Given your “rolleyes” at the end, can you be more explicit of what your criticism is to my post? I am reflecting what can be found in the scientific liturature. Do you have any idea what you’re even talking about?
I generally say “black Africans” or “black people” depending on whether I’m talking about those of fairly immediately African origins (or actual people living there) or about black people without any particular reference to Africa (say, in regards to racial issues in the U.S.) I suppose the latter could be held to include Australian Aboriginese and people who tan too much, but I’ve never found it a problem.
As for East Asians, I say Asian or East Asian, depending on whether I think clarification is necessary. I can’t claim any authority, but I don’t often get accused of cultural insensitivity, either.
Your point is well-taken, and there’s a great deal of truth to the notion that referring to folks that way creates a false impression of similarity; depending on whether you include the Khoe people, for instance, Subsaharan Africans don’t necessarily have particularly dark skin. And plenty of Southeast Asians don’t have epicanthic folds.
But they are still cultural terms that have some validity, and not only in regards to a Eurocentric worldview. Pan-Africanism is still a relevant concept in intellectual thought, and it obviously underlies organizations like the once-upon-a-time OAU and the current African Union. East Asia, in contrast, shares a great deal of cultural heritage, whatever the differences. China, being an ancient and long-lasting civilization, contributed quite heavily to the entire region. Modern Japan and China are really about as different as could be in most or all the respects you name - and yet Japan still uses a writing system it borrowed from China (as did many of these nations until fairly recently.) The Chinese language and philosophies were heavy contributors to many or most East Asian cultures, and they all share at least some contribution from the (non-East Asian) Buddhist religion. (India also, incidentally, was the origin of the scripts of quite a few Asian languages.) It’s true that there’s a great deal of diversity, but there is definitely some shared culture common to the region.
That’s not to even start on the very important concept of Black Culture in the United States. “Black people” is definitely a relevant term for a specific group of people here, diverse or no.
Especially relevant point given that the very traits we take as most emblematic of the populations are not at all uniform. Skin color does not just occur in three or four shades - it ends up being uniformly distributed when you consider the world’s entire population. There’s definitely some arbitrariness to this whole thing.
This is just my guess. I don’t know how, why, where, when the epicanthic fold originated but I think that it became more pronounced in certain regions because of geographic isolation. Partly because of sexual selection and then partly because of genetic isolation in certain areas, the eyelid trait emerged and took the various forms that exist today.
Unless East Asia descends from a culture that went through a bottleneck at some point, that’s hard for me to believe. Asia has always had an immense number of ethnic groups, and it doesn’t lend itself nearly as well as Europe to cultural isolation - there’s not enough seas and gulfs and such (which, according to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel is the reason that China ended up, in the end, nowhere near the dominant world power that Europe is.) Not only are there lots of different ethnicities, but many of them were quite mobile, historically, and even among East Asians not all possess the folds, which means there’s not been many chances for East Asia to be isolated from their unfolded brethren.
After living in Japan for nearly a year and observing the local population, I’m prepared to theorize that it’s because their mothers’ eyes look exactly the same way.
This is not my experience. There is definitely a Western influence on modern Asian concepts of beauty, but I have been told that women who did not naturally have the epicanthic fold were considered the epitome of beauty in olden times. I have a Vietnamese colleague who has no fold, and her friends consider her to have an “old fashioned face” because of it. They are not disparaging about it though. It’s just that they don’t seem to have a preference, and I can’t see any of them waiting in line at the plastic surgeon’s to get their own epicanthic folds removed.
IANAEvolutionary Biologist but without some sort of “bottleneck” how would a trait such as epicanthic folds develop? If there was a lot of intermixing of the population I would think there wouldn’t be a chance for an adaptive trait like this to evolve into the population. At least a trait that is not ubiquitous to the entire asian (or east asian if you prefer) population. Certainly if the explanation is it developed as an adaptive trait that aided survival in a specific region due to its unique requirements (arid, cold, etc.) then there would seem to be even less pressure for it to evolve with a good deal of population intermixing.
With all due respect, is your experience based on one Vietnamese colleague? I’m relating what I witnessed in extensive travel through south east asia, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan (yeah, these last two are technically China too), Korea, and Japan.
If memory serves, China and Japan had the highest density of plastic surgery adverts describing the procedure, and women who had had it done. During my second to last trip to S. China, one of the major English language newspaper had a multi-page article on it. It’s still anecdotal, but the women interviewed were clear that they wanted a more western face.
True, however those groups don’t draw a line at the Sahara based on skin tone. Libya, for example, has been a major proponent of pan-Africanism. The similarities are largely econonomic in this sense, and historical as a repsonse to colonialism (here again we have an exception in Ethiopia).
There’s quite some variation in all of the traits I mention above within China as well, although we tend to think of the whole place as Han Chinese. Honestly there aren’t many statements you could make about the Uighurs, the Han, Tibetans, Dai and Mongols that are just generally true… and that’s before we even leave China!
Actually there are several cultures in the region that have had little Chinese influence, other than via traders. There isn’t even one Buddhist religion, there are different branches thereof, and some of those sects are from or more direct descendants from the South Asian subcontinent. I’m not convinced that the Uighur or Chams or Malaysian Muslims (to give some examples) have taken much from Chinese philosophy, but am open to new nformation.
I’m rather skeptical. It’s not at all difficult to find two East Asians for comparison who live with very different diets, religions, political structures, language families, language scripts, economic opportunities, heights and builds, etc etc. All you’re left with in the end are the eyefolds; that and living within a few time zones of each other.
