title: Race (human categorization)

text: In 2000, philosopher Robin Andreasen proposed that cladistics might be used to categorize human races biologically, and that races can be both biologically real and socially constructed. Andreasen cited tree diagrams of relative genetic distances among populations published by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza as the basis for a phylogenetic tree of human races (p. 661). Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks (2008) responded by arguing that Andreasen had misinterpreted the genetic literature: "These trees are phenetic (based on similarity), rather than cladistic (based on monophyletic descent, that is from a series of unique ancestors)." Evolutionary biologist Alan Templeton (2013) argued that multiple lines of evidence falsify the idea of a phylogenetic tree structure to human genetic diversity, and confirm the presence of gene flow among populations. Marks, Templeton, and Cavalli-Sforza all conclude that genetics does not provide evidence of human races.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Previously, anthropologists Lieberman and Jackson (1995) had also critiqued the use of cladistics to support concepts of race. They argued that "the molecular and biochemical proponents of this model explicitly use racial categories "in their initial grouping of samples"". For example, the large and highly diverse macroethnic groups of East Indians, North Africans, and Europeans are presumptively grouped as Caucasians prior to the analysis of their DNA variation. They argued that this "a priori" grouping limits and skews interpretations, obscures other lineage relationships, deemphasizes the impact of more immediate clinal environmental factors on genomic diversity, and can cloud our understanding of the true patterns of affinity.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In 2015, Keith Hunley, Graciela Cabana, and Jeffrey Long analyzed the Human Genome Diversity Project sample of 1,037 individuals in 52 populations, finding that diversity among non-African populations is the result of a serial founder effect process, with non-African populations as a whole nested among African populations, that "some African populations are equally related to other African populations and to non-African populations," and that "outside of Africa, regional groupings of populations are nested inside one another, and many of them are not monophyletic." Earlier research had also suggested that there has always been considerable gene flow between human populations, meaning that human population groups are not monophyletic. Rachel Caspari has argued that, since no groups currently regarded as races are monophyletic, by definition none of these groups can be clades.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: One crucial innovation in reconceptualizing genotypic and phenotypic variation was the anthropologist C. Loring Brace's observation that such variations, insofar as it is affected by natural selection, slow migration, or genetic drift, are distributed along geographic gradations or clines. For example, with respect to skin color in Europe and Africa, Brace writes:To this day, skin color grades by imperceptible means from Europe southward around the eastern end of the Mediterranean and up the Nile into Africa. From one end of this range to the other, there is no hint of a skin color boundary, and yet the spectrum runs from the lightest in the world at the northern edge to as dark as it is possible for humans to be at the equator.In part this is due to isolation by distance. This point called attention to a problem common to phenotype-based descriptions of races (for example, those based on hair texture and skin color): they ignore a host of other similarities and differences (for example, blood type) that do not correlate highly with the markers for race. Thus, anthropologist Frank Livingstone's conclusion, that since clines cross racial boundaries, "there are no races, only clines".


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In a response to Livingstone, Theodore Dobzhansky argued that when talking about race one must be attentive to how the term is being used: "I agree with Dr. Livingstone that if races have to be 'discrete units', then there are no races, and if 'race' is used as an 'explanation' of the human variability, rather than vice versa, then the explanation is invalid." He further argued that one could use the term race if one distinguished between "race differences" and "the race concept". The former refers to any distinction in gene frequencies between populations; the latter is "a matter of judgment". He further observed that even when there is clinal variation, "Race differences are objectively ascertainable biological phenomena ... but it does not follow that racially distinct populations must be given racial (or subspecific) labels." In short, Livingstone and Dobzhansky agree that there are genetic differences among human beings; they also agree that the use of the race concept to classify people, and how the race concept is used, is a matter of social convention. They differ on whether the race concept remains a meaningful and useful social convention.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In 1964, the biologists Paul Ehrlich and Holm pointed out cases where two or more clines are distributed discordantly – for example, melanin is distributed in a decreasing pattern from the equator north and south; frequencies for the haplotype for beta-S hemoglobin, on the other hand, radiate out of specific geographical points in Africa. As the anthropologists Leonard Lieberman and Fatimah Linda Jackson observed, "Discordant patterns of heterogeneity falsify any description of a population as if it were genotypically or even phenotypically homogeneous".


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Patterns such as those seen in human physical and genetic variation as described above, have led to the consequence that the number and geographic location of any described races is highly dependent on the importance attributed to, and quantity of, the traits considered. A skin-lightening mutation, estimated to have occurred 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, partially accounts for the appearance of light skin in people who migrated out of Africa northward into what is now Europe. East Asians owe their relatively light skin to different mutations. On the other hand, the greater the number of traits (or alleles) considered, the more subdivisions of humanity are detected, since traits and gene frequencies do not always correspond to the same geographical location. Or as put it:


