Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader / Edition 1

by Ida Susser, Thomas C. Patterson

Overview

Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader is an unprecedented collection of contemporary writings authored by some of anthropology's most notable scholars-from across the discipline - on the central issues of cultural diversity in the United States. The contributors to this landmark critical reader rethink diversity, identity politics, and multiculturalism, and provide fundamental tools for the analysis and understanding of critical political issues in the United States today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631222132
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	03/05/2001
Pages:	490
Product dimensions:	6.85(w) x 9.70(h) x 1.05(d)

About the Author

Ida Susser is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and was the founding President of the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Her books include AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean (edited with George Bond, Joan Vincent, and John Kreniske, 1997), Medical Anthropology and the World System (co-authored with Merrill Singer and Hans Baer, 1997), and Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Community (1982).

Thomas C. Patterson is Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Riverside. His books include Change and Development in the Twentieth Century (1999), Inventing Western Civilization (1997), Making Alternative Histories (edited with Peter R. Schmidt, 1995), and Race, Racism, and the History of U.S. Anthropology (edited with Lee Baker, 1994).

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Cultural Diversity in the United States

In an effort to contribute towards constructive social change, this volume offers an anthropological analysis that reexamines the social and political history of the United States, and attempts to provide a grounded historical context for concepts such as cultural pluralism, multiculturalism, and cultural diversity. Chapters here demonstrate the heterogeneity present in the United States from the first settlers and examine the changing definitions of race and ethnicity in the construction of a nation. We aim to confront national stereotypes and critically review commonly accepted images with respect to nation and identity. The collected work represents an effort to address public discourse and public policy concerning race, class, nation, and gender in the United States in order to inform ongoing dialogue and debate from an anthropological perspective.

American anthropologists have more legitimacy intervening in the workings of their own nation/state than in advocating change in societies where they are not citizens and are often members of a privileged elite. This makes it incumbent upon U.S. researchers to elaborate their findings in terms of the implications for people in this society. Indeed, as global interrelations intensify, studying U.S. society, power, and inequality will have major ramifications for our understanding of events and experiences for people in many other national contexts. Thus, this volume represents a concerted effort to use the tools of anthropological analysis to illuminate contested issues such as race, gender, class, and ethnicity in the United States and to provide a framework for the understanding of inequality.

Anthropologists have begun to reexamine the representations of nationalism, ethnicity, imperialism, and race in the United States in our own discipline, including who is cited and remembered and who ignored and forgotten (Vincent 1990; di Leonardo 1998; Harrison 1995, 1998; Galley 1998; Brodkin 1998; Baker and Patterson 1994). Benefiting from such revisionist history, this book examines the creation both in the imagination and in the establishment of state power of what we tend to view unproblematically as the United States. The historical processes which connect the United States to world capitalism have long been transparent to historians and anthropologists (e.g. Hobsbawm 1994; Williams 1966; Wolf 1982; Hall 1991; Nash 1981; Leeds 1994; Mintz 1985). However, their work concerning the turbulent interconnections of trade and colonialism has not been fully incorporated into our understandings of the generation of inequality and difference, in terms of race, nationality, religion, household, and gender in the United States today. The concept of the United States itself has a history of shifting frontiers and contested boundaries. Borders between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, created historically through the competition of colonial powers, have been intermittently porous in response to shifts in the need for labor, political contingencies, and unequal development. The global connections of advanced capitalism and such corresponding government policies as the North American Free Trade Agreement are more recent ways in which we have to reconsider the changing boundaries of the United States and the space that we describe (Fernandez-Kelly 1998; Gledhill 1998; Gutmann 1998; Smith 1998).

As we are all aware, the United States was founded on a history of conquest, colonial exploitation, patriarchal assumptions, labor migration, and slavery. From the initial formation of the thirteen states divisions emerged with respect to religion, language, and cultural practice. Patterns of landownership, slavery and class, definitions of democracy, and the expectations of civil society differed by state and region and certainly differed dramatically from the United States of today (Schudson 1999). Unifying myths and practices have been constructed along with the imposition of federal and state control. From the first, the nation depended on the recreation of identity, possibly based on participation in, and powerfully recreated by, memories of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, as played out in blood and suffering in the Civil War, inequality was always intertwined with socially constructed differences of color and also justified by constraints and discrimination with respect to gender, immigration, and indigenous peoples (see Chapters 2, 8, and 25, this volume; Kessler-Harris 1982; Brodkin 1998). This book examines the long-term processes and struggles which revolved around civil rights, access to employment and national institutions. As several chapters demonstrate, government policies, with respect to documentation, immigration quotas, quarantine, legal definitions of indentured servitude, the land rights of indigenous peoples, and slavery were important determinants of differentiation. Such historical processes limited who was officially granted full national rights and set the stage for continuing patterns of inequality as well as the emergence of social movements and identity politics.

Within contemporary identity groups of the 1980s and 1990s we find a mix of nationalism, feminism, religious community, and revolutionary fervor. But, as many have noted, history is frequently oversimplified when viewed only as the politics of identity. The complex interweaving of race, gender, immigration, class, and political opportunity needs to be addressed, as well as the significance of agency in a society in which both continuity and change are endemic.

