The cultural construction of gendered bodies: Biology and metaphors of production and destruction*

One way of conceiving of the anthropological task is that of countering the degradations and “dehumanizations” of the “other” to which the species is prone by promoting “transcendent humanization.” However efficiently and professionally anthropologists gather their materials and form them into their ethnographic and ethnologic analyses, may not this “ethical impulse” be postulated as the “final cause” of our efforts? But what could such a sonorous phrase mean ? And what is its relationship to the systematic study of the “differences that make or do not make a difference” in culture to which anthropology has long been devoted? I will argue that it involves a dynamic of categories and that this dynamic is itself an object of systematic study. Recently, for example, some anthropologists have been writing “against culture,” seeing the culture concept and associated theory more as barriers than as benefits to pan‐human understanding. I will argue that this is an instance of “transcendent humanization.” One cannot but be sympathetic to the thrust and merits of this argument. But at the same time one wants to ask what implications it holds for the systematic study and understanding of the other. This article, then, examines some elementary vectors in the “dynamic of the categorical” involved in these and related recent debates which also may be seen in terms of transcendence and humanization: the debate over relativism and the recently emergent debate over “enlightenment mythmaking” in anthropology.     

Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology

Anténor Firmin published De I'Égalité des Races Humaines in 1885 in Paris as a response both to Arthur de Gobineau's racist tome L'lnégalité des Races (1853-55) and to the racialist anthropology of the nineteenth century. This pioneering work of anthropology has been translated for the first time into English by Assclin Charles as The Equality of the Human Races (Firmin [1885]2000). In 662 pages of the original text, Firmin systematically critiqued the anthropometry and craniometry that dominated the anthropology of his day, while he envisioned a broad, synthetic discipline that would follow once this narrow approach to the study of man was abandoned. He challenged virtually every extant racial myth and laid a basis for the understanding of human variation as adaptation to climate and environment. Contrary to the polygenist doctrines of the infertility of interracial matings, Firmin extolled the value of racial mixture, especially in the vigorous New World hybrid populations. He developed a critical view of racial classifications and of race that foreshadowed much later social constructions of race. In the book he also articulated early Pan-Africanist ideas as well as an analytical framework for what would become postcolonial studies.
The Equality of the Human Races is a text that lies historically at the foundations of the birth of the discipline of anthropology, yet it is unknown to the field. It is a pioneering work in critical anthropology that awaits recognition 115 years after it was first published. [Anténor Firmin, history of racism, antiracism, historical texts, Haitian anthropologist, critical anthropology, nineteenth-century pioneer]     

Fear is readily associated with an out-group face in a minimal group context

Research on prepared learning demonstrates that fear-conditioning biases may exist to natural hazards (e.g., snakes) compared to nonnatural hazards (e.g., electrical cords) and that fear is more readily learned toward exemplars of a racial out-group than toward exemplars of one's own race. Here we push the limits of the generalizability of the mechanisms underlying race biases in a fear-conditioning paradigm by using arbitrary group categories not distinguished by race. Groups were distinguishable solely by t-shirt color, with assignment based on performance in a perceptual task. In this “minimal group paradigm,” we found that out-group exemplars were more readily associated with an aversive stimulus than exemplars of one's in-group. Our findings suggest that prepared learning in an intergroup context is not limited to contexts involving racial categories involving histories rife with cultural stereotypes and that previous findings of learning biases along racial lines may be interpreted as a by-product of a broader psychological system for prepared fear learning toward categories of agents that may have posed persistent threats over human evolutionary history.     