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Another way to look at differences between populations is to measure genetic differences rather than physical differences between groups. The mid-20th-century anthropologist William C. Boyd defined race as: "A population which differs significantly from other populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant 'constellation'". Leonard Lieberman and Rodney Kirk have pointed out that "the paramount weakness of this statement is that if one gene can distinguish races then the number of races is as numerous as the number of human couples reproducing." Moreover, the anthropologist Stephen Molnar has suggested that the discordance of clines inevitably results in a multiplication of races that renders the concept itself useless. The Human Genome Project states "People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other." Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan argue that human races do exist, and that they correspond to the genetic classification of ecotypes, but that real human races do not correspond very much, if at all, to folk racial categories. In contrast, Walsh & Yun reviewed the literature in 2011 and reported that "Genetic studies using very few chromosomal loci find that genetic polymorphisms divide human populations into clusters with almost 100 percent accuracy and that they correspond to the traditional anthropological categories."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Some biologists argue that racial categories correlate with biological traits (e.g. phenotype), and that certain genetic markers have varying frequencies among human populations, some of which correspond more or less to traditional racial groupings.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The distribution of genetic variants within and among human populations are impossible to describe succinctly because of the difficulty of defining a population, the clinal nature of variation, and heterogeneity across the genome (Long and Kittles 2003). In general, however, an average of 85% of statistical genetic variation exists within local populations, ≈7% is between local populations within the same continent, and ≈8% of variation occurs between large groups living on different continents. The recent African origin theory for humans would predict that in Africa there exists a great deal more diversity than elsewhere and that diversity should decrease the further from Africa a population is sampled. Hence, the 85% average figure is misleading: Long and Kittles find that rather than 85% of human genetic diversity existing in all human populations, about 100% of human diversity exists in a single African population, whereas only about 60% of human genetic diversity exists in the least diverse population they analyzed (the Surui, a population derived from New Guinea). Statistical analysis that takes this difference into account confirms previous findings that, "Western-based racial classifications have no taxonomic significance."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: A 2002 study of random biallelic genetic loci found little to no evidence that humans were divided into distinct biological groups.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In his 2003 paper, "", A. W. F. Edwards argued that rather than using a locus-by-locus analysis of variation to derive taxonomy, it is possible to construct a human classification system based on characteristic genetic patterns, or "clusters" inferred from multilocus genetic data. Geographically based human studies since have shown that such genetic clusters can be derived from analyzing of a large number of loci which can assort individuals sampled into groups analogous to traditional continental racial groups. Joanna Mountain and Neil Risch cautioned that while genetic clusters may one day be shown to correspond to phenotypic variations between groups, such assumptions were premature as the relationship between genes and complex traits remains poorly understood. However, Risch denied such limitations render the analysis useless: "Perhaps just using someone's actual birth year is not a very good way of measuring age. Does that mean we should throw it out? ... Any category you come up with is going to be imperfect, but that doesn't preclude you from using it or the fact that it has utility."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Early human genetic cluster analysis studies were conducted with samples taken from ancestral population groups living at extreme geographic distances from each other. It was thought that such large geographic distances would maximize the genetic variation between the groups sampled in the analysis, and thus maximize the probability of finding cluster patterns unique to each group. In light of the historically recent acceleration of human migration (and correspondingly, human gene flow) on a global scale, further studies were conducted to judge the degree to which genetic cluster analysis can pattern ancestrally identified groups as well as geographically separated groups. One such study looked at a large multiethnic population in the United States, and "detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity – as opposed to current residence – is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Anthropologists such as C. Loring Brace, the philosophers Jonathan Kaplan and Rasmus Winther, and the geneticist Joseph Graves, have argued that while there it is certainly possible to find biological and genetic variation that corresponds roughly to the groupings normally defined as "continental races", this is true for almost all geographically distinct populations. The cluster structure of the genetic data is therefore dependent on the initial hypotheses of the researcher and the populations sampled. When one samples continental groups, the clusters become continental; if one had chosen other sampling patterns, the clustering would be different. Weiss and Fullerton have noted that if one sampled only Icelanders, Mayans and Maoris, three distinct clusters would form and all other populations could be described as being clinally composed of admixtures of Maori, Icelandic and Mayan genetic materials. Kaplan and Winther therefore argue that, seen in this way, both Lewontin and Edwards are right in their arguments. They conclude that while racial groups are characterized by different allele frequencies, this does not mean that racial classification is a natural taxonomy of the human species, because multiple other genetic patterns can be found in human populations that crosscut racial distinctions. Moreover, the genomic data underdetermines whether one wishes to see subdivisions (i.e., splitters) or a continuum (i.e., lumpers). Under Kaplan and Winther's view, racial groupings are objective social constructions (see Mills 1998) that have conventional biological reality only insofar as the categories are chosen and constructed for pragmatic scientific reasons. In earlier work, Winther had identified "diversity partitioning" and "clustering analysis" as two separate methodologies, with distinct questions, assumptions, and protocols. Each is also associated with opposing ontological consequences vis-a-vis the metaphysics of race. Philosopher Lisa Gannett has argued that biogeographical ancestry, a concept devised by Mark Shriver and Tony Frudakis, is not an objective measure of the biological aspects of race as Shriver and Frudakis claim it is. She argues that it is actually just a "local category shaped by the U.S. context of its production, especially the forensic aim of being able to predict the race or ethnicity of an unknown suspect based on DNA found at the crime scene."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Recent studies of human genetic clustering have included a debate over how genetic variation is organized, with clusters and clines as the main possible orderings. argued for smooth, clinal genetic variation in ancestral populations even in regions previously considered racially homogeneous, with the apparent gaps turning out to be artifacts of sampling techniques. disputed this and offered an analysis of the Human Genetic Diversity Panel showing that there were small discontinuities in the smooth genetic variation for ancestral populations at the location of geographic barriers such as the Sahara, the Oceans, and the Himalayas. Nonetheless, stated that their findings "should not be taken as evidence of our support of any particular concept of biological race... Genetic differences among human populations derive mainly from gradations in allele frequencies rather than from distinctive 'diagnostic' genotypes." Using a sample of 40 populations distributed roughly evenly across the Earth's land surface, found that "genetic diversity is distributed in a more clinal pattern when more geographically intermediate populations are sampled."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Guido Barbujani has written that human genetic variation is generally distributed continuously in gradients across much of Earth, and that there is no evidence that genetic boundaries between human populations exist as would be necessary for human races to exist.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Over time, human genetic variation has formed a nested structure that is inconsistent with the concept of races that have evolved independently of one another.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: As anthropologists and other evolutionary scientists have shifted away from the language of race to the term "population" to talk about genetic differences, historians, cultural anthropologists and other social scientists re-conceptualized the term "race" as a cultural category or identity, i.e., a way among many possible ways in which a society chooses to divide its members into categories.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs concerning shared culture, ancestry and history. Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race", following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the civil rights movement in the United States and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. They thus came to believe that race itself is a social construct, a concept that was believed to correspond to an objective reality but which was believed in because of its social functions.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Craig Venter and Francis Collins of the National Institute of Health jointly made the announcement of the mapping of the human genome in 2000. Upon examining the data from the genome mapping, Venter realized that although the genetic variation within the human species is on the order of 1–3% (instead of the previously assumed 1%), the types of variations do not support notion of genetically defined races. Venter said, "Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines (that would stand out), if we could compare all the sequenced genomes of everyone on the planet." "When we try to apply science to try to sort out these social differences, it all falls apart."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Anthropologist Stephan Palmié has argued that race "is not a thing but a social relation"; or, in the words of Katya Gibel Mevorach, "a metonym", "a human invention whose criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but have always been used to manage difference." As such, the use of the term "race" itself must be analyzed. Moreover, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race; only history and social relationships will.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Imani Perry has argued that race "is produced by social arrangements and political decision making", and that "race is something that happens, rather than something that is. It is dynamic, but it holds no objective truth." Similarly, "" (2005), Richard T. Ford argued that while "there is no necessary correspondence between the ascribed identity of race and one's culture or personal sense of self" and "group difference is not intrinsic to members of social groups but rather contingent o[n] the social practices of group identification", the social practices of identity politics may coerce individuals into the "compulsory" enactment of "prewritten racial scripts".


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Compared to 19th-century United States, 20th-century Brazil was characterized by a perceived relative absence of sharply defined racial groups. According to anthropologist Marvin Harris, this pattern reflects a different history and different social relations.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Race in Brazil was "biologized", but in a way that recognized the difference between ancestry (which determines genotype) and phenotypic differences. There, racial identity was not governed by rigid descent rule, such as the one-drop rule, as it was in the United States. A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only a very limited number of categories to choose from, to the extent that full siblings can pertain to different racial groups.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Over a dozen racial categories would be recognized in conformity with all the possible combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and not one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred preferentially to appearance, not heredity, and appearance is a poor indication of ancestry, because only a few genes are responsible for someone's skin color and traits: a person who is considered white may have more African ancestry than a person who is considered black, and the reverse can be also true about European ancestry. The complexity of racial classifications in Brazil reflects the extent of genetic mixing in Brazilian society, a society that remains highly, but not strictly, stratified along color lines. These socioeconomic factors are also significant to the limits of racial lines, because a minority of "pardos", or brown people, are likely to start declaring themselves white or black if socially upward, and being seen as relatively "whiter" as their perceived social status increases (much as in other regions of Latin America).


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Fluidity of racial categories aside, the "biologification" of race in Brazil referred above would match contemporary concepts of race in the United States quite closely, though, if Brazilians are supposed to choose their race as one among, Asian and Indigenous apart, three IBGE's census categories. While assimilated Amerindians and people with very high quantities of Amerindian ancestry are usually grouped as "caboclos", a subgroup of "pardos" which roughly translates as both mestizo and hillbilly, for those of lower quantity of Amerindian descent a higher European genetic contribution is expected to be grouped as a "pardo". In several genetic tests, people with less than 60-65% of European descent and 5–10% of Amerindian descent usually cluster with Afro-Brazilians (as reported by the individuals), or 6.9% of the population, and those with about 45% or more of Subsaharan contribution most times do so (in average, Afro-Brazilian DNA was reported to be about 50% Subsaharan African, 37% European and 13% Amerindian).


title: Race (human categorization)

text: If a more consistent report with the genetic groups in the gradation of genetic mixing is to be considered (e.g. that would not cluster people with a balanced degree of African and non-African ancestry in the black group instead of the multiracial one, unlike elsewhere in Latin America where people of high quantity of African descent tend to classify themselves as mixed), more people would report themselves as white and "pardo" in Brazil (47.7% and 42.4% of the population as of 2010, respectively), because by research its population is believed to have between 65 and 80% of autosomal European ancestry, in average (also >35% of European mt-DNA and >95% of European Y-DNA).


title: Race (human categorization)

text: From the last decades of the Empire until the 1950s, the proportion of the white population increased significantly while Brazil welcomed 5.5 million immigrants between 1821 and 1932, not much behind its neighbor Argentina with 6.4 million, and it received more European immigrants in its colonial history than the United States. Between 1500 and 1760, 700.000 Europeans settled in Brazil, while 530.000 Europeans settled in the United States for the same given time. Thus, the historical construction of race in Brazilian society dealt primarily with gradations between persons of majority European ancestry and little minority groups with otherwise lower quantity therefrom in recent times.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The European Union uses the terms racial origin and ethnic origin synonymously in its documents and according to it "the use of the term 'racial origin' in this directive does not imply an acceptance of such [racial] theories". Haney López warns that using "race" as a category within the law tends to legitimize its existence in the popular imagination. In the diverse geographic context of Europe, ethnicity and ethnic origin are arguably more resonant and are less encumbered by the ideological baggage associated with "race". In European context, historical resonance of "race" underscores its problematic nature. In some states, it is strongly associated with laws promulgated by the Nazi and Fascist governments in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, in 1996, the European Parliament adopted a resolution stating that "the term should therefore be avoided in all official texts".


