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CHAPTER 1
DEFINING RACE
Race is a topic of increasing concern to anthropologists. My contention in this book is that, although this is a welcome development, anthropologists – and other social scientists who study this subject – would benefit by focusing on a theme that hitherto has received little attention and yet that seems to be at the very centre of ideas about race. By reading across the disciplinary boundaries of the history of science, science studies, anthropological kinship studies and studies of race, I attempt to explore ideas about the nature of 'nature', that domain that seems to ground ideas about race and in relation to which scholars, either explicitly or implicitly, define a racial discourse. In a laudable, important and necessary way, scholars have tended to focus on questions of identity, politics and inequality when approaching race. In doing so, they have looked less thoroughly at ideas about human nature, 'blood', heredity, bodily substance, relatedness, biology and genes as they enter into discourses about race. Yet scholars still tend to define or recognise a racial discourse by the fact that it deploys these ideas (although this may not be the only defining criterion they use). These ideas thus tend to drop into a taken-for-granted, background position and this alone makes them ripe for a closer examination. Furthermore our understandings of identity, inequality and racism will be enhanced by a more nuanced grasp of the idioms of nature which are being used in expressing, creating and enacting these phenomena.
Social anthropology is well placed to advance such a study because it has a history of investigating ideas about nature, human relatedness, human bodily substances and what it is that makes people into people, linked (or not) to other people. Anthropology is not alone in its enquiries into human nature: historians and philosophers have also made major contributions as my use of some of their work in Chapter 3 will make apparent. Anthropology is useful in its ethnographic approach which reveals how concepts about human nature and biology are mediated through the realms of, for example, kinship. This gives a valuable insight into everyday ideas about these matters, as the material presented in Chapter 4 will show. Anthropology is also well placed for the work I want to pursue due to its inclination – shared with some other fields, including philosophy, history and feminism – to question apparently self-evident categories such as gender, nature and culture and reveal them as culturally mediated.
RACE IN ANTHROPOLOGY
Questions of race rather dropped out of post-war anthropology in Europe and the US. Prior to this anthropologists had made a mixed contribution to theories about race. On the one hand, some early anthropologists supported late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century raciology or scientific racism, that is the dominant theories elaborated by scientists of the day mostly medics and naturalists – that humans were divided into a few, distinctive racial types each with its own fairly ingrained or even immutable characteristics and all arranged in a stable moral, social and intellectual hierarchy in which white Europeans were at the top (F. Harrison, 1995, 1998; Shanklin, 1994, 1998; Smedley, 1993; Stocking, 1971, 1982). On the other hand, from the early twentieth century, anthropologists were among the most outspoken in denying a) that humans could be divided up systematically in this way, and b) that moral, social and intellectual capacities were linked in any significant way to race (as judged from appearance). The most famous among these revisionists is Franz Boas, but he was not alone in his endeavours – the black US sociologist, W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, was also a vocal opponent of racial typology (Baker, 1998; Harrison, 1992; Harrison and Harrison, 1999).
From the time of Boas onwards, scientific racism gradually weakened, although it continued to underwrite the eugenics movement – an alliance of social policy and science that aimed to restrict the breeding of 'races' seen as less 'fit' – which had its most explicit manifestation under Nazism (Kevles, 1995; Paul, 1995; Stepan, 1982). Within anthropology various views existed. Many still held that races existed as biological entities, asserting that human biodiversity could be usefully broken up into broad racial types, even though these were not very clearly bounded and had no relation to intellectual capability; in fact a number of biological and even cultural anthropologists hold such a view today (Lieberman and Reynolds, 1996). Others held that race had no biological reality at all, arguing that the history of human travel and sexual interaction has made it impossible to delineate any biological types. This is now a dominant view in social and cultural anthropology. In each argument, race is also said to exist as a purely social category or construction; even those who claim that the concept of race captures some aspect of biological reality may also concede that race can exist in popular thought as a social construction. In the social constructionist view, race is a way people think about some aspects of human difference which has no basis in biological reality, but which, interweaving with inequalities of colonialism, class and gender, generates its own very potent social reality of racism, discrimination, racial identities and so on (F. Harrison, 1995, 1998; Shanklin, 1994, 1998; Smedley, 1993).
