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Ethnicity and Race in Anthropology

Ethnicity And Difference



In early-twenty-first-century sociocultural anthropology, ethnicity is envisioned as a complicated, fluid, politically charged, perhaps even ephemeral quality or qualities of individual or group identity that map differently to various social categories depending on people's particular histories. The formation or maintenance of an ethnicity, then, is not a necessary by-product of predictable biological, cultural, or social forces. Anthropological thinking on ethnicity is also informed by newer theories of race as a political category, differently expressed and marked within particular political and cultural struggles.



Anthropologists are also adapting frameworks from fields theorists in cultural studies, who focus on difference not to the exclusion of others, but toward the multiplication of meanings and the highlighting of marginal identities. As Stuart Hall cautions: "We are all … ethnically located and our ethnic identities are crucial to our subjective sense of who we are. But this is also a recognition that this is not an ethnicity which is doomed to survive … only by marginalizing, dispossessing, displacing, and forgetting other ethnicities" (p. 447).

Further, acceptance of the social construction of race in the humanities and social sciences, and lately by progressives in the U.S. public at large, has spurred anthropologists to more widely publicize disciplinary views on race and ethnicity as both educational and policy recommendations. In particular the American Anthropological Association's "Statement on Race" deconstructs the dangers of relying on fixed notions of identity in social and cultural research and interactions, saying that "racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior." Likewise, myths of ahistorical, unchanging ethnicities are also falling by the wayside in anthropological thought.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Anthropological Association. Statement on Race. 1998. Available at http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

Banks, Marcus. Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Boas, Franz. "Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants." American Anthropologist 14 (1912): 530–563.

Brooks, James F, ed. Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Cadena, Marisol de la. Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981.

Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race; or the Racial Basis of European History. New ed., rev. and amplified, with a new preface, by Henry Fairfield Osborn. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1918.

Gravlee, Clarence C., H. Russell Bernard, and William R. Leonard. "Heredity, Environment, and Cranial Form: A Reanalysis of Boas's Immigrant Data." American Anthropologist 105 (2003): 125–138.

Hall, Stuart. "The New Ethnicities." In Ethnicity, edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Jones, Siân. The Archaeology of Ethnicity. London: Routledge, 1997.

Morley, David, and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge, 1986.

Pierpont, Claudia R. "The Measure of America: How a Rebel Anthropologist Waged War on Racism." New Yorker 8 March 2004.

Sparks, Corey, and Richard Jantz. "A Reassessment of Human Cranial Plasticity: Boas Revisited." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (2002): 14636–14639.

Stocking, George W. Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1968.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Ann M. Kakaliouras

Additional topics

Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Ephemeris to Evolution - Historical BackgroundEthnicity and Race in Anthropology - Franz Boas, Ethnicity, And Contemporary Physical Anthropology: Continuing Tensions, Cultural Fundamentalism And Instrumental Ethnicities