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The concept of racial origin relies on the notion that human beings can be separated into biologically distinct "races", an idea generally rejected by the scientific community. Since all human beings belong to the same species, the ECRI (European Commission against Racism and Intolerance) rejects theories based on the existence of different "races". However, in its Recommendation ECRI uses this term in order to ensure that those persons who are generally and erroneously perceived as belonging to "another race" are not excluded from the protection provided for by the legislation. The law claims to reject the existence of "race", yet penalize situations where someone is treated less favourably on this ground.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The immigrants to the United States came from every region of Europe, Africa, and Asia. They mixed among themselves and with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent. In the United States most people who self-identify as African American have some European ancestors, while many people who identify as European American have some African or Amerindian ancestors.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Since the early history of the United States, Amerindians, African Americans, and European Americans have been classified as belonging to different races. Efforts to track mixing between groups led to a proliferation of categories, such as mulatto and octoroon. The criteria for membership in these races diverged in the late 19th century. During the Reconstruction era, increasing numbers of Americans began to consider anyone with "one drop" of known "Black blood" to be Black, regardless of appearance. By the early 20th century, this notion was made statutory in many states. Amerindians continue to be defined by a certain percentage of "Indian blood" (called "blood quantum"). To be White one had to have perceived "pure" White ancestry. The one-drop rule or hypodescent rule refers to the convention of defining a person as racially black if he or she has any known African ancestry. This rule meant that those that were mixed race but with some discernible African ancestry were defined as black. The one-drop rule is specific to not only those with African ancestry but to the United States, making it a particularly African-American experience.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The decennial censuses conducted since 1790 in the United States created an incentive to establish racial categories and fit people into these categories.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The term "Hispanic" as an ethnonym emerged in the 20th century with the rise of migration of laborers from the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America to the United States. Today, the word "Latino" is often used as a synonym for "Hispanic". The definitions of both terms are non-race specific, and include people who consider themselves to be of distinct races (Black, White, Amerindian, Asian, and mixed groups). However, there is a common misconception in the US that Hispanic/Latino is a race or sometimes even that national origins such as Mexican, Cuban, Colombian, Salvadoran, etc. are races. In contrast to "Latino" or "Hispanic", "Anglo" refers to non-Hispanic White Americans or non-Hispanic European Americans, most of whom speak the English language but are not necessarily of English descent.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The concept of race classification in physical anthropology lost credibility around the 1960s and is now considered untenable. A 2019 statement by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists declares:Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.Wagner et al. (2017) surveyed 3,286 American anthropologists' views on race and genetics, including both cultural and biological anthropologists. They found a consensus among them that biological races do not exist in humans, but that race does exist insofar as the social experiences of members of different races can have significant effects on health.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Wang, Štrkalj et al. (2003) examined the use of race as a biological concept in research papers published in China's only biological anthropology journal, "Acta Anthropologica Sinica". The study showed that the race concept was widely used among Chinese anthropologists. In a 2007 review paper, Štrkalj suggested that the stark contrast of the racial approach between the United States and China was due to the fact that race is a factor for social cohesion among the ethnically diverse people of China, whereas "race" is a very sensitive issue in America and the racial approach is considered to undermine social cohesion – with the result that in the socio-political context of US academics scientists are encouraged not to use racial categories, whereas in China they are encouraged to use them.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Lieberman et al. in a 2004 study researched the acceptance of race as a concept among anthropologists in the United States, Canada, the Spanish speaking areas, Europe, Russia and China. Rejection of race ranged from high to low, with the highest rejection rate in the United States and Canada, a moderate rejection rate in Europe, and the lowest rejection rate in Russia and China. Methods used in the studies reported included questionnaires and content analysis.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Kaszycka et al. (2009) in 2002–2003 surveyed European anthropologists' opinions toward the biological race concept. Three factors, country of academic education, discipline, and age, were found to be significant in differentiating the replies. Those educated in Western Europe, physical anthropologists, and middle-aged persons rejected race more frequently than those educated in Eastern Europe, people in other branches of science, and those from both younger and older generations." The survey shows that the views on race are sociopolitically (ideologically) influenced and highly dependent on education."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Since the second half of the 20th century, physical anthropology in the United States has moved away from a typological understanding of human biological diversity towards a genomic and population-based perspective. Anthropologists have tended to understand race as a social classification of humans based on phenotype and ancestry as well as cultural factors, as the concept is understood in the social sciences. Since 1932, an increasing number of college textbooks introducing physical anthropology have rejected race as a valid concept: from 1932 to 1976, only seven out of thirty-two rejected race; from 1975 to 1984, thirteen out of thirty-three rejected race; from 1985 to 1993, thirteen out of nineteen rejected race. According to one academic journal entry, where 78 percent of the articles in the 1931 "Journal of Physical Anthropology" employed these or nearly synonymous terms reflecting a bio-race paradigm, only 36 percent did so in 1965, and just 28 percent did in 1996.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: A 1998 "Statement on 'Race'" composed by a select committee of anthropologists and issued by the executive board of the American Anthropological Association, which they argue "represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists", declares:


title: Race (human categorization)

text: An earlier survey, conducted in 1985 , asked 1,200 American scientists how many "disagree" with the following proposition: "There are biological races in the species "Homo sapiens"." Among anthropologists, the responses were:


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The same survey, conducted again in 1999, showed that the number of anthropologists disagreeing with the idea of biological race had risen substantially. The results were as follows:


title: Race (human categorization)

text: A line of research conducted by Cartmill (1998), however, seemed to limit the scope of Lieberman's finding that there was "a significant degree of change in the status of the race concept". Goran Štrkalj has argued that this may be because Lieberman and collaborators had looked at all the members of the American Anthropological Association irrespective of their field of research interest, while Cartmill had looked specifically at biological anthropologists interested in human variation.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In 2007, Ann Morning interviewed over 40 American biologists and anthropologists and found significant disagreements over the nature of race, with no one viewpoint holding a majority among either group. Morning also argues that a third position, "antiessentialism", which holds that race is not a useful concept for biologists, should be introduced into this debate in addition to "constructionism" and "essentialism".


title: Race (human categorization)

text: According to the 2000 University of Wyoming edition of a popular physical anthropology textbook, forensic anthropologists are overwhelmingly in support of the idea of the basic biological reality of human races. Forensic physical anthropologist and professor George W. Gill has said that the idea that race is only skin deep "is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm" and "Many morphological features tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc. (For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.)" While he can see good arguments for both sides, the complete denial of the opposing evidence "seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all". He also states that many biological anthropologists see races as real yet "not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship".


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In partial response to Gill's statement, Professor of Biological Anthropology C. Loring Brace argues that the reason laymen and biological anthropologists can determine the geographic ancestry of an individual can be explained by the fact that biological characteristics are clinally distributed across the planet, and that does not translate into the concept of race. He states: The concept of "race" is still sometimes used within forensic anthropology (when analyzing skeletal remains), biomedical research, and race-based medicine. Brace has criticized forensic anthropologists for this, arguing that they in fact should be talking about regional ancestry. He argues that while forensic anthropologists can determine that a skeletal remain comes from a person with ancestors in a specific region of Africa, categorizing that skeletal as being "black" is a socially constructed category that is only meaningful in the particular social context of the United States, and which is not itself scientifically valid.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In the same 1985 survey , 16% of the surveyed biologists and 36% of the surveyed developmental psychologists disagreed with the proposition: "There are biological races in the species "Homo sapiens"."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The authors of the study also examined 77 college textbooks in biology and 69 in physical anthropology published between 1932 and 1989. Physical anthropology texts argued that biological races exist until the 1970s, when they began to argue that races do not exist. In contrast, biology textbooks did not undergo such a reversal but many instead dropped their discussion of race altogether. The authors attributed this to biologists trying to avoid discussing the political implications of racial classifications, and to the ongoing discussions in biology about the validity of the idea of "subspecies". The authors concluded, "The concept of race, masking the overwhelming genetic similarity of all peoples and the mosaic patterns of variation that do not correspond to racial divisions, is not only socially dysfunctional but is biologically indefensible as well (pp. 5 18–5 19)."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: A 1994 examination of 32 English sport/exercise science textbooks found that 7 (21.9%) claimed that there are biophysical differences due to race that might explain differences in sports performance, 24 (75%) did not mention nor refute the concept, and 1 (3.1%) expressed caution with the idea.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In February 2001, the editors of "Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine" asked "authors to not use race and ethnicity when there is no biological, scientific, or sociological reason for doing so." The editors also stated that "analysis by race and ethnicity has become an analytical knee-jerk reflex." "Nature Genetics" now ask authors to "explain why they make use of particular ethnic groups or populations, and how classification was achieved."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Morning (2008) looked at high school biology textbooks during the 1952–2002 period and initially found a similar pattern with only 35% directly discussing race in the 1983–92 period from initially 92% doing so. However, this has increased somewhat after this to 43%. More indirect and brief discussions of race in the context of medical disorders have increased from none to 93% of textbooks. In general, the material on race has moved from surface traits to genetics and evolutionary history. The study argues that the textbooks' fundamental message about the existence of races has changed little.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Surveying views on race in the scientific community in 2008, Morning concluded that biologists had failed to come to a clear consensus, and they often split along cultural and demographic lines. She notes, "At best, one can conclude that biologists and anthropologists now appear equally divided in their beliefs about the nature of race."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Gissis (2008) examined several important American and British journals in genetics, epidemiology and medicine for their content during the 1946–2003 period. He wrote that "Based upon my findings I argue that the category of race only "seemingly" disappeared from scientific discourse after World War II and has had a "fluctuating yet continuous use" during the time span from 1946 to 2003, and has even "become more pronounced from the early 1970s on"".