Apportionment of racial diversity: A review

It has become increasingly popular to theorize and assert significant genetic differences between arbitrary regional, ethnic, and racial groupings of humans. Beginning with Livingstone, Brace, and Newman is the early 1960s, biological anthropologists have shown that variation in human traits is non‐concordant along racial lines, as they are products of overlapping, dynamic selective pressures. In 1972, Lewontin analyzed blood groups, serum protein, and red blood cell enzyme variants and found that only about 6% of total genetic variance was accounted for by race, while the majority of variance is accounted for by differences between individuals. Using similar assays, Latter obtained similar results in 1980. In 1982, Nei and Roychoudhury analyzed 62 protein variants and 23 blood groups, finding that roughly 10% of genetic variance was accounted for by race. Analyzing protein, blood group, and HLA variants, Ryman and coworkers obtained similar figures in 1983. More recently, Dean and coworkers (1994) and Barbujani and coworkers (1997) have used PCR techniques to analyze RFLP and microsattelite loci, again yielding estimates of around 10% for the amount of genetic variance accounted for by race. Furthermore, recent research on regional and racial variance in mtDNA (Excoffier and coworkers, 1992), a traditional marker for human racial groupings, shows a higher proportion of variance within than across racial categories. These studies used a variety of assays and analytical techniques, some of which are designed to maximize the amount of variance accounted for by race. In light of this, the low proportion of genetic variance across racial groupings strongly suggests a re‐examination of the race concept. It no longer makes sense to adhere to arbitrary racial categories, or to expect that the next genetic study will provide the key to racial classification. Evol. Anthropol. 10:34–40, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

生物人类学和人体组成学的渊源关系

随着人体组成学中文版的发行和人体组成测量培训班在中国的举行, 中国生物人类学家对人体组成测量方法在科研中的运用有了更大的兴趣。该文对人类学家,如Jindr?ich Matiegka和Stanley MarionGarn在人体组成学发展中的历史贡献做了基本的介绍。此外, 作者还以Garn博士的工作为例, 去激励中国生物人类学家开展人体组成学的研究工作。文章讨论了人体组成成分的测量方法在生物人类学中的用途, 并介绍了人体组成学的基本理论和概念及近年来人体组成学的变化: 如影像技术的发展, 影像技术作为"金标准"对评估其他人体组成测量方法的用途, 双能量x线吸收法的优势, 生物电阻分析法的广泛运用, 和多种人体组成测量方法相辅相成的现象。作者对常用的人体组成测量方法的优缺点做了比较, 并指出人体组成成分测量是人体测量方法的自然延续, 人体组成学和生物人类学的关系渊源已久; 因此中国人类学家应当更多地利用人体组成测量方法对人体差异做更深入的研究, 并注重人体差异同健康疾病和生物医学的关系, 以便让生物人类学更好地为当今社会服务。     

Uncloaking a Lost Cause: Decolonizing ancestry estimation in the United States

Since the professionalization of US-based forensic anthropology in the 1970s, ancestry estimation has been included as a standard part of the biological profile, because practitioners have assumed it necessary to achieve identifications in medicolegal contexts. Simultaneously, forensic anthropologists have not fully considered the racist context of the criminal justice system in the United States related to the treatment of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; nor have we considered that ancestry estimation might actually hinder identification efforts because of entrenched racial biases. Despite ongoing criticisms from mainstream biological anthropology that ancestry estimation perpetuates race science, forensic anthropologists have continued the practice. Recent years have seen the prolific development of retooled typological approaches with 21st century statistical prowess to include methods for estimating ancestry from cranial morphoscopic traits, despite no evidence that these traits reflect microevolutionary processes or are suitable genetic proxies for population structure; and such approaches have failed to critically evaluate the societal consequences for perpetuating the biological race concept. Around the country, these methods are enculturated in every aspect of the discipline ranging from university classrooms, to the board-certification examination marking the culmination of training, to standard operating procedures adopted by forensic anthropology laboratories. Here, we use critical race theory to interrogate the approaches utilized to estimate ancestry to include a critique of the continued use of morphoscopic traits, and we assert that the practice of ancestry estimation contributes to white supremacy. Based on the lack of scientific support that these traits reflect evolutionary history, and the inability to disentangle skeletal-based ancestry estimates from supporting the biological validity of race, we urge all forensic anthropologists to abolish the practice of ancestry estimation.     

Unsettling intersectional identities: historicizing embodied boundaries and border crossings

At a time when the pace of global change has led to unprecedented shifts in, and unsettling of, identities, Brubaker brings “trans/gender” and “trans/racial” creatively into conversation to theorize the historical location of identity claims and to examine the question of whether identities are optional, self-consciously chosen and subject to political claims rather than biologically pre-given. His main argument is that the distinction between sex and gender allows us to construct gender identity as personal, individual and separate from the (biologically) sexed body. In contrast, other people always have a stake in allowing or challenging identity claims to racial identity. Brubaker’s argument is persuasive. However, he treats both race and sex/gender as solipsistic and neglects the wider social context that has produced the conditions of possibility for the entrenched differences he records. An intersectional approach would have deepened his discussion of the place of categories in “trans” arguments.     

