Nineteenth-century ethnology subsumed caste into biologically determined race essences

Evidence

Ethnology draws upon ethnographic material to compare and contrast different cultures. Ethnography is the study of single groups through direct contact with their cultures. In the nineteenth century, ethnologists and ethnographers studied caste mainly as a subsidiary exercise in the supposedly higher and grander task of uncovering the evolutionary heritage of all humanity. In doing so they contributed to the ‘Orientalist’ exercise of the census and gazetteers and to the racial understanding of caste. Caste was thus subsumed into theories of biologically determined race essences. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 1067

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in caste annihilation by explaining the intellectual machinery that naturalized caste as race, which annihilation had to dismantle. — connects to: Eighteenth-century ethnology fused bodily and cultural notions of race together — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 137; Late-nineteenth-century Darwinian race science underpinned homo islamicus typologies; Proust compared nineteenth-century French class rigidity to a caste system — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 80