropologists have been trying to define "the races of the world" since I was a pup. Carlton Coon, the distinguished anthropologist on the Harvard faculty, wrote a book about it which caused a good deal of kerfuffle when it was published. It was a pioneering work, but some say it was flawed. Most pioneering works are. I had a black friend when I was in college who went to Africa for a term. She came back and said, "Boy, are those folks black! Really black -- much more than American blacks are." But even black Africans are mixed with some of the Mideastern races, like Egyptians, who are a mixed race themselves [take a look at some of the statues of the Pharoahs if you doubt me, and compare them with that glorious head of Nefertiti that is so famous].

So I think we had best go with mixed races. And eventually in a thousand years or so, we'll all be coffee-colored, and probably bald.

I'm glad I'm alive now. It's more fun, certainly, than being bald.

Marianne

By the way, Bird Dog ... If you want to be an Indian, I think you should do exactly what you want, especially if there's some profit in it.

Ummm ... are you going to wear a feather head-dress? I'd give a lot to see that ....

Marianne

Meta ... about that tradition that Indians name their babies after the first thing they see after the child's birth. I think you've got that confused with baby ducks, who fasten on the first being they see after they hatch as being their mommy, and follow her/him/it around faithfully. Isn't that sweet? I bet Muffin thinks so, don't you, Muffin?

Marianne