Meanwhile, within mainstream anthropology, questions of race and racism were not major concerns. One might have thought that the issue would rear its head for European and North American anthropologists working in colonial or neocolonial contexts before 1945, but, as is well known, these researchers tended to focus on particular communities, whether within an explicitly functionalist framework or not; they did not grapple a great deal with the power politics, much less the racial politics, of colonialism. After the Second World War the notion of race faded even further from anthropology's research horizon. It was generally replaced by the notion of ethnicity which, by referring to people's ideas about cultural difference, seemed to avoid all the nasty baggage that the concept of race brought with it (Harrison, 1998). The concept of race lived on in sociology, both in the UK and the US, where the sub-discipline of 'race relations' emerged. This speciality had been around for some time in the US, based largely on the work of such sociologists as Robert Park, although anthropologists including W. Lloyd Warner and Hortense Powdermaker also made important contributions to work on race in the US while others also wrote on race in Latin America. In the UK it was the post-war immigration from the ex-colonies that spurred such a concern. However, anthropologists, who still defined themselves very much as students of 'other cultures', saw little need to dabble in questions of race 'at home'.
In the 1990s race made something of a comeback in anthropology, especially in the US. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) decreed that its theme for 1997-98 would be 'Is it "Race"? Anthropology on Human Diversity' and its Anthropology Newsletter published over 70 articles on race in that period. The AAA produced a statement on race and American Anthropologist produced two issues focusing on race, in September 1997 (vol. 99, no. 3) and September 1998 (vol. 100, no. 3). A growing body of anthropological literature is emerging. It is difficult to say why this resurgence of race has occurred in anthropology. It may be that, since it never really went away in sociology and has been a strong feature of the burgeoning field of Cultural Studies on both sides of the Atlantic, the concept of race has new appeal to European and North American anthropologists now less sure of their separation from these disciplines, partly due to their increased willingness to study 'at home'. It may also be that anthropologists feel obliged to face up to the resurgence in 'scientific' racism – which continues to make claims about links between race and IQ, for example (see Kohn, 1995; Reynolds and Lieberman, 1996) – and the continued or even increasing virulence of racism in many areas. Or it may be that the concept of race has been lent a new, more critical edge by decolonisation, the rise of post-colonial studies and the growth of social movements some of which make use of racial identifications. Whatever the exact reasons, the resurgence of race in the discipline of social anthropology invites a consideration of the concept and of whether existing approaches in anthropology might shed light on it.
WHAT IS RACE?
If the concept has persisted in many areas of social research and, in particular, has returned to the fold of anthropological ideas, then it is important to be clear about what it means. I do not want to pre-empt the argument of this book by laying all my cards on the table now, because part of my argument is that current definitions of 'race', although they seem to vary, generally reproduce some unexamined assumptions which need unpacking. But I think it will help the reader if I give a general idea of what social scientists say they are looking at when they study race – or racial identities, or racism, or racialisation, or racial formation. This in turn will indicate the direction of my concerns.
Race is generally agreed to be a social construction. Few take issue with this, but it begs the question of what kind of social construction is a racial one? Sometimes analysts do not address the question. Harrison, for example, in an excellent review article on race, gives no definition as such, although she implies that racial discourse builds on physical difference – specifically mentioning phenotype or physical appearance – while racism is defined as practices perpetuating oppressive power relations between populations presumed to be 'essentially different' (F. Harrison, 1995: 51, 65) or, in a later article, 'essentially and irreconcilably different' (1998: 613). The idea of 'essential difference' is left unexplored. What is an essence in human terms? How do we know an essentialist differentiation when we see one? Are all essentialist differentiations racial ones? How about gendered essentialisms, for example? If differences are said to be ingrained but not really 'irreconcilable', does that mean they are not 'racial' differences?
That aside – for the moment (see below) – Harrison's reference to phenotype is a common one, as bodily appearance is often taken to be the raw material on which concepts of race are built. I examined this assumption at some length in a previous text (Wade, 1993b), so I will not dwell long on it here. My main point in that article was that phenotype is often taken to be a neutral, objective biological fact on which social constructions build. But, as analysts such as Haraway (1989, 1991, 1997) have argued, there can be no pre-discursive encounter with biology or nature. Thus the phenotype that is taken to underlie race is, in fact, itself a social construction (see also Miles, 1989: 71; Omi and Winant, 1994: 55). After all, phenotype includes all aspects of appearance – actually it includes more even than that – so why do specific aspects come to signify race: particular variations in skin colour rather than height; particular types of hair, rather than eye colour; specific facial features, rather than muscularity? The answer is that only some aspects of phenotype are worked into racial signifiers and they are the aspects that were originally seen to be ways of distinguishing between Europeans and those they encountered in their colonial explorations. 'Phenotype' is thus linked to a particular history.