title: Race (human categorization)

text: 33 health services researchers from differing geographic regions were interviewed in a 2008 study. The researchers recognized the problems with racial and ethnic variables but the majority still believed these variables were necessary and useful.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: A 2010 examination of 18 widely used English anatomy textbooks found that they all represented human biological variation in superficial and outdated ways, many of them making use of the race concept in ways that were current in 1950s anthropology. The authors recommended that anatomical education should describe human anatomical variation in more detail and rely on newer research that demonstrates the inadequacies of simple racial typologies.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: A 2021 study that examined over 11,000 papers from 1949 to 2018 in The American Journal of Human Genetics, found that "race" was used in only 5% of papers published in the last decade, down from 22% in the first. Together with an increase in use of the terms "ethnicity," "ancestry," and location-based terms, it suggests that human geneticists have mostly abandoned the term "race."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913), considered to be one of the founders of American sociology, rejected notions that there were fundamental differences that distinguished one race from another, although he acknowledged that social conditions differed dramatically by race. At the turn of the 20th century, sociologists viewed the concept of race in ways that were shaped by the scientific racism of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Many sociologists focused on African Americans, called Negroes at that time, and claimed that they were inferior to whites. White sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), for example, used biological arguments to claim the inferiority of African Americans. American sociologist Charles H. Cooley (1864–1929) theorized that differences among races were "natural," and that biological differences result in differences in intellectual abilities Edward Alsworth Ross (1866–1951), also an important figure in the founding of American sociology, and a eugenicist, believed that whites were the superior race, and that there were essential differences in "temperament" among races. In 1910, the "Journal" published an article by Ulysses G. Weatherly (1865–1940) that called for white supremacy and segregation of the races to protect racial purity.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), one of the first African-American sociologists, was the first sociologist to use sociological concepts and empirical research methods to analyze race as a social construct instead of a biological reality. Beginning in 1899 with his book "The Philadelphia Negro", Du Bois studied and wrote about race and racism throughout his career. In his work, he contended that social class, colonialism, and capitalism shaped ideas about race and racial categories. Social scientists largely abandoned scientific racism and biological reasons for racial categorization schemes by the 1930s. Other early sociologists, especially those associated with the Chicago School, joined Du Bois in theorizing race as a socially constructed fact. By 1978, William Julius Wilson argued that race and racial classification systems were declining in significance, and that instead, social class more accurately described what sociologists had earlier understood as race. By 1986, sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant successfully introduced the concept of racial formation to describe the process by which racial categories are created. Omi and Winant assert that "there is no biological basis for distinguishing among human groups along the lines of race."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Sociology professor at Duke University, remarks, "I contend that racism is, more than anything else, a matter of group power; it is about a dominant racial group (whites) striving to maintain its systemic advantages and minorities fighting to subvert the racial status quo." The types of practices that take place under this new color-blind racism is subtle, institutionalized, and supposedly not racial. Color-blind racism thrives on the idea that race is no longer an issue in the United States. There are contradictions between the alleged color-blindness of most whites and the persistence of a color-coded system of inequality.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Today, sociologists generally understand race and racial categories as socially constructed, and reject racial categorization schemes that depend on biological differences.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In the United States, federal government policy promotes the use of racially categorized data to identify and address health disparities between racial or ethnic groups. In clinical settings, race has sometimes been considered in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions. Doctors have noted that some medical conditions are more prevalent in certain racial or ethnic groups than in others, without being sure of the cause of those differences. Recent interest in race-based medicine, or race-targeted pharmacogenomics, has been fueled by the proliferation of human genetic data which followed the decoding of the human genome in the first decade of the twenty-first century. There is an active debate among biomedical researchers about the meaning and importance of race in their research. Proponents of the use of racial categories in biomedicine argue that continued use of racial categorizations in biomedical research and clinical practice makes possible the application of new genetic findings, and provides a clue to diagnosis. Biomedical researchers' positions on race fall into two main camps: those who consider the concept of race to have no biological basis and those who consider it to have the potential to be biologically meaningful. Members of the latter camp often base their arguments around the potential to create genome-based personalized medicine.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Other researchers point out that finding a difference in disease prevalence between two socially defined groups does not necessarily imply genetic causation of the difference. They suggest that medical practices should maintain their focus on the individual rather than an individual's membership to any group. They argue that overemphasizing genetic contributions to health disparities carries various risks such as reinforcing stereotypes, promoting racism or ignoring the contribution of non-genetic factors to health disparities. International epidemiological data show that living conditions rather than race make the biggest difference in health outcomes even for diseases that have "race-specific" treatments. Some studies have found that patients are reluctant to accept racial categorization in medical practice.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In an attempt to provide general descriptions that may facilitate the job of law enforcement officers seeking to apprehend suspects, the United States FBI employs the term "race" to summarize the general appearance (skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and other such easily noticed characteristics) of individuals whom they are attempting to apprehend. From the perspective of law enforcement officers, it is generally more important to arrive at a description that will readily suggest the general appearance of an individual than to make a scientifically valid categorization by DNA or other such means. Thus, in addition to assigning a wanted individual to a racial category, such a description will include: height, weight, eye color, scars and other distinguishing characteristics.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Criminal justice agencies in England and Wales use at least two separate racial/ethnic classification systems when reporting crime, as of 2010. One is the system used in the 2001 Census when individuals identify themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic group: W1 (White-British), W2 (White-Irish), W9 (Any other white background); M1 (White and black Caribbean), M2 (White and black African), M3 (White and Asian), M9 (Any other mixed background); A1 (Asian-Indian), A2 (Asian-Pakistani), A3 (Asian-Bangladeshi), A9 (Any other Asian background); B1 (Black Caribbean), B2 (Black African), B3 (Any other black background); O1 (Chinese), O9 (Any other). The other is categories used by the police when they visually identify someone as belonging to an ethnic group, e.g. at the time of a stop and search or an arrest: White – North European (IC1), White – South European (IC2), Black (IC3), Asian (IC4), Chinese, Japanese, or South East Asian (IC5), Middle Eastern (IC6), and Unknown (IC0). "IC" stands for "Identification Code;" these items are also referred to as Phoenix classifications. Officers are instructed to "record the response that has been given" even if the person gives an answer which may be incorrect; their own perception of the person's ethnic background is recorded separately. Comparability of the information being recorded by officers was brought into question by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in September 2007, as part of its Equality Data Review; one problem cited was the number of reports that contained an ethnicity of "Not Stated."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In the United States, the practice of racial profiling has been ruled to be both unconstitutional and a violation of civil rights. There is active debate regarding the cause of a marked correlation between the recorded crimes, punishments meted out, and the country's populations. Many consider "de facto" racial profiling an example of institutional racism in law enforcement.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Mass incarceration in the United States disproportionately impacts African American and Latino communities. Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" (2010), argues that mass incarceration is best understood as not only a system of overcrowded prisons. Mass incarceration is also, "the larger web of laws, rules, policies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison." She defines it further as "a system that locks people not only behind actual bars in actual prisons, but also behind virtual bars and virtual walls", illustrating the second-class citizenship that is imposed on a disproportionate number of people of color, specifically African-Americans. She compares mass incarceration to Jim Crow laws, stating that both work as racial caste systems.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Many research findings appear to agree that the impact of victim race in the interpersonal violence (IPV) arrest decision might include a racial bias in favor of white victims. A 2011 study in a national sample of IPV arrests found that female arrest was more likely if the male victim was white and the female offender was black, while male arrest was more likely if the female victim was white. For both female and male arrest in IPV cases, situations involving married couples were more likely to lead to arrest compared to dating or divorced couples. More research is needed to understand agency and community factors that influence police behavior and how discrepancies in IPV interventions/ tools of justice can be addressed.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Recent work using DNA cluster analysis to determine race background has been used by some criminal investigators to narrow their search for the identity of both suspects and victims. Proponents of DNA profiling in criminal investigations cite cases where leads based on DNA analysis proved useful, but the practice remains controversial among medical ethicists, defense lawyers and some in law enforcement.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: The Constitution of Australia contains a line about 'people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws', despite there being no agreed definition of race described in the document.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Similarly, forensic anthropologists draw on highly heritable morphological features of human remains (e.g. cranial measurements) to aid in the identification of the body, including in terms of race. In a 1992 article, anthropologist Norman Sauer noted that anthropologists had generally abandoned the concept of race as a valid representation of human biological diversity, except for forensic anthropologists. He asked, "If races don't exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?" He concluded:


