Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective

To analyze race, then, requires that we comprehend biosocial processes and then use them as a means to educate people away from the reductive notion that there is anything simple or inherent about race. Can race be detected via genetic analysis? Yes, this has been demonstrated in relation to peoples’ own forms of racial self-identification. Does this mean race is simply genetic? Absolutely not, because genes do not exist in some pure, baseline reality; they function in interaction with environments and biologies, and variously bear the imprint of cultural practices and institutions. The better question regarding genes and race is, so what? How can that linkage with self-identification have any bearing on the far more powerful ways that encounters with racism generate low birth rates, which then can impact subsequent generations without being transmitted genetically? In this regard, what anthropology brings to the study of race is not a motto or a claim about what “it is” or “is not”; rather, we provide for people a broader understanding of the dynamic interplay by which genes, biology, and culture intertwine through processes that bear manifold points of inflection. This is, at least, what we came up with as we struggled to characterize an anthropology of race.

2007

■ Montagu referred to race as ‘man’s most dangerous myth’, while Lévi-Strauss called it ‘the original sin of anthropology’. Although persuasive arguments against the concept of race were made throughout the 20th century, race remains a particular problem for anthropologists who deal in the classification of human populations. Racial terminology has been perpetuated within anthropology largely owing to the fact that, historically, race formed the very core of anthropological study. Despite the conceptual inadequacy of race, the anthropological enterprise has yet to move beyond it as an explanatory tool for understanding human biological variation because of the lack of a conceptual and/or methodological replacement. This article re-analyses historical anthropological literature on ethnicity and biocultural interaction as a replacement for the race concept, and recasts it in the context of modern philosophical and psychological perspectives on population variation.

Man, 1993

This article examines the way definitions of 'race' are currently constructed with reference to an opposition between nature and culture, and how these definitions often take for granted the category of 'phenotypical variation', tending to reproduce 'race' as a problematic category. The frequently drawn contrast between the USA and Latin America is then examined. This also often rests on certain assumptions about nature and culture which distort the character of the contrast.

Succinctly, we begin from a basic stance that race is a biosocial fact. This assertion purposefully stands in contrast to the position that race is a social construction. We take this stance because we have found that analyzing the complexity of race and making effective knowledge claims about its operations require a concomitant attention to biology and genes as well as to social forces. Too often, assertions that race is socially constructed do just the opposite by insisting upon a firewall between society and biological and genetic domains. The reasons for such an insistence on a separation of culture from these other domains are well founded—they are an outgrowth of historical efforts to combat scientific racism and racial ideologies that promoted notions that skin color reflects inherent, indelible characteristics (Smedley and Smedley 2012; Reardon 2004). But the basic point we stress here is that, today, such a stance risks obscuring more than it can reveal about the workings of race.

This article assesses anthropological thinking about the race concept and its applications. Drawn from a broader national survey of geneticists' and anthropologists' views on race, in this analysis, we provide a qualitative account of anthropologists' perspectives. We delve deeper than simply asserting that " race is a social construct. " Instead, we explore the differential ways in which anthropologists describe and interpret how race is constructed. Utilizing the heuristic of constructors, shifters, and reconcilers, we also illustrate the ways in which anthropologists conceptualize their interpretations of race along a broad spectrum as well as what these differential approaches reveal about the ideological and biological consequences of socially defined races, such as racism in general and racialized health disparities in particular. [race concept, social construction, racism, health disparities]

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 1989

Race, once a core anthropological concept, is no longer supported by a majority of members of the discipline. The history of the concept is briefly reviewed. Results of a survey are presented indicating acceptance by 50% of biological anthropologists and 31 % of cultural anthropologists, while 42% of the former and 52% of the latter reject the concept. Alternatives for teaching about human biological and cultural variation are discussed. Ethnicity is suggested as an alternative for teaching about folk taxonomies that arose in the colonial era, while cline, or geographic variation, is proposed for human biological variation.

2013

What is biological race and how is it made relevant by specific practices? How do we address the materiality of biological race without pigeonholing it? And how do we write about it without reifying race as a singular object?

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2014

The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus’s (1735) Systema naturae and the demise of racial typologies after World War II (WWII) in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation marks that almost invariably surround the term. “Race” is placed outside of rational discourse as a residue of outdated essentialist and hierarchical thinking. I will throw doubt on this underlying assumption, not in order to re-legitimate race but in order to understand better why race has been, and continues to be, such a politically powerful and explosive concept.

Journal of Biosocial Science, 2009

Critique of anthropology, 2007

■ Montagu referred to race as 'man's most dangerous myth', while Lévi-Strauss called it 'the original sin of anthropology'. Although persuasive arguments against the concept of race were made throughout the 20th century, race remains a particular problem for anthropologists who deal in the classification of human populations. Racial terminology has been perpetuated within anthropology largely owing to the fact that, historically, race formed the very core of anthropological study. Despite the conceptual inadequacy of race, the anthropological enterprise has yet to move beyond it as an explanatory tool for understanding human biological variation because of the lack of a conceptual and/or methodological replacement. This article re-analyses historical anthropological literature on ethnicity and biocultural interaction as a replacement for the race concept, and recasts it in the context of modern philosophical and psychological perspectives on population variation.