ABSTRACT
In both academic studies and in common understandings, the connection between the body and racial identity is strong. From the sixteenth century, race has been used to denote common descent and was seen as carried by blood (Banton 1987; Gossett 1965). In the nineteenth century, genes replaced blood but still race was contained by the body. This connection still holds. Van Den Berghe (1993: 240) distinguishes race as a bodily feature from ethnicity, which is a cultural feature: “Ethnicity is based upon cultural markers of membership, such as language, religion, and countless symbols such as clothing, holidays, music, literature, tattooing, and so on, whereas race is marked by heritable phenotypes.” Being a member of a racial group is now fundamentally a claim about physical features such as skin color, hair texture, facial features, and musculature.
