SOCIAL DIFFERENCE Race and Ethnicity

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SOCIAL DIFFERENCERace and Ethnicity
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Anthropology of Social Difference

• What is the basis for the recognition of
  difference within and between social groups?
  what is the role of culture?
• What is the relationship of recognized social
  differences to political power and inequality?
  what are the processes of society? (social
  stratification)

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CULTURE SOCIETY

• Geertz (1973) on culture -- "a historically
  transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in
  symbols, a system of inherited conceptions
  expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men
  communicate, perpetuate, and develop their
  knowledge about and attitudes toward life
• Geertz on society the pattern of social
  interaction
• Culture society capable of wide range of
  modes of integration

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Geertz on Society and Culture Again

• Culture logico-meaningful integration
• A unity of style, of logical implication, of
  meaning and value
• Fabric of meaning
• Society causal-functional integration
• Kind of integration one finds in an organism
• All parts united in a single causal web
• Keep the system going
• Actually existing network of social relations

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Social Differences Society

• shift from homogeneous kin based societies
  (mechanic) to heterogeneous societies of
  associations (organic) involves increased social
  differentiation
• Increased differentiation integration
  INCREASED SOCIAL STRATIFICATION (social
  differences)

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Society Social Stratification

• inequality in society
• the unequal distribution of goods and services,
  rights and obligations, power and prestige
• all attributes of positions in society, not
  attributes of individuals
• Stratified society is
• when a society exhibits stratification it means
  that there are significant breaks in the
  distribution of goods services, rights
  obligations power prestige
• as a result of which are formed collectivities or
  groups we call strata

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Stratification Society

• Integration and equilibrium
• Society is a system of action
• stratification is a generalized aspect of the
  structure of all social systems
• Social Strata emerge from the process of
  differentiation and evaluation in the form of
  social statuses, differences, and classes

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Stratification Social Power

• Power domination and the process of
  legitimization by which a dominant status group
  becomes accepted as dominant
• pre-industrial society power based on
  traditional respect or allegiance to charismatic
  leaders
• industrial society power based on legality,
  consensus on the rules and procedures concerning
  the selection and limits of power

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3 TYPES OF SOCIETIES

• egalitarian societies - no social groups having
  greater access to economic resources, power, or
  prestige - usually foragers
• rank societies - do not have unequal access to
  economic resources or to power, but they do
  contain social groups having unequal access to
  prestige
• class societies - unequal access to all 3
  advantages, economic resources, power, prestige
• open closed class systems - the extent to which
  mobility occurs allowing people to pass through
  inequalities

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Understanding Social Differences Status

• status - ascribed achieved
• ascribed status - social positions that people
  hold by virtue of birth
• sex, age, family relationships, birth into class
  or caste
• achieved status - social positions attained as a
  result of individual action
• shift from homogenous kin based societies to
  heterogeneous society of associations involves
  growth in importance of achieved status

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Race Society

• There are no biological human races
• Racial social stratification is built upon idea
  that social differences are linked with
  hereditary characteristics which differ between
  races
• As indicated by perceived physical differences
  and cloaked in the language of biology
• social races groups assumed to have a
  biological basis but social constructed
• Racism systematic social and political bias
  based on idea of race
• Operates as a form of class

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American Anthropological Assoc. statement on race

• Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g.,
  DNA) indicates that most physical variation,
  about 94, lies within so-called racial groups.
• Conventional geographic racial groupings differ
  from one another only in about 6 of their
  genes.
• Race thus evolved as a world view, a body of
  prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human
  differences and group behavior.
• The racial world view was invented to assign
  some groups to perpetual low status, while others
  were permitted access to privilege, power, and
  wealth

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Race A Brief History
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Distribution of Human Skin Color before 1400 A.D.
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Race Age of Discovery

• Race did not exist until the European expansion
  and exploration beginning 1500
• ancient Greeks -- first among civilized nations
  around the Mediterranean
• did not link physical appearance and cultural
  attainment.
• Ancient Greeks granted civilized status to the
  Nile Valley Nubians who were among the darkest
  skinned people they knew
• did not grant it to European barbarians to the
  north who were lighter skinned than they were
• People were divided on the basis of religion,
  class or language or status

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Europe Race before Age of Discovery

• up until 14th cent. in Europe cultural social
  evolution based on the idea of progress from
  kinbased societies to civil society through
  governance law
• after 16th cent. in Europe dispositions of blood
  distinguished the character of difference (racist
  notions of social cultural evolution)

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After 1500

• European exploration increased contact with
  other human societies
• exploration turned to conquest and Ethnocentric
  feeling of European superiority

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The Enlightenment 17th 18th Century Europe

• race used interchangeably with type, variety,
  people, nation, generation species
• race equated with breeding stock
• 1700s Enlightenment science
• social phenomena and the worlds peoples into
  natural schemes

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Formal Human ClassificationLinneaus Systemae
Naturae, 1758

• Europeaeus
• White muscular hair long, flowing eyes blue
• Americanus
• Reddish erect hair black, straight, thick
  wide nostrils
• Asiaticus
• Sallow (yellow) hair black eyes dark
• Africanus
• Black hair black, frizzled skin silky nose
  flat lips tumid

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1795 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach race
classifications

• Malayan
• Ethiopian
• American
• Mongolian
• Caucasian
• coined the term "Caucasian" because he believed
  that the Caucasus region of Asia Minor produced
  "the most beautiful race of men".

