Lecture 15. Week 37 Constructing racial identities

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Lecture 15. Week 37 Constructing racial
identities

• Economic indicators
• Poverty rate among Blacks and Hispanics in the US
  is three times that of whites
• African Americans 10.7 workforce, yet 6.9
  executive position
• Hispanics 9.2, yet 4.8 executive.
• From http//faculty.plattsburgh.edu/richard.robbi
  ns/legacy/editors_choice/scientific_racism.htm

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Anthropological ideas about race 1870-1920
anthropology identified itself as the study of
different races of mankind Anthropometric
studies Since then, efforts to critique the
notion of race as a biological concept
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Anthropometric tools
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Anthropometric measurements, 1890s, Masubia men
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How is race defined?

• framework of ranked categories
• dividing human population into hierarchy of
  races, colours, religions and cultures
• developed by western Europeans following global
  expansion, 1400s
• Linguistic lineage of race
• word first appeared in 1580 to refer to a breed
  or stock of animals
• can be traced to the Arabic word ras and the
  French word razza both meaning order or lineage
• Spanish and Portuguese term raza has a similar
  definition

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Popular conceptions of race

• global
• small number of categories, most frequently just
  three (white, black yellow (Caucasoid, Negroid,
  Mongoloid (and then subgroups)
• Assumed ranks of categories of cultural worth,
  intelligence, attractiveness etc.
• reinforces legally and politically economic and
  social inequality
• race seen as natural, biological, real and
  unquestionable

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cultural category rather than a biological
reality

• discredited biological term
• molecular biology and genetic studies
• plenty of genetic variation in humans, but 85 is
  individual variation.
• Humans- the most genetically homogenous species,
• no biological evidence of historical sublineages
  of humanity

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Classfication
Jeffrey Fish, Mixed Blood (2000). Avocados and
people Is avocado a fruit or a
vegetable? Question of classification - people
in with mixed blood In Brazil loura (whiter
than white) branca (white) morena (dark curly
hair, tan skin, nose not narrow, lips not thin)
mulata (tight curly hair, darker range of skin,
broad nose, thick lips). In America by drop of
blood no physical characteristics. In Russia
by physical appearance. Chechen people or look
alike are spotted by police.
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The history and evolution of the notion of race

• race arose alongside the development European sea
  travel after 1492
• 500 year old discussion about what constitutes
  humans
• 16th century imagined spaces based on medieval
  geographies
• Ideas of the other

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cannibals
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Amazon women
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Image from Mandeville
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Columbus discovers the New World, 1590
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Nova Reperta- Vespucci awakens America, 1598
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Early classifications, little to do with skin
colour

• at first, religious categories, barbarians and
  natural slaves
• Debates over the slavery of the Amerindians, how
  to classify them (human or beast) early 1500s
• History of the classificatory term barbarian
  (Greeks, Aristotle, Spanish colonialists)

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Ways to define barbarians, Indian savagery in the
New World

• cannibalism
• dietary norms
• technology
• lack of laws, arts, writing systems
• Great debates
• Environmental determinism
• 1537, officially decreed that Indians could
  qualify for eternal salvation

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St. Thomas of Aquinass adaptation of Aristotle's
Theory of Natural Slavery384-322 BC

• -axiom of Greek thought
• existing in all complex forms a duality (in which
  one element naturally dominates the other)--
  i.e.--intellect vs. emotion, rationality vs.
  passions etc.
• Natural slaves Indians and women
• men are creatures of their environment
• first employed in Spain, 1512
• early primitivism- evident in all colonial
  societies by the late 1600s
• in the 1700s, scientific frameworks (Western
  Europe) place exploited peoples into natural
  schemes, culminating in the division of mankind
  into different races

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Early 19th century anthropology

• polygenists vs. monogenists
• 1871 Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in
  Relation to Sex
• culture could only be as advanced as the brains
  that produced it
• Social Darwinists ---20th century Eugenics
  movement

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Anthropology and the construction of a Racial
Worldview

• Lewis Henry Morgan and EB Tylor
• rank human groups along unilinear evolutionary
  path from savagery to civilization
• Craniometric data
• Tylor Primitive Culture 1871
• doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind
• human nature universal baseline for cultural
  development that has taken humanity from its
  primitive, hunter-gatherer roots to modern
  science and civilization