Generational change and how we conceptualize and measure multiracial people and “mixture”

Until relatively recently, in countries such as the U.S.A. and U.K., individuals could only opt for “single race” categories with which they identified. However, in the 2000 decennial census, respondents in the U.S. were able to choose more than one racial category, while in 2001, a “Mixed” box (with further subcategories) was provided in the England and Wales census for the first time. But the very success of this racial project in these countries has spawned a number of questions for policy-makers and academics who theorize, enumerate and study the experiences of multiracial people. With demographic changes such as generational change, who counts as multiracial or mixed race? This question has yet to receive significant attention. Although mixing is becoming more commonplace, the question of who counts as multiracial is far from straightforward, especially as we look down the generational pipeline.     

Racialization: a defense of the concept

This paper defends the concept of racialization against its critics. As the concept has become increasingly popular, questions about its meaning and value have been raised, and a backlash against its use has occurred. I argue that when “racialization” is properly understood, criticisms of the concept are unsuccessful. I defend a definition of racialization and identify its companion concept, “racialized group.” Racialization is often used as a synonym for “racial formation.” I argue that this is a mistake. Racial formation theory is committed to racial ontology, but racialization is best understood as the process through which racialized – rather than racial – groups are formed. “Racialization” plays a unique role in the conceptual landscape, and it is a key concept for race eliminativists and anti-realists about race.     

De-indigenized but not defeated: race and resistance in Colombia's Peace Community and Campesino University

Despite the institution of multicultural policies and pluriethnic governments across Latin America, racist violence against Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups persists. Yet the racial facets of violence against non-ethnic campesinos remain unexplored. Integrating scholarship on race as a global structure and Latin American racial formations, I offer an account of racialization in Colombia. This article analyzes the racial dynamics of resistance to extractivism in Colombia's Campesino University, uniting Indigenous and campesino groups like the San José de Apartadó Peace Community. While the dominant race lexicon separates “campesinos” like San José's peasants from “Indigenous” and “Black” groups, I argue that the identifier campesino mestizo hides how San José's farmers were “de-indigenized” yet remain racialized as the less-than-human “Indigenous savage”. If racialization works to dominate but also divide the subaltern, then Campesino University participants’ cross-ethnic solidarity network against what they affirm is a shared experience of racist violence both unveils and counters racism.     

Hyperracialized: interracial relationships in post-apartheid South Africa and the informal policing of public spaces

Dynamics of race in South Africa are deeply entangled within a world system that continues to enable hegemonic white privilege. Prevalent views and behaviours towards “interracial” relationships reveal a rebellion against the non-racial philosophies and policies of the new government and are an indicator of the ongoing salience of race in shaping lived experience. Drawing on interviews with couples in so-called “interracial” relationships, this article argues that unequal power dynamics continue to hyperracialize and regulate these relationships through “privatized” racial boundary policing, even though such relationships are no longer stigmatized and criminalized by the state as in apartheid South Africa. Their experiences of racism show up in two distinct ways: aggressive policing and covert policing; these in turn can lead to self-policing, and perpetuate racial social organization.     

P > .05: The incorrect interpretation of “not significant” results is a significant problem

Statistically nonsignificant (p > .05) results from a null hypothesis significance test (NHST) are often mistakenly interpreted as evidence that the null hypothesis is true—that there is “no effect” or “no difference.” However, many of these results occur because the study had low statistical power to detect an effect. Power below 50% is common, in which case a result of no statistical significance is more likely to be incorrect than correct. The inference of “no effect” is not valid even if power is high. NHST assumes that the null hypothesis is true; p is the probability of the data under the assumption that there is no effect. A statistical test cannot confirm what it assumes. These incorrect statistical inferences could be eliminated if decisions based on p values were replaced by a biological evaluation of effect sizes and their confidence intervals. For a single study, the observed effect size is the best estimate of the population effect size, regardless of the p value. Unlike p values, confidence intervals provide information about the precision of the observed effect. In the biomedical and pharmacology literature, methods have been developed to evaluate whether effects are “equivalent,” rather than zero, as tested with NHST. These methods could be used by biological anthropologists to evaluate the presence or absence of meaningful biological effects. Most of what appears to be known about no difference or no effect between sexes, between populations, between treatments, and other circumstances in the biological anthropology literature is based on invalid statistical inference.     