This suggests two things, which I did not explore fully in that article. First, if phenotype is admittedly an important feature in knowing what the concept of race is, then we have to enquire into how phenotype is socially constructed in different contexts. This has attracted a fair amount of attention in comparisons between different regions of the Americas, since a person with a given racialised phenotype may be 'black' in the US and moreno (brown) or mestizo (mixed) or even blanco (white) in Colombia. In Brazil a person called by a given colour term in one class context may be labelled with a term denoting lighter colour – and apparently may even be perceived as such – if s/he looks wealthier. Meanwhile, in the Andes, the same person might be indio or indigena (Indian or indigenous) and mestizo or ladino (mixed, nonindigenous), depending on social context, speech, clothing and so on. These facts are well known, but they have been deployed in specific, and limited, ways. For Brazil, the variability of racial labelling has generally been taken to show that 'class' is more important in defining social status than 'race' a conclusion always drawn in comparison to the US where the opposite is said to apply. The phenomenon has been placed in a debate about the theoretical and empirical relations between race and class, rather than in a consideration of how racialised phenotypes are constructed differently in different regions. In the Andes the variation in labelling has often been taken to indicate that it is a question of 'ethnicity' not 'race', since, apparently by definition, racial identities are held to be permanent and not malleable (see Wade, 1997: 37-9). Again, this prejudges what is racial and what is not.
Outside of these American comparisons, the social construction of phenotype has been given less attention in the study of race. It is as if this apparent malleability of race is just a Latin American or Caribbean phenomenon. Often, indeed, it is said or implied that racial identifications 'fix' social classifications, since they use physical markers and refer to 'nature' and something 'innate' which are both said – I think wrongly – to necessarily imply permanence (see below). It may well be that, in particular contexts, racial identifications work to create unyielding and enduring classifications, but this would be a social process and the result of a specific history, not the automatic result of a reference to phenotype or nature. All this implies the need to include in the study of race a broad approach to embodiment which problematises the notion of phenotype. I will return to this in Chapter 6. At the least, if phenotype is not a self-evident phenomenon, it seems inadequate to use reference to it as the self-evidently diacritical feature of a racial social construction.
Second, the argument that phenotype became racialised in a historical process also suggests that the aspects of appearance that came to signify race had something special about them. Not only did they correlate in some perceptually intuitive way with the geographical differences that Europeans were encountering and mapping – Alcoff (1996) has an interesting point about the visual nature of both mapping places and seeing races – but they had some continuity over time and across generations. This implies that reference to phenotype is actually not the only thing that makes a social construction a racial one. Many analysts go beyond phenotype to note that racial or racist discourse refers to 'physical difference' or 'biology', without necessarily specifying which of the many aspects of these very broad categories are at issue (phenotype? genotype?); others are more specific, focusing on racial discourse's reference to descent or heritage; or they focus on reference to innateness and essence, with the implication, at least, that these are thought to be heritable.
Harrison (1998: 613), for example, implies that racism exists when 'categories of human beings are subjugated or privileged because of differences purported to be fundamentally natural and/or biophysical'. A more explicit definition, which combines an appeal to phenotype with 'biology' more broadly and also notions of heritage, holds that:
Race is one way by which the boundary is to be constructed between those who can and those who cannot belong to a particular construction of a collectivity or population. In the case of race, this is on the basis of an immutable biological or physiognomic difference which may or may not be seen to be expressed mainly in culture or life-style, but is always grounded on the separation of human populations by some notion of stock or collective heredity of traits. (Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1992: 2)
In this view, a racial identification is one based on reference to immutable physiognomy or biology, and/or on some 'notion' of heredity. The thrust of the definition is familiar enough, but a little critical thought shows that it is not clear a) whether physiognomy (outward appearance) is an alternative to biology or some subcategory of it; b) whether both physiognomic difference and a notion of heredity have to be involved; c) whether physiognomy and biology are objective and self-evident, while heredity is a subjective 'notion'. This definition also brings in the idea of 'immutability'. It is quite common to assert that racial identifications imply fixity and permanence. (I myself made this argument some years ago; see Wade, 1985.) Often the implicit or explicit argument is that this is a result of making reference to biology, heredity and physical difference. Smedley, for example, notes that racial ideology 'imposed social meanings on physical variations among human groups' and that the ideology about the meaning of these differences is 'based on a notion of heredity and permanence' (1998: 693). Harrison's mention of essential and irreconcilable difference also has strong overtones of fixity. Goldberg (1993: 81) notes that 'race gives to social relations the veneer of fixedness', while Guillaumin (1995: 143) argues that the reference race makes to nature 'proclaims the permanence of the effects of certain social relations on dominated groups'.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Race, Nature And Culture"
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Copyright © 2002 Peter Wade.
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