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Identification of the ancestry of an individual is dependent upon knowledge of the frequency and distribution of phenotypic traits in a population. This does not necessitate the use of a racial classification scheme based on unrelated traits, although the race concept is widely used in medical and legal contexts in the United States. Some studies have reported that races can be identified with a high degree of accuracy using certain methods, such as that developed by Giles and Elliot. However, this method sometimes fails to be replicated in other times and places; for instance, when the method was re-tested to identify Native Americans, the average rate of accuracy dropped from 85% to 33%. Prior information about the individual (e.g. Census data) is also important in allowing the accurate identification of the individual's "race".


title: Race (human categorization)

text: A 2002 study found that about 13% of human craniometric variation existed between regions, while 6% existed between local populations within regions and 81% within local populations. In contrast, the opposite pattern of genetic variation was observed for skin color (which is often used to define race), with 88% of variation between regions. The study concluded that "The apportionment of genetic diversity in skin color is atypical, and cannot be used for purposes of classification."


title: Race (human categorization)

text: Similarly, a 2009 study found that craniometrics could be used accurately to determine what part of the world someone was from based on their cranium; however, this study also found that there were no abrupt boundaries that separated craniometric variation into distinct racial groups. Another 2009 study showed that American blacks and whites had different skeletal morphologies, and that significant patterning in variation in these traits exists within continents. This suggests that classifying humans into races based on skeletal characteristics would necessitate many different "races" being defined.


title: Race (human categorization)

text: In 2010, philosopher Neven Sesardic argued that when several traits are analyzed at the same time, forensic anthropologists can classify a person's race with an accuracy of close to 100% based on only skeletal remains. Sesardic's claim has been disputed by philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, who accused Sesardic of "cherry pick[ing] the scientific evidence and reach[ing] conclusions that are contradicted by it." Specifically, Pigliucci argued that Sesardic misrepresented a paper by Ousley et al. (2009), and neglected to mention that they identified differentiation not just between individuals from different races, but also between individuals from different tribes, local environments, and time periods.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: The print is Hokusai's best-known work and the first in his series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji", in which the use of Prussian blue revolutionized Japanese prints. The composition of "The Great Wave" is a synthesis of traditional Japanese prints and use of graphical perspective developed in Europe, and earned him immediate success in Japan and later in Europe, where Hokusai's art inspired works by the Impressionists. Several museums throughout the world hold copies of "The Great Wave", many of which came from 19th-century private collections of Japanese prints.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: "The Great Wave Kanagawa" has been described as "possibly the most reproduced image in the history of all art", as well as being a contender for the "most famous artwork in Japanese history". It has influenced several notable artists and musicians, including Vincent van Gogh, Claude Debussy, Claude Monet, and Hiroshige.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: "Ukiyo-e" is a Japanese printmaking technique which flourished in the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of subjects including female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; Japanese flora and fauna; and erotica. The term translates as "picture[s] of the floating world".


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: After Edo (now Tokyo) became the seat of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate in 1603, the "chōnin" class of merchants, craftsmen, and workers benefited most from the city's rapid economic growth, and began to indulge in and patronise the entertainment of kabuki theatre, geisha, and courtesans of the pleasure districts; the term ("floating world") came to describe this hedonistic lifestyle. Printed or painted "ukiyo-e" works were popular with the "chōnin" class, who had become wealthy enough to afford to decorate their homes with them.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: The earliest "ukiyo-e" works, Hishikawa Moronobu's paintings and monochromatic prints of women, emerged in the 1670s. Colour prints were introduced gradually, and at first were only used for special commissions. By the 1740s, artists such as Okumura Masanobu used multiple woodblocks to print areas of colour. In the 1760s, the success of Suzuki Harunobu's "brocade prints" led to full-colour production becoming standard, with ten or more blocks used to create each print. Some "ukiyo-e" artists specialized in creating paintings, but most works were prints. Artists rarely carved their own woodblocks; production was divided between the artist, who designed the prints; the carver, who cut the woodblocks; the printer, who inked and pressed the woodblocks onto hand-made paper; and the publisher who financed, promoted, and distributed the works. As printing was done by hand, printers were able to achieve effects impractical with machines, such as the blending or gradation of colours on the printing block.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Katsushika Hokusai was born in Katsushika, Japan, in 1760 in a district east of Edo. He was the son of a shogun mirrormaker, and at the age of 14, he was named "Tokitarō". As Hokusai was never recognised as an heir, it is likely his mother was a concubine.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Hokusai began painting when he was six years old, and when he was twelve his father sent him to work in a bookstore. At sixteen, he became an engraver's apprentice, which he remained for three years while also beginning to create his own illustrations. At eighteen, Hokusai was accepted as an apprentice to artist Katsukawa Shunshō, one of the greatest "ukiyo-e" artists of his time. When Shunshō died in 1793, Hokusai studied Japanese and Chinese styles, as well as some Dutch and French paintings on his own. In 1800, he published "Famous Views of the Eastern Capital and Eight Views of Edo", and began to accept trainees. During this period he began to use the name Hokusai; during his life, he would use more than 30 pseudonyms.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: In 1804, Hokusai rose to prominence when he created a drawing of a Buddhist monk named Daruma for a festival in Tokyo. Due to his precarious financial situation, in 1812, he published "Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing", and began to travel to Nagoya and Kyoto to recruit more students. In 1814, he published the first of 15 "manga"; volumes of sketches of subjects that interested him, such as people, animals, and Buddha. He published his famous series "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" in the late 1820s; it was so popular he later had to add ten more prints. Hokusai died in 1849 at the age of 89.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" is a landscape-format "yoko-e" print that was produced in an "ōban" size of . The landscape is composed of three elements: a stormy sea, three boats, and a mountain. The artist's signature is visible in the upper left-hand corner.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: In the background is Mount Fuji and its snow-capped summit; Mount Fuji is the central figure of the "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" series, which depicts the mountain from different angles. In "The Great Wave off Kanagawa", Mount Fuji is depicted in blue with white highlights in a similar way to the wave in the foreground. The dark colour surrounding the mountain appears to indicate the painting is set in the early morning, with the sun rising from the viewer's vantage point and beginning to illuminate the snowy peak. There are cumulonimbus clouds between the mountain and the viewer; although these clouds typically indicate a storm, there is no rain on Fuji or in the main scene.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: The scene shows three "oshiokuri-bune", fast barges that were used to transport live fish from the Izu and Bōsō peninsulas to markets in Edo Bay. According to analysis by Cartwright and Nakamura (2009), the boats are located in Edo (Tokyo) Bay off Yokohama in present-bay Kanagawa Prefecture, with Edo to the north and Mount Fuji to the west. The boats are facing south, likely to Sagami Bay to collect a cargo of fish for sale in Edo. Each boat has eight rowers who are holding their oars. At the front of each boat are two more relief crew members; 30 men are represented in the picture but only 22 are visible. The size of the wave can be approximated using the boats as a reference: the "oshiokuri-bune" were generally between long. Taking into account Hokusai reduced the vertical scale by 30%, the wave is between high.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: The sea dominates the composition, which is based on the shape of a wave that spreads out and dominates the entire scene before falling. At this point, the wave forms a perfect spiral with its centre passing through the centre of the design, allowing viewers to see Mount Fuji in the background. The image is made up of curves, with the water's surface being an extension of the curves inside the waves. The big wave's foam-curves generate other curves, which are divided into many small waves that repeat the image of the large wave. Edmond de Goncourt, a French writer, described the wave as follows:


