| Korean physical anthropology according to typological approaches | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: May 20 2008, 03:14:41 PM (267 Views) | |
| black man | May 20 2008, 03:14:41 PM Post #1 |
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The Right Hand
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Our poster cydevil addressed the most elaborated train of thought on Korean physical anthropology I so far came across at... http://s6.zetaboards.com/man/topic/528776/1/#post114190 and http://s6.zetaboards.com/man/topic/528776/1/#post114203 . cydevil refers to a professor who seems to distinguish between two different "types" among Koreans. According to him, it seems, the vast majority of Koreans resembles "Altaic"-speakers. In the context of the description that probably means Manchu-Tungus first of all. On the other hand, he appears to write, there is a "Paleo-Asian" "type" in other parts of Korea. While the former "type" probably more or less conforms to what people associate with average Koreans, the latter seems to be associated with all kinds of features possibly considered to be atypical. Since I just know cydevil's reflection on this, I cannot go into detail much more than that. Apparently, the translated online version of the article was titled "The Physical and Cultural Faces of the Korean People". If so, the author is Cho Yong-jin. And the model appears to be that of one "type" having arrived from a northwestern direction and more or less having replaced a pre-existing "type", which is still relatively present in southern and eastern parts of the Korean peninsula. Then again, the author also associates the "southern-type face" with fishermen and coastal settlements. This makes me wonder whether the model could be overly simplified... Wouldn't Korean coastal settlements have attracted newcomers more easily than isolated mountainous regions in inland Korea? Moreover, Cho is a contemporary researcher. So he probably didn't have the opportunity to do much research on the physical anthropology of northern Korean populations. When more people could still enter northern Korea, Western researchers have been trying to typologically classify both northern and southern Koreans, though... One earlier assumption you might encounter in outdated literature is that there would be overwhelming overlap as for northern Korean and northern Han phenotypes. Von Eickstedt and Lundman were physical anthropologists who more or less supported this idea maybe after having read about the ideas of some sinocentric sinologists. But neither of them seems to have done any research in Korea and northern China on his own. Rather, both of them appear to have depended on what others wrote about Koreans and northern Han. And since they probably never learnt to read any East Asian languages, they probably didn't even know about the state of research back then while they were writing their books. The most striking pecularity von Eickstedt's and Lundman's works on northern East Asian physical anthropology was that they emphasised the sociographic identities of northern East Asians, though. In this sense, they should have done research on East Asians according to social milieus like Baelz had previously done on a small scale when he had been in Japan. Accordingly, von Eickstedt and Lundman themselves almost invalidate their own statements about northern East Asians by remaining silent as for detailed studies on sociographially different populations within, e.g., Korea. By contrast, Russian anthropologists like Shirokogorov and Cheboksarov were already aware of that mainstream northern Koreans are generally significantly different from mainstream northern Han. Shirokogorov himself examined northern Koreans, Manchus and northern Han from several locations. And Cheboksarov was not only aware of the findings of other Russian anthropologists concerning northern Korean, Manchu and northern Han phenotypes but he also examined northern Han himself. That said, the picture which emerged from the findings of different Russian physical anthropologists suggested that the ethno-genetic and racial backgrounds of northern East Asian populations are rather a complicated topic. And Cheboksarov could already tell that Koreans and Manchus in his opinion most likely belonged to a race* different from the race of mainstream northern Han** within something like a northern East Asian racial cluster which included Koreans, Manchus and northern Han. In sum, future studies on the physical anthropology of Korean populations should focus on... - people from rural locations which are rather isolated and ethnographically distinctive in the sense that they are representative for a special region - people from specific social milieus at more urban locations So far, hardly anybody seems to have done so (if anybody at all). Therefore, one might only suppose that... - different kinds of craniofacially robust "types" (perhaps more similar to different kinds of North Asians) could persist in certain isolated rural parts of Korea in particular, e.g., in mountainous Korea in general, on Jeju-do and in middle and northern eastern coastal Korea - other, craniofacially less robust, "types" (maybe more similar to Manchus or leptoprosopic Japanese) could predominate in different rural parts of Korea - "types" similar to those in educated Han Chinese could persist among specialised white-collar workers and at special locations associated with sinicised culture in particular - gracile "types" specific to traditional Korean white-collar elites could have emerged in certain centres of Korean civilisation * (would be translated as "Koreano-Manchurian race" into English, one might suppose) ** (would be translatedas "Northern Chinese race" into English, one might suppose) |
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