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1830s Philadelphia doctor and polygenist Samuel
Morton

• collected hundreds of human skulls of known races
• measured them by filling the skulls with lead
  pellets and then pouring the pellets into a glass
  measuring cup
• tables assign the highest brain capacity to
  Europeans (with the English highest of all)
• Second rank goes to Chinese, third to Southeast
  Asians and Polynesians, fourth to American
  Indians, and last place to Africans and
  Australian aborigines.
• work establish the scientific basis for
  physical anthropology but also the idea that race
  is inherently biological

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Stephen Jay GouldThe Mis-measure of Man
(1981)

• Re-analyzed Mortons data
• Mortons racist bias -- prevented identification
  of fully overlapping measurements among the
  racial skull samples he used

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Race Social Status

• Operates as an ASCRIBED status
• Race and racial differences as a state of nature
• Sociobiological notion that racism derives from
  genes that cause groups to compete against those
  who are genetically different
• Nature outside of culture
• Phenotype blood quantum

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Social Status and Affects of Race

• Life chances
• Where you live
• How you are treated
• Access to wealth, power and prestige
• Access to education, housing, and other valued
  resources
• Life expectancy

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Society First Nation Health

• Compared with the Canadian population in 1996,
  the First Nations population (on and off
  reserves) rated lower on all educational
  attainment.
• Among First Nations, the 1996 labour
  participation rate was 59 and the employment
  rate was 43.
• Rates for Canada as a whole were 68 and 62,
  respectively.
• First Nations unemployment rate was twice the
  Canadian rate in 1996.

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Society First Nation health

• 56.9 of homes were considered adequate in
  1999--00.
• 33.6 of First Nations communities had at least
  90 of their homes connected to a community
  sewage disposal system.
• In 1999, 65 First Nations and Inuit communities
  were under a boil water advisory for varying
  lengths of time
• Many communicable diseases can be traced to poor
  water quality

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Variation in recognized racial types

• US
• Bi-racial society
• Japan
• a nation whose population is greater than 99
  born in Japan
• racism in Japan is often not directed so much
  against people of a particular race or ethnic
  group but rather against those who are
  non-Japanese
• purity
• Brazil
• long history with slavery and as a recipient of
  emigrants from all over the world
• racial paradise image
• process of whitening -- racial and cultural means
  through which outsiders became "Brazilian"
• While racial divisions in Brazil are not clearly
  defined, class lines are
• Canada
• Vertical mosaic

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Social Races

• Geertz (1973) on culture -- "a historically
  transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in
  symbols, a system of inherited conceptions
  expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men
  communicate, perpetuate, and develop their
  knowledge about and attitudes toward life
• Geertz on society the pattern of social
  interaction
• Culture society capable of wide range of
  modes of integration

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Ethnicity A Cultural Logic of Race?

• ethnicity forged in the process of historical
  time
• subject to shifts in meaning
• shifts in referents or markers of ethnic identity
• subject to political manipulations
• ethnic identity is not a function of primordial
  ties, although it may be described as such
• always the genesis of specific historical forces
  that are simultaneously structural cultural

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Building Blocks of Ethnicity/Ethnic Identity

• associated with distinctions between language,
  religion, historical experience, geographic
  isolation, kinship, notions of race (phenotype)
• may include collective name, belief in common
  descent, sense of solidarity, association with a
  specific territory, clothing, house types,
  personal adornment, food, technology, economic
  activities, general lifestyle

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cultural markers of difference must be visible to
members and non-members

• valued markers of difference by insiders may
  become comic or derided by outsiders
• caricature and exaggeration frequently mark
  outsider depictions of boundary mechanisms
• stereotype is one form

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ethnicity and boundaries

• where there is a group there is some sort of
  boundary
• where there are boundaries there are mechanisms
  for maintaining boundaries
• cultural markers of difference that must be
  visible to members and non-members
• Code switching
• Marked and unmarked categories

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Boundary maintenance

• The ethnic boundary canalizes social life
• Boundaries may also be territorial
• Distinctions between us and them criteria for
  judgment of value and performance and
  restrictions on interactions
• Allows for the persistence of cultural
  differences
• Identities are signaled as well as embraced
• All ethnic groups in a poly-ethnic society act to
  maintain dichotomies and differences

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ethnogenesis

• fluidity of ethnic identity
• ethnic groups vanish, people move between ethnic
  groups, new ethnic groups come into existence
• ethnogenesis
• emergence of new ethnic group, part of existing
  group splits forms new ethnic group, members of
  two or more groups fuse

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Ethnicity, Culture, and Society

• ethnicity is founded upon structural inequities
  among dissimilar groups into a single political
  entity -- society
• based on cultural differences similarities
  perceived as shared -- culture

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Ethnicity and class

• Many poly-ethnic societies are ranked according
  to ethnic membership
• May be a high correlation between ethnicity and
  class

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Ethnicity as identity formation and political
organization

• Ethnic groups those human groups that entertain
  a SUBJECTIVE belief in their common descent
  because of similarities of physical type or of
  customs or of both
• feelings of ethnicity associated behavior vary
  in intensity within groups ( persons) over time
  space
• Belief in group affinity can have important
  consequences for the formation of a political
  community

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Ethnic Groups

• Geertz (1973) on culture -- "a historically
  transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in
  symbols, a system of inherited conceptions
  expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men
  communicate, perpetuate, and develop their
  knowledge about and attitudes toward life
• Geertz on society the pattern of social
  interaction
• Culture society capable of wide range of
  modes of integration