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: The wave is generally described as that produced by a tsunami, a giant wave or more likely a rogue wave, but also as a monstrous or ghostly wave like a white skeleton threatening the fishermen with its "claws" of foam. This interpretation of the work recalls Hokusai's mastery of Japanese fantasy, which is evidenced by the ghosts in his "Hokusai Manga". An examination of the wave on the left side reveals many more "claws" that are ready to seize the fishermen behind the white foam strip. This image recalls many of Hokusai's previous works, including his "Hyaku Monogatari" series "One Hundred Ghost Stories", produced from 1831 to 1832, which more explicitly depicts supernatural themes. The wave's silhouette resembles that of a dragon, which the author frequently depicts, even on Mount Fuji.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" has two inscriptions. The title of the series is written in the upper-left corner within a rectangular frame, which reads: "冨嶽三十六景/神奈川沖/浪裏" "Fugaku Sanjūrokkei" / "Kanagawa oki / nami ura", meaning "Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji / On the high seas in Kanagawa / Under the wave". The inscription to the left of the box bears the artist's signature: 北斎改爲一筆 "Hokusai aratame Iitsu hitsu" which reads as "(painting) from the brush of Hokusai, who changed his name to Iitsu". Due to his humble origins, Hokusai had no surname; his first nickname Katsushika was derived from the region he came from. Throughout his career, Hokusai used over 30 names and never started a new cycle of work without changing his name, sometimes leaving his name to his students.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Depth and perspective ("uki-e") work in "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" stand out, with a strong contrast between background and foreground. Two great masses dominate the visual space: the violence of the great wave contrasts with the serenity of the empty background, evoking the yin and yang symbol. Man, powerless, struggles between the two, which may be a reference to Buddhism (in which man-made things are ephemeral), as represented by the boats being swept away by the giant wave, and Shintoism (in which nature is omnipotent).


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Hokusai faced numerous challenges during the composition of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa". In 1826, whilst in his sixties, he suffered financial difficulty, and in 1827 apparently suffered a serious health problem, probably a stroke. His wife died the following year, and in 1829 he had to rescue his grandson from financial problems, a situation that pushed Hokusai into poverty. Despite sending his grandson to the countryside with his father in 1830, the financial ramifications continued for several years, during which time he was working on "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji". Cartwright and Nakamura (2009) interpret Hokusai's tribulations as the source of the series' powerful and innovative imgaery. Hokusai's goal for the series appears to have been depicting the contrast between the sacred Mount Fuji and secular life.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: After several years of work and other drawings, Hokusai arrived at the final design for "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" in late 1831. Two similar works from around 30 years before the publication of "The Great Wave" can be considered forerunners: "Kanagawa-oki Honmoku no Zu" and "Oshiokuri Hato Tsusen no Zu", both of which depict a boat (a sailing boat in the former, and a rowing boat in the latter) in the midst of a storm and at the base of a great wave that threatens to engulf them. "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" demonstrates Hokusai's drawing skill. The print, though simple in appearance to the viewer, is the result of a lengthy process of methodical reflection. Hokusai established the foundations of this method in his 1812 book "Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing", in which he explains that any object can be drawn using the relationship between the circle and the square: "The book consists of showing the technique of drawing using only a ruler and a compass ... This method starts with a line and the most naturally obtained proportion". He continues in the book's preface: "All forms have their own dimensions which we must respect ... It must not be forgotten that such things belong to a universe whose harmony we must not break".


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Hokusai returned to the image of "The Great Wave" a few years later when he produced "Kaijo no Fuji" for the second volume of "One Hundred Views of Fuji". This print features the same relationship between the wave and the mountain, and the same burst of foam. There are no humans or boats in the latter image, and the wave fragments coincide with the flight of birds. While the wave in "The Great Wave" moves in the opposite direction of the Japanese reading – from right to left – the wave and birds in "Kaijo no Fuji" move in unison.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: The Japanese interpret "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" from right to left, emphasising the danger posed by the enormous wave. This is traditional for Japanese paintings, as Japanese script is also read from right to left. Analyzing the boats in the image, particularly that at the top, reveals the slender, tapering bow faces left, implying the Japanese interpretation is correct. The boats' appearances can also be analysed in Hokusai's print "Sōshū Chōshi" from the series "Chie no umi" ("Oceans of Wisdom"), in which the boat moves against the current in a rightward direction, as shown by the boat's wake.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: The concept of perspective prints arrived in Japan in the 18th century. These prints rely on a single-point perspective rather than a traditional foreground, middle ground, and background, which Hokusai consistently rejected. Objects in traditional Japanese painting and Far Eastern painting in general were not drawn in perspective but rather, as in ancient Egypt, the sizes of objects and figures were determined by the subject's importance within the context.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Perspective, which was first used in Western paintings by Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca, was introduced to Japanese artists through Western – particularly Dutch – merchants arriving in Nagasaki. Okumura Masanobu and especially Utagawa Toyoharu made the first attempts to imitate the use of Western perspective, producing engravings depicting the canals of Venice or the ruins of ancient Rome in perspective as early as 1750.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Toyoharu's work greatly influenced Japanese landscape painting, which evolved with the works of Hiroshige – an indirect student of Toyoharu through Toyohiro – and Hokusai. Hokusai became acquainted with Western perspective in the 1790s through Shiba Kōkan's investigations, from whose teaching he benefited. Between 1805 and 1810, Hokusai published the series "Mirror of Dutch Pictures – Eight Views of Edo".


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" would not have been as successful in the West if audiences did not have a sense of familiarity with the work. It has been interpreted as a Western play seen through the eyes of a Japanese. According to Richard Lane:


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: During the 1830s, Hokusai's prints underwent a "blue revolution", in which he made extensive use of the dark-blue pigment Prussian blue. He used this shade of blue for "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" rather than indigo, the delicate, quickly fading shade of blue that was commonly used in "ukiyo-e" works at the time. Prussian blue, which is known in Japanese as "berorin ai", was imported from Holland beginning in 1820, and was extensively used by Hiroshige and Hokusai after its arrival in Japan in large quantities in 1829.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: The first 10 prints in the series, including "The Great Wave off Kanagawa", are among the first Japanese prints to feature Prussian blue, which was most likely suggested to the publisher in 1830. This innovation was an immediate success. In early January 1831, Hokusai's publisher Nishimuraya Yohachi (Eijudō) widely advertised the innovation, and the following year published the next 10 prints in the "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" series, and unique for their predominantly-blue "aizuri-e" style, with "Kōshū Kajikazawa" ("Kajikazawa in Kai Province") being a notable example. The outlines on these 10 supplementary prints, known collectively as "ura Fuji" ("Fuji seen from behind"), are "sumi" black with India ink rather than Prussian blue.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: About 1,000 copies of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" were initially printed, resulting in wear in later editions of print copies. It is estimated approximately 8,000 copies were eventually printed.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: The first signs of wear were in the pink and yellow of the sky, which fades more in worn copies, resulting in vanishing clouds, a more uniform sky, and broken lines around the box containing the title. Some of the surviving copies have been damaged by light, as woodblock prints of the Edo period used light sensitive colourants. , about 100 copies of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" are known to survive; some of these copies are housed at Tokyo National Museum, the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum in Matsumoto, the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C., the Giverny Museum of Impressionisms in Giverny, France, the Musée Guimet and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France both in Paris. Some private collections such as the Gale Collection also have copies of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa".


