Pop Quiz 1. What is the ethnicity of the community among whom Philippe Bourgois conducted his fieldwork? 2. What is the key anthropological method he uses in his fieldwork?

October 13, 2015 Anthropology of Race Harrison, Faye: Unraveling Race for the twentieth century (ENM) Bourgois – In Search of Respect. Chapter 3, pages 77 – 113 American Anthropological Association Statement on "Race" (1998) http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm Jon Stewart - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_98ojjIZDI

Social Stratification Informs practices of exclusion Of Belonging Rights and entitlements Role and Duties Citizenship All of which are naturalized

Questions of Identity Similarity and difference that orient us to the world around and influence social relations Not fundamental, or ‘of blood,’ but a dynamic relationship between two complimentary aspects of social process (identification) and its product (identity)

Race A category of people thought to be biologically similar to each other, and different from other races due to shared descent from people of a particular region Race, like ethnicity may be determined by the person, or by others

Race We tend to think of “race” as being more biological, unchangeable, and real BUT, anthropologists have shown our categories of race are arbitrary cultural constructs they are not “out there” in the biological world

Problem with race far more variation within the groups than between the groups 94% of all human variation is found within any given "race” “due to its operational ambiguity, arbitrariness, artificiality, and erroneous assumptions, the concept declined in usage.”

Franz Boas showed that race, culture, and language actually had nothing to do with one another—but the idea of the nation assumes that they do

Imagined but not Imaginary Race is a product of social and historical processes But, “Racism is not only an ideology, discourse, or set of attitudes; it is a system of material relations with ideas, meanings, and sentiments embedded in those relations.”

Faye Harrison Concept of race has gone in and out of anthropological focus Ashley Montagu (1942) – jettisoned notion of race and embraced culture-centered concepts of “ethnicity” 1990s – re-emerged Ethnicity and race indistinguishable

History of Race The idea emerged in the historically specific context of Western colonial expansion and world capitalist development Not a trans-historical phenomenon existing in all societies and cultures at all times

Eric Wolf 1982 – Europe and the People Without History Racial categories “mirror” the political processes that alienated populations of whole continents from their lands and transformed them into a supply of coerced labor

Race in Contemporary Times Race interacts with and intersects with other axes of difference, namely, class, nationality, ethnicity, and gender Not limited to social orders structured around the immediate dominance of the “whites” Ferguson, Missouri, Niqab question, immigration

New discourses and practices of racial politics “less stable and more contradictory, ranging in visibility from subtle, hidden subtexts to flagrant acts of hate speech and genocidal violence” Racialization, or the social processes that give rise to new racial identities or the transformation of the old ones

Global Apartheid Global Apartheid – to characterize the widening gap in power, wealth, life expectancy in different parts of the world that follows racial and historical lines

Structural Violence Symbolic, psychological, and physical violations emanating from situations and institutional configurations structured in dominance For example, among poor Puerto Rican immigrants and crack dealers in El Barrio