Anthropology 2

“Introduction to Cultural Anthropology”

Spring 2008

Casey Walsh

Lecture 4/23/2008

Race and Ethnicity

Lecture Outline (4/23 and 4/25)

• Complex mixed concepts: race, ethnicity, culture, nation, citizenship
• Race NOT a biological fact
• Race a social fact
• Ethnicity: an identity based on race, language, religion, the nation-state, etc.
• Ethnicity construction is a social process
• Cases of Race, Ethnicity, Social Inequality

South Africa, USA, Mexico

• Human Rights

How do we understand diversity?

• Culture
• Race
• Ethnicity
• Sex/gender, class, environment, etc.

Popular Understandings of Culture, Race and Ethnicity : All Mixed Up

• “cultures”: lecture (4/11)
• “ethnicities”: synonymous with “cultures”, “peoples”, “nations”.

“multiculturalism”: includes elements of “race,” culture, ethnicity, citizenship

• “races”: idea of physically discernable biological groups

Breeds of animals

Skin color of humans

Also linked to nation, culture, “volk”

Race: Essentialist View

• “race as a division of the human species based on differences in physical features [phenotype] that are determined by heredity [genotype].”
• Assumes existence of original, distinct groups: “ideal types”

  Darwin: species originate in a single gene pool, not distinct races

Race and Genetics: Populations?

• Populations sometimes called “races”:

In population biology, a race is defined to be a cluster of local populations that differs genetically from other clusters of local populations.

• Human “races” cannot be identified by geneticists

94% of human genetic diversity is shared by groups that are geographically defined as “races” (Africans, Europeans, Asians, etc.)

Other “races” are subsets of Africans, genetically.

Populations?

• Physical variation distributed gradually over space
• Where does one begin and another end?
• Population concept of race does not fit data

Race as Social/Cultural Construction

• Even if scientists don’t find races, people see biological differences as racial

cultural, and learned

• Race is culturally, socially constructed

Everyone participates in this

• Much of it is based in skin color

Skin Color and Race

• Skin color as measured by reflectivity correlates to geography, not populations or “races”
• Too much UV strips away folic acid, causing birth defects. Too little UV and body can’t make vitamin D. Pigmentation regulates this.

Race a Universal Discourse

• Race is a framework that shapes understandings of diversity around the world
• Nevertheless, racial ideas and social relations are quite varied

Race as a Social Fact

• Race, a cultural construct, becomes a social reality

legal definitions of racial categories

correlation between race and: socioeconomic status/class; political power

everyday interactions governed by ideas and perceptions of race

• Racial Formations

Examples: lecture of 4/25

Ethnicity

• “Ethnicity means identification with, and feeling part of, an ethnic group and exclusion from certain other groups because of this affiliation” (Kottak)
• This identification based on many elements: “race”, language, religion, geography, etc.

Ethnicity: Fredrik Barth

Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: the Social Organization of Cultural Difference (1969)

• Ethnicity determined by the relations between groups, more than the content of those groups.

Interdependence rather than isolation

Some basis in environment

Anti-essentialist perspective

Social identities constantly shift

The Conditions of Ethnicity

• Ethnicity exists around the world, not just in modern societies
• Interdependence can be understood in terms of ecology: niches

- shared or different

• Economic conditions: society stratified along the lines of ethnicity (“race”, language, religion, etc.)

Ethnic Identity Construction

• The ethnic identity of an individual is formed in relation to:

Ethnic group

Other groups

Nation-state

• Identity construction is done within conditions: economics and power