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Nineteenth-century private collectors were frequently the source of museum collections of Japanese prints; for example, the copy in the Metropolitan Museum came from Henry Osborne Havemeyer's former collection, which his wife donated to the museum in 1929. The copy in the Bibliothèque nationale de France came from the collection of Samuel Bing in 1888, and te copy in the Musée Guimet is a bequest from , who gave it to the museum in 1932.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: After the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Japan ended a long period of isolation and opened to imports from the West. In turn, much Japanese art was exported to Europe and America, and quickly gained popularity. The influence of Japanese art on Western culture became known as Japonisme. Japanese woodblock prints inspired Western artists in many genres, particularly the Impressionists.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: As the most famous Japanese print, "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" influenced great works: in painting, works by Claude Monet; in music, Claude Debussy's "La Mer"; and in literature, Rainer Maria Rilke's "Der Berg". Claude Debussy, who loved the sea and painted images of the Far East, kept a copy of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" in his studio. During his work on "La Mer", he was inspired by the print and asked for the image to be used on the cover of the original 1905 score.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Henri Riviére, a draughtsman, engraver, and watercolourist who was also an important figure behind the Paris entertainment venue "Le Chat Noir", was one of the first artists to be heavily influenced by Hokusai's work, particularly "The Great Wave off Kanagawa". In homage to Hokusai's work, Riviére published a series of lithographs titled "The Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower" in 1902. Riviére was a collector of Japanese prints who purchased works from Siegfried Bing, Tadamasa Hayashi and Florine Langweil.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Vincent van Gogh, a great admirer of Hokusai, praised the quality of drawing and use of line in "The Great Wave off Kanagawa ", and wrote it had a "terrifying" emotional impact. French sculptor Camille Claudel's "" (1897) replaced the boats in Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa " with three women dancing in a circle.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Wayne Crothers, the curator of a 2017 Hokusai exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, described "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" as "possibly the most reproduced image in the history of all art" while the "Wall Street Journal"'s Ellen Gamerman wrote it "may be the most famous artwork in Japanese history". Hiroshige paid homage to "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" with his print "The Sea off Satta in Suruga Province" while French artist Gustave-Henri Jossot produced a satirical painting in the style of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" to mock the popularity of Japonisme.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Many modern artists have reinterpreted and adapted the image. Indigenous Australian artist Lin Onus used "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" as the basis for his 1992 painting "Michael and I are just slipping down the pub for a minute". A work named "Uprisings" by Japanese-American artist Kozyndan is based on the print; the foam of the wave is replaced with rabbits. On computer operating systems designed by Apple Inc., the emoji character for a water wave strongly resembles the wave depicted in the print.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: In 2022, the Bank of Japan announced a redesign of Japan's banknotes to begin circulation in 2024. Among other redesigns and security enhancements, the engraving of Mt. Fuji on the obverse of the 1,000 yen banknote will be replaced by a reproduction of the "Great Wave", including the portion of the print which depicts Mt. Fuji in the background.


title: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

text: Special television programmes and documentaries about "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" have been produced; these include the 30-minute, French-language documentary "La menace suspendue: La Vague" (1995) and a 2004 English-language special programme part of the BBC series "The Private Life of a Masterpiece". "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" is also the subject of the 93rd episode of the BBC radio series "A History of the World in 100 Objects" produced in collaboration with the British Museum, which was released on 4 September 2010. A replica of "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" was created for a documentary film about Hokusai released by the British Museum in 2017.


title: Book

text: A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is "codex" (plural, "codices"). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page.


title: Book

text: As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's "Physics" is called a book. In an unrestricted sense, a book is the compositional whole of which such sections, whether called books or chapters or parts, are parts.


title: Book

text: The intellectual content in a physical book need not be a composition, nor even be called a book. Books can consist only of drawings, engravings or photographs, crossword puzzles or cut-out dolls. In a physical book, the pages can be left blank or can feature an abstract set of lines to support entries, such as in an account book, an appointment book, an autograph book, a notebook, a diary or a sketchbook. Some physical books are made with pages thick and sturdy enough to support other physical objects, like a scrapbook or photograph album. Books may be distributed in electronic form as ebooks and other formats.


title: Book

text: Although in ordinary academic parlance a monograph is understood to be a specialist academic work, rather than a reference work on a scholarly subject, in library and information science "monograph" denotes more broadly any non-serial publication complete in one volume (book) or a finite number of volumes (even a novel like Proust's seven-volume "In Search of Lost Time"), in contrast to serial publications like a magazine, journal or newspaper. An avid reader or collector of books is a bibliophile or colloquially, "bookworm". A place where books are traded is a bookshop or bookstore. Books are also sold elsewhere and can be borrowed from libraries. Google has estimated that by 2010, approximately 130,000,000 titles had been published. In some wealthier nations, the sale of printed books has decreased because of the increased usage of ebooks. Although in most countries printed books continue to outsell their digital counterparts due to many people still preferring to read in a traditional way.


title: Book

text: The word book comes from Old English , which in turn comes from the Germanic root , cognate to 'beech'. In Slavic languages like Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian —'letter' is cognate with 'beech'. In Russian, Serbian and Macedonian, the word () or () refers to a primary school textbook that helps young children master the techniques of reading and writing. It is thus conjectured that the earliest Indo-European writings may have been carved on beech wood. The Latin word , meaning a book in the modern sense (bound and with separate leaves), originally meant 'block of wood'.


title: Book

text: When writing systems were created in ancient civilizations, a variety of objects, such as stone, clay, tree bark, metal sheets, and bones, were used for writing; these are studied in epigraphy.


title: Book

text: A tablet is a physically robust writing medium, suitable for casual transport and writing. Clay tablets were flattened and mostly dry pieces of clay that could be easily carried, and impressed with a stylus. They were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Wax tablets were pieces of wood covered in a coating of wax thick enough to record the impressions of a stylus. They were the normal writing material in schools, in accounting, and for taking notes. They had the advantage of being reusable: the wax could be melted, and reformed into a blank.


title: Book

text: The custom of binding several wax tablets together (Roman "pugillares") is a possible precursor of modern bound (codex) books. The etymology of the word "codex" (block of wood) also suggests that it may have developed from wooden wax tablets.


title: Book

text: Scrolls can be made from papyrus, a thick paper-like material made by weaving the stems of the papyrus plant, then pounding the woven sheet with a hammer-like tool until it is flattened. Papyrus was used for writing in Ancient Egypt, perhaps as early as the First Dynasty, although the first evidence is from the account books of King Neferirkare Kakai of the Fifth Dynasty (about 2400 BC). Papyrus sheets were glued together to form a scroll. Tree bark such as lime and other materials were also used.


title: Book

text: According to Herodotus (History 5:58), the Phoenicians brought writing and papyrus to Greece around the 10th or 9th century BC. The Greek word for papyrus as writing material ("biblion") and book ("biblos") come from the Phoenician port town Byblos, through which papyrus was exported to Greece. From Greek we also derive the word tome (), which originally meant a slice or piece and from there began to denote "a roll of papyrus". "Tomus" was used by the Latins with exactly the same meaning as "volumen" (see also below the explanation by Isidore of Seville).


title: Book

text: Whether made from papyrus, parchment, or paper, scrolls were the dominant form of book in the Hellenistic, Roman, Chinese, Hebrew, and Macedonian cultures. The more modern codex book format form took over the Roman world by late antiquity, but the scroll format persisted much longer in Asia.


title: Book

text: Isidore of Seville (died 636) explained the then-current relation between a codex, book, and scroll in his "Etymologiae" (VI.13): "A codex is composed of many books; a book is of one scroll. It is called codex by way of metaphor from the trunks ("codex") of trees or vines, as if it were a wooden stock, because it contains in itself a multitude of books, as it were of branches". Modern usage differs.


title: Book

text: A codex (in modern usage) is the first information repository that modern people would recognize as a "book": leaves of uniform size bound in some manner along one edge, and typically held between two covers made of some more robust material. The first written mention of the codex as a form of book is from Martial, in his "Apophoreta" at the end of the first century, where he praises its compactness. However, the codex never gained much popularity in the pagan Hellenistic world, and only within the Christian community did it gain widespread use. This change happened gradually during the 3rd and 4th centuries, and the reasons for adopting the codex form of the book are several: the format is more economical, as both sides of the writing material can be used; and it is portable, searchable, and easy to conceal. A book is much easier to read, to find a page that you want, and to flip through. A scroll is more awkward to use. The Christian authors may also have wanted to distinguish their writings from the pagan and Judaic texts written on scrolls. In addition, some metal books were made, that required smaller pages of metal, instead of an impossibly long, unbending scroll of metal. A book can also be easily stored in more compact places, or side by side in a tight library or shelf space.


title: Book

text: The fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD saw the decline of the culture of ancient Rome. Papyrus became difficult to obtain due to lack of contact with Egypt, and parchment, which had been used for centuries, became the main writing material. Parchment is a material made from processed animal skin and used—mainly in the past—for writing on.


title: Book

text: Parchment is most commonly made of calfskin, sheepskin, or goatskin. It was historically used for writing documents, notes, or the pages of a book. Parchment is limed, scraped and dried under tension. It is not tanned, and is thus different from leather. This makes it more suitable for writing on, but leaves it very reactive to changes in relative humidity and makes it revert to rawhide if overly wet.


title: Book

text: Monasteries carried on the Latin writing tradition in the Western Roman Empire. Cassiodorus, in the monastery of Vivarium (established around 540), stressed the importance of copying texts. St. Benedict of Nursia, in his "Rule of Saint Benedict" (completed around the middle of the 6th century) later also promoted reading. The "Rule of Saint Benedict" (Ch. ), which set aside certain times for reading, greatly influenced the monastic culture of the Middle Ages and is one of the reasons why the clergy were the predominant readers of books. The tradition and style of the Roman Empire still dominated, but slowly the peculiar medieval book culture emerged.


