The Conceptual Politics of Racial Ideologies Japinder Dhesi SPRRaM Social Psychology London School of Economics

Cognition and Ideology  Conventional social scientific accounts of ideology fail to consider the psychological component of ideologies (Van Dijk, 2005)  Increasingly, social scientists are acknowledging the role played by cognitive factors in maintaining social systems.  Key Question: To what extent do psychological predispositions lend racial ideologies their conceptual fluency?

The Functions of Ideologies A key function of ideology to legitimate social hierarchies such as ‘race’ by naturalizing status and power inequalities between social groups The naturalization of ‘race’ is a major factor underlying the political potency of ‘race’ to organize power and authority Stuart Hall observes: ‘race discovers what other ideologies have to construct: an apparently ‘natural’ and universal basis in nature itself’ (1980: 342) Where does a naturalized notion of ‘race’ come from?

A Cognition and Culture Approach A widespread assumption in the social sciences has been that human cognitive abilities are domain-general i.e. they can be applied to any empirical domain.  The Cognition and Culture perspective posits that the human cognitive architecture contains a number of innate cognitive structures which guide the acquisition of information about certain phenomena from our environment. The Cognition and Culture perspective adopts an ‘epidemiology of representations’ approach to culture (Sperber, 1994) Cultural representations which trigger our evolved cognitive architecture are more likely to be acquired and transmitted than others.

Ideology: A Cognition and Culture Approach  In standard social scientific accounts essentialism is described as a by-product of certain philosophical and cultural traditions (Fuss, 1989).  Cognition and Culture theorists have suggested that essentialism is a property of the mind.  Psychological essentialism is an innate cognitive predisposition which leads people to believe that members of a category share a deep underlying causal essence which confers their identity and is responsible for many of their observable features (perceptual and behavioural) (Medin & Ortony, 1989).

Ideology: A Cognition and Culture Approach A distinction is made between metaphysical essentialism, the view that things have essences, and psychological essentialism, the view that people’s representations of these things might reflect such a belief (as erroneous as it may be) (Medin & Ortony, 1989). However, this predisposition does not determine which social categories are essentialized. Psychological essentialism is an innate cognitive mechanism triggered by the salience of social categories in the cultural environment. In relation to gender, Gelman (2003) has noted how cultural factors such as stereotyping and gender-typed practices can serve to heighten an essentializing tendency.

Ideology: A Cognition and Culture Approach  There is support from experimental studies of children’s concepts for essentialist beliefs about natural kind categories emerging as early as two and a half years, and across different cultures (Astuti et al., 2004).  In recent years evidence has emerged which suggests that humans also essentialise social categories, including age-grades (Fagan, 1972); caste (Mahalingham, 2003); gender (Taylor, 1996); kinship (Hirschfeld, 1986); ‘race’ (Hirschfeld, 1996) and ethnicity (Gil-White, 2001).

Ideology: A Cognition and Culture Approach Hirschfeld (1997) suggests that humans have an innate tendency to classify human groups in essentialist terms. 2 caveats: 1) ‘Race’ is not a natural category of the mind but the way we think about ‘race’ may be result of a psychological predisposition 2) This does not discount the need for a study of the particular social, political and economic factors which lead to the essentialization of ‘race’.

The Conceptual Politics of Racial Ideologies: a re-reading of Foucault  In his 1976 lectures on the history of racisms and racial discourse Foucault speaks of the “reinscription”, “re- encasement” and “recovery” of older racial discourses as they are shaped into new ones.  He describes the tactile and polyvalent mobility of racism i.e. how it serves various different functions at different times and places.  He highlights the resilience and enduring nature of racial discourses. The ‘success’ and resilience of racial ideologies is a function not simply of the politics of inequality but of conceptual politics as well (Hirschfeld, 1997)

Final Thought “…to what extent and in what ways might it be that certain categories of power acquire the weight and relevance they do in social life because of the ways in which they feed off and build upon categories of the mind?” (Stoler, 1997: 101)