Asian = Oriental, etc.

[Joe Pickett]

Thanks for pointing out this error in the treatment of these words in AHD4.
This may indeed be a case of cultural anthropology varying from physical
anthropology.
The anthro definitions in AHD4 were reviewed by a cultural anthropologist,
but not by a physical anthropologist.
Would that we could hire multiple consultants for every field covered in
the dictionary!

Call it prescriptivism if you like, but I don't regret trying to include a
warning about the use of these -oid words because their use outside of
physical anthropology
would likely provoke considerable controversy, if not anger. They are not
substitutes for "Asian," "African American," and similar words.

It would be interesting to know whether physical anthropologists have ever
debated the use of these -oid terms.


Joe






"Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on 02/09/2001
05:01:35 PM

Please respond to American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>

Sent by:  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>


To:   ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
cc:
Subject:  Re: Asian = Oriental, etc.


>... the AHD4's authorities saw fit to declare that "Mongoloid" is
>no longer used as a racial or typological classification in
>scientific writing.  Maybe it depends on your local scientist.

"No longer used" is in this case not merely too strong: it is entirely
false. This is either a simple error by AHD or an effort at a type of
"prescriptivism".

A few examples:

"Encyclopaedia Britannica" (current Web version) uses "Mongoloid".

The "Columbia Encyclopedia" (2001), found with AHD4 at Bartleby, gives the
conventional racial categories, including "Mongoloid".

The (reasonably popular and reasonably scientific) recent book "The History
and Geography of Human Genes" by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza et al. (Princeton,
1994) uses the designation routinely -- although the gene-frequency data
presented here do not exactly support the conventional racial
categorization.

The feature article in "Scientific American" for Sep. 2000 ("Who Were the
First Americans?") uses the word, in a context wherein it could easily have
been avoided by an only slightly inept circumlocution.

As for "real" scientific papers ("primary sources"), just one example where
"Mongoloid" appears among the key-words: "p53 Mutations Detected in
Colorectal Carcinoma Patients in Hong Kong" by Leung, Cheung, Wong, Lau,
Tang, and Lung (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 6: 925-930, 1997).

In physical anthropology: "Logistic Analysis of the Effects of Shovel Trait
on Carabelli's Trait in a Mongoloid Population" by Tsai, Hsu, Lin, and Liu
(AJPA 100:523-30, 1996).

In forensics: "Hair, Fibers, Crime, and Evidence" by D. W. Deedrick (FBI)
(Forensic Sci Commun 2(3), 2000), on the Web.

Anybody who is interested can come up with 100 other examples very easily,
I'm sure.

Perhaps the AHD was poorly advised.

-- Doug Wilson