title: Book

text: Before the invention and adoption of the printing press, almost all books were copied by hand, which made books expensive and comparatively rare. Smaller monasteries usually had only a few dozen books, medium-sized perhaps a few hundred. By the 9th century, larger collections held around 500 volumes and even at the end of the Middle Ages, the papal library in Avignon and Paris library of the Sorbonne held only around 2,000 volumes.


title: Book

text: The "scriptorium" of the monastery was usually located over the chapter house. Artificial light was forbidden for fear it may damage the manuscripts. There were five types of scribes:


title: Book

text: The bookmaking process was long and laborious. The parchment had to be prepared, then the unbound pages were planned and ruled with a blunt tool or lead, after which the text was written by the scribe, who usually left blank areas for illustration and rubrication. Finally, the book was bound by the bookbinder.


title: Book

text: Different types of ink were known in antiquity, usually prepared from soot and gum, and later also from gall nuts and iron vitriol. This gave writing a brownish black color, but black or brown were not the only colors used. There are texts written in red or even gold, and different colors were used for illumination. For very luxurious manuscripts the whole parchment was colored purple, and the text was written on it with gold or silver (for example, Codex Argenteus).


title: Book

text: Irish monks introduced spacing between words in the 7th century. This facilitated reading, as these monks tended to be less familiar with Latin. However, the use of spaces between words did not become commonplace before the 12th century. It has been argued that the use of spacing between words shows the transition from semi-vocalized reading into silent reading.


title: Book

text: The first books used parchment or vellum (calfskin) for the pages. The book covers were made of wood and covered with leather. Because dried parchment tends to assume the form it had before processing, the books were fitted with clasps or straps. During the later Middle Ages, when public libraries appeared, up to the 18th century, books were often chained to a bookshelf or a desk to prevent theft. These chained books are called "libri catenati".


title: Book

text: At first, books were copied mostly in monasteries, one at a time. With the rise of universities in the 13th century, the Manuscript culture of the time led to an increase in the demand for books, and a new system for copying books appeared. The books were divided into unbound leaves ("pecia"), which were lent out to different copyists, so the speed of book production was considerably increased. The system was maintained by secular stationers guilds, which produced both religious and non-religious material.


title: Book

text: Judaism has kept the art of the scribe alive up to the present. According to Jewish tradition, the Torah scroll placed in a synagogue must be written by hand on parchment and a printed book would not do, though the congregation may use printed prayer books and printed copies of the Scriptures are used for study outside the synagogue. A sofer "scribe" is a highly respected member of any observant Jewish community.


title: Book

text: People of various religious (Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Muslims) and ethnic backgrounds (Syriac, Coptic, Persian, Arab etc.) in the Middle East also produced and bound books in the Islamic Golden Age (mid 8th century to 1258), developing advanced techniques in Islamic calligraphy, miniatures and bookbinding. A number of cities in the medieval Islamic world had book production centers and book markets. Yaqubi (died 897) says that in his time Baghdad had over a hundred booksellers. Book shops were often situated around the town's principal mosque as in Marrakesh, Morocco, that has a street named "Kutubiyyin" or book sellers in English and the famous Koutoubia Mosque is named so because of its location in this street.


title: Book

text: The medieval Muslim world also used a method of reproducing reliable copies of a book in large quantities known as check reading, in contrast to the traditional method of a single scribe producing only a single copy of a single manuscript. In the check reading method, only "authors could authorize copies, and this was done in public sessions in which the copyist read the copy aloud in the presence of the author, who then certified it as accurate." With this check-reading system, "an author might produce a dozen or more copies from a single reading," and with two or more readings, "more than one hundred copies of a single book could easily be produced." By using as writing material the relatively cheap paper instead of parchment or papyrus the Muslims, in the words of Pedersen "accomplished a feat of crucial significance not only to the history of the Islamic book, but also to the whole world of books".


title: Book

text: In woodblock printing, a relief image of an entire page was carved into blocks of wood, inked, and used to print copies of that page. This method originated in China, in the Han dynasty (before 220 AD), as a method of printing on textiles and later paper, and was widely used throughout East Asia. The oldest dated book printed by this method is "The Diamond Sutra" (868 AD). The method (called woodcut when used in art) arrived in Europe in the early 14th century. Books (known as block-books), as well as playing-cards and religious pictures, began to be produced by this method. Creating an entire book was a painstaking process, requiring a hand-carved block for each page; and the wood blocks tended to crack, if stored for long. The monks or people who wrote them were paid highly.


title: Book

text: The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware c. 1045, but there are no known surviving examples of his printing. Around 1450, in what is commonly regarded as an independent invention, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in Europe, along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mould. This invention gradually made books less expensive to produce and more widely available.


title: Book

text: Early printed books, single sheets and images which were created before 1501 in Europe are known as incunables or "incunabula". "A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in AD 330."


title: Book

text: Steam-powered printing presses became popular in the early 19th century. These machines could print 1,100 sheets per hour, but workers could only set 2,000 letters per hour. Monotype and linotype typesetting machines were introduced in the late 19th century. They could set more than 6,000 letters per hour and an entire line of type at once. There have been numerous improvements in the printing press. As well, the conditions for freedom of the press have been improved through the gradual relaxation of restrictive censorship laws. See also intellectual property, public domain, copyright. In mid-20th century, European book production had risen to over 200,000 titles per year.


title: Book

text: Throughout the 20th century, libraries have faced an ever-increasing rate of publishing, sometimes called an information explosion. The advent of electronic publishing and the internet means that much new information is not printed in paper books, but is made available online through a digital library, on CD-ROM, in the form of ebooks or other online media. An on-line book is an ebook that is available online through the internet. Though many books are produced digitally, most digital versions are not available to the public, and there is no decline in the rate of paper publishing. There is an effort, however, to convert books that are in the public domain into a digital medium for unlimited redistribution and infinite availability. This effort is spearheaded by Project Gutenberg combined with Distributed Proofreaders. There have also been new developments in the process of publishing books. Technologies such as POD or "print on demand", which make it possible to print as few as one book at a time, have made self-publishing (and vanity publishing) much easier and more affordable. On-demand publishing has allowed publishers, by avoiding the high costs of warehousing, to keep low-selling books in print rather than declaring them out of print.


title: Book

text: Goddess Saraswati image dated 132 AD excavated from Kankali tila depicts her holding a manuscript in her left hand represented as a bound and tied palm leaf or birch bark manuscript. In India a bounded manuscript made of birch bark or palm leaf existed side by side since antiquity. The text in palm leaf manuscripts was inscribed with a knife pen on rectangular cut and cured palm leaf sheets; colouring was then applied to the surface and wiped off, leaving the ink in the incised grooves. Each sheet typically had a hole through which a string could pass, and with these the sheets were tied together with a string to bind like a book.


title: Book

text: The codices of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) had the same form as the European codex, but were instead made with long folded strips of either fig bark (amatl) or plant fibers, often with a layer of whitewash applied before writing. New World codices were written as late as the 16th century (see Maya codices and Aztec codices). Those written before the Spanish conquests seem all to have been single long sheets folded concertina-style, sometimes written on both sides of the local "amatl" paper.


title: Book

text: The methods used for the printing and binding of books continued fundamentally unchanged from the 15th century into the early 20th century. While there was more mechanization, a book printer in 1900 had much in common with Gutenberg. Gutenberg's invention was the use of movable metal types, assembled into words, lines, and pages and then printed by letterpress to create multiple copies. Modern paper books are printed on papers designed specifically for printed books. Traditionally, book papers are off-white or low-white papers (easier to read), are opaque to minimize the show-through of text from one side of the page to the other and are (usually) made to tighter caliper or thickness specifications, particularly for case-bound books. Different paper qualities are used depending on the type of book: Machine finished coated papers, woodfree uncoated papers, coated fine papers and special fine papers are common paper grades.


title: Book

text: Today, the majority of books are printed by offset lithography. When a book is printed, the pages are laid out on the plate so that after the printed sheet is folded the pages will be in the correct sequence. Books tend to be manufactured nowadays in a few standard sizes. The sizes of books are usually specified as "trim size": the size of the page after the sheet has been folded and trimmed. The standard sizes result from sheet sizes (therefore machine sizes) which became popular 200 or 300 years ago, and have come to dominate the industry. British conventions in this regard prevail throughout the English-speaking world, except for the USA. The European book manufacturing industry works to a completely different set of standards.