I’m not sure who is saying exactly what here, so I just want to clarify –
“Epicanthic fold” refers to the stereotype of the “Oriental” or “slanted” eye (I realize that these terms may have some pejorative connotations, but I use them only for the sake of clarity).
“Double eyelid” refers to the non-epicanthic-folded eye or, in the terms of the old pulp novels, the Western “round eye.”
The plastic surgery in question alters the appearance of the eye so that it no longer has that “Asian” look (and “Asian” is a completely useless term when discussing this physical trait) and thus has the “double eyelid” or “Western” look.
Take a look at the pics at this site – http://www.lamblaserclinic.com/asian_double_eyelid_surgery.html
On the other hand, ignore my last post. I have no idea what I’m talking about.
Your post made sense to me. I’m skeptical of the ‘most requested surgery’ claim, but it does tend to support what I was saying.
According to one of my professors, there is a trace of the epicanthic fold in Hungarian and even Finnish people, due to the Magyars being of Asian origins. True?
This is a professor of art history, isn’t it? Asia is a big continent. Magyars are from the eastern to central regions of it.
Might be true for Hungarians (if there is such a thing as a “trace” of the epicanthic fold) but highly unlikely for Finnish folk. Finns may be linguistically tied to Asia, but genetically they are very much akin to their Northern European neighbors. The influx of the Magyars from Asia into modern day Hungary had nothing to do with Finland, btw. The linguistic ties between Hungarian and Finnish predate that invasion by at least 1000 years, and probably longer.
How common in this trait in so-called full-blooded native Americans? Researchers widely theorize that this nation’s (diverse) population of native Americans can be traced back to Asia, specifically present-day Siberia, Mongolia, and China.
Would one reasonably assume a prevalence of this facial trait among “full blooded” (US government and tribal terms, I believe) native Americans?
No, he taught Russian history and language.
Because it was adaptive. That’s how evolution happens. Possibly a sexually-selected feature at some point? Important in protecting the eyes from dust? (Though when I’ve heard that theory, it was supposed to be snow, thus its lesser frequency in southeast Asia.) Kozmik’s theory was that it was essentially genetic drift, just the result of some geographical isolation. But East Asians have never been isolated geographically, except for a few groups in a few locations. East Asia just does not lend itself to that variety of isolation, and yet the trait is very common.
What? I don’t understand how you could think this at all. When there’s some sort of selective pressure, one that promotes a trait, it spreads through a population. Like the gene that promotes malaria resistance (but causes sickle-cell anemia) in tropical populations. Or the differences in skin tone between tropical and temperate zone populations. When there’s a survival or reproductive advantage to a trait, it becomes common. Pure genetic drift, on the other hand, is not something that happens with large populations. Straight chance does not adequately explain how a trait could develop in a large population.
I don’t know how you managed to construe my statement as somehow applying to every different culture within the modern political borders of China. Of course there’s not much that can be said to be common to all of the ethnic groups within the territory controlled today by the PRC. But I was talking about Chinese culture - meaning, obviously, Han culture. The present-day political borders obviously include many other cultures, but were I talking about Tibetan culture, or Uyghur culture, I would have mentioned them. They haven’t been dominant cultural centers throughout East Asia; nor have the Miao, Karen, or any of the other small ethnic groups. After all, I’m talking about cultural history, most of it during a time when China controlled much less territory, and certainly didn’t control Xinjiang or Tibet.
Which ones are those, exactly?
I quite clearly stated that Buddhism was just another cultural characteristic fairly common in Asia. It is obviously not Chinese; I’m getting more and more puzzled by the way you’ve construed by post. And when did I say that Buddhism was monolithic? I’m certainly aware that it comes in very different strains - you’re not talking about esoteric matters here. Does that mean that there’s nothing common to the different varieties of Buddhism? Because your argument doesn’t make sense unless you agree that there is nothing shared by the different varieties of Buddhism (and thus that the name is, apparently, a matter of simple convenience to classify multitudinous unrelated religions.)
I did not say that East Asian culture was homogeneous from Xinjiang to Hokkaido (and really, your repeated references to the Uyghurs would only make sense if they were East Asian.) I said that there are some broad similarities. Pointing out that there are some differences is a non sequitur of a response, since my argument was not based upon the notion that Asia is full of identical people with identical cultures.
At any rate, the Chams and Malay are of course Austronesian, and would hardly be classified, under naive theories of race, as the same racial group as the Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Thai, Mongols, etc. The Cham culture is tiny, and a comparatively recent import to my knowledge. Malaysia is not really within either the geographical or cultural area that I was referring to, even if it is classified as a part of Asia. Demanding that my assertion that there is some value to the concept of East Asia as a geographical and cultural region also apply to Malaysia makes rather less sense than would demanding that I explain what Shaka Zulu and Charlize Theron have in common to justify what I said about Africa. I mean, at least they were from the same area.
Oh, we were talking about them slanty-eyes before I got all distracted, weren’t we?
I don’t think it’s a purely Asian trait, the epicanthic fold (though is that the only physiological aspect that makes their eyes look “that way”? I’ve read that it’s fairly common in white European children (during childhood), and exists in other ethnic groups. Also that it can occur in other ethnic groups due to birth defects. I suspect that the epicanthic fold is not any more solid a way to delineate humanity into “races” than dark skin.
It’s based on the opinions of quite a few other Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese colleagues when a comment made about this one woman piqued my interest and we ended up having a discussion about it. I also asked friends in Hong kong when I was there, and they seemed to back this up. Some story about Chinese emporors preferring their concubines to not have the fold.
I think East Asia is such a huge and populous place that both our experiences with this may well hold.