Throughout the history of the United States, populations have struggled with inequality and its concomitant and changing definitions of difference. At times groups have crossed ethnic and nationality lines to combat class inequalities. Other groups have constructed communal identities which have served as a base from which to struggle against inequities related to class but fueled also by racial or religious discrimination...

Table of Contents

Foreword: Yolanda Moses.

Preface: Ida Susser.

Introductions: Ida Susser, Thomas C. Patterson, Steven F. Arvizuu.

Part I: Biological and Medical Issues:.

1. Biological Diversity and Cultural Diversity from Race to Radical Bioculturalism: Alan H. Goodman.

2. The Peoplings of The Americas: Anglo Stereotypes and Native American Realities: C. Loring Brace and A. Russell Nelson.

3. Diversity in The Context of Health and Illness: Cheryl Mwaria.

4. Health, Disease, and Social Inequality: Merrill Singer.

Part II: Historical Development of Contemporary Diversity:.

5. The Color-Blind Bind: Lee Baker.

6. Racialized Identity and The Law: Sally Engle Merry.

7. Immigration and Ethnicity: Shifting Boundaries: Judith Goode.

8. Unearthing Diversity and Archaeological Issues: Thomas C. Patterson.

9. The Hyphenated Past: American Cultural Diversity: Ruben G. Mendoza.

10. The Roots of Our Inequality: Elizabeth M. Scott.

Part III: Diversity: Contemporary Issues, Contemporary Conflicts:.

11. The Complex Diversity of Language in The United States: Bonnie Urciuoli.

12. Contemporary Native American Struggles and The Construction of "Nation": Thomas Biolsi.

13. New Labor Struggles: Gender, Ethnicity, and Migration: June Nash.

14. Social Inequality: Diversity, Poverty, and Gender in The City: Ida Susser.

15. Ethnicity and Place: J. Diego Vigil and Curtis C. Roseman.

16. Diversity and Kinship Today: Lynn Bolles.

17. Aging : Cultural Diversity as A Late-Life Concern: Maria Vesperi.

18. Poverty, Class, and Sexual Orientation: Jeff Maskovsky.

19. Diversity and Psychocultural Open Systems Models: Michael Winkelman.

Part IV: Overviews of Diversity in The United States:.

20. Studying American Cultural Diversity: Some Non-Essentializing Perspectives: Douglas Foley and Kirby Moss.

21. Diversity in Anthropological Theory: Karen Brodkin.

Afterword: Louise Lamphere.

Index.

Preface

This volume represents a long-term cooperative and evolving project on the part of many committed people and several organizations within the American Anthropological Association (AAA), as well as the Association itself, as part of an ongoing effort to address concretely through anthropological scholarship the wide range of public issues, concerned with inequality, race, immigration, health and education, confronting U.S. society as it enters the new millennium.

In 1995, Ida Susser (then-president of the Society for the Anthropology of North America, or SANA), together with Helan Page (then-president of the Association of Black Anthropologists), Steve Arvizu (then-president of the Association of Latino/Latina Anthropologists), and Michael Winkelman (chair of the External Relations Committee of the AAA) presented a proposal to the AAA Executive Assembly to edit an AAA volume on diversity in the United States. James Peacock, president of the AAA, appointed an editorial board made up of Yolanda Moses (then president-elect of the AAA), Louise Lamphere (later president-elect of the AAA), Michael Winkelman, and Carol Mukhapody, with Steve Arvizu presiding over the group and Ida Susser as coordinating editor. Patsy Evans as minority representative on the AAA staff assisted with the project. This editorial board selected topics and solicited initial contributions. As the chapters were submitted, Ida Susser, Tom Patterson, Louise Lamphere, June Nash, Michael Winkelman, Carol Mukhapody, and Maria Vesperi assisted in editing many of the contributions.

Eventually, Ida Susser and Tom Patterson worked to finalize the list of contributors, build a coherent theme, edit the completed chapters, and carry the project to publication.

Among the many people who have assisted us with this project, we would like to thank Bill Davis, Julie Philpot and Susan Skomol of the American Anthropological Association. We would also like to thank, especially, Joan Vincent for a thorough and critical review, Emily Martin for her support and energy at crucial junctures, and Jane Huber, our editor at Blackwell Publishers, for her persistence, patience, and hard work in helping us through the publication process.

Editorial Reviews

"Susser and Patterson have compiled a work we have long needed: a set of fine-grained historical analyses stretching across the four fields of anthropology, which makes the understanding of diversity its central focus. Containing ample supplementary references and detailed practical suggestions for teaching, this treasure will be indispensable for anyone interested in the politics of difference in contemporary U.S. culture." Emily Martin, Princeton University

"This volume greatly enriches the understanding of cultural differences and will doubtless inform future discussion and debate." Choice

"Cultural diversity is, simply put, the best reader available on the complex connections between race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the United States" Matthew C. Gutmann, Brown University, Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute

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