Revisiting the rural/race debates: A view from the Welsh countryside

The analysis of the specific features of rural racism and rural/race issues is a developing field of study. Much of the debate and existing research focuses on demonstrating the “specificity” of rural/race issues and responding to the “rural ethnic subject” as the victim of racial exclusion and/or violence. Drawing on a study conducted in the north of Wales and work on Welsh narratives on race, this article seeks to revisit the rural/race debate and argues for its repositioning within wider discourses of British multiculturalism. It explores the conceptual basis of the rural racism debates, in particular seeking to qualify the notion of the “specificity” of rural/race matters within the context of the newly devolved nations and particular constructions of “the ethnic subject” in rural/race relations. It suggests ways in which the “rural” discourse on race decentres the dominant narratives of multicultural Britain and is contributing to its reformulation.     

"Race"—Still an Issue for Physical Anthropology? Results of Polish Studies Seen in the Light of the U.S. Findings

The racial paradigm, which became rooted in physical anthropology at its very beginning, was, for decades, treated as a concept needing no verification. It was only in the mid-20th century that the first attempts were made to question the usefulness of the race concept in describing our species variation. Since then, an ever growing number of anthropologists, particularly in the United States, have rejected the concept (nearly seventy percent in 1999). In Poland, the situation is different—in the 2001 study, the race concept was rejected by only 25 percent; the remaining respondents differing widely as to the accepted meaning of race. Unlike the U.S. anthropologists, Polish anthropologists tend to regard race as a term without taxonomic value, often as a substitute for population. The discrepancy may stem from differences in the traditions of anthropological schools, the differing sociopolitical histories, education, semantics, and possible attitudinal factors. [Keywords: race, human variation, subspecies, anthropological schools]     

Rethinking the (im)possible in evolution

This paper will discuss the philosophical background to evolutionary theory and present multiple counterfactuals to each of the following seven empirically unsustainable but nonetheless widespread assumptions about genomic (DNA-based) evolution:1. “All heredity transmission occurs from parent to progeny”2. “Mutations are the result of inevitable replication errors”3. “Mutations occur at constant low probabilities over time” (= there are “mutation rates”)4. “Virus infection cannot induce genetic changes giving heritable resistance”5. “Mutations cannot be targeted within the genome”6. “Spontaneous hereditary changes are localized and limited to those of small effect”7. “Cells cannot integrate DNA change with biologically useful adaptive needs”.The summary take-home lesson is that we have to change from thinking of the genome as a read-only memory (ROM) that dictates the fate of the cell or organism to conceptualizing the genome as a read-write (RW) organelle modified transiently or permanently by the cell at different time scales.     

Family ideation,immigration, and the racial state: explaining divergent family reunification policies in Britain and the US

Why do family reunification policies differ across liberal democracies? Established literature explains differentiation through reference to the logics of distinct “national models” of immigration policy-making. Drawing on critical race and feminist scholarship, this paper finds consistent racial logics in the political histories of family reunification policies in Britain and the US during the mid-twentieth century. In a context where the geopolitical power of each country was conditioned by an assertive antiracist internationalism, “family” provided a colourblind, ideational platform to rearticulate the state-based racial project of white supremacy. Despite an original convergence, family reunification diverged because of the context-specific racialization of the immigrant family in each case. In rooting divergent reunification policies in the logics of the racial state, this paper contributes to efforts to incorporate race into the sociology of immigration. The paper also develops recent feminist scholarship on the role of “family ideation” in building liberal-democratic immigration systems.     

‘To bring out the best that is in their blood’: Race,reform, and civilization in the journal of race development (1910–1919)

The Journal of Race Development [JRD], published out of Clark University in the United States between 1910 and 1919, aimed, in its founder's words, “to present … the important facts which bear upon race progress, and the different theories as to the methods by which developed peoples may most effectively aid the progress of the undeveloped”. Its basic premise was that scientific knowledge could harness racial or civilizational “evolution” and turn it into “development”. This article examines that project, the conceptual apparatus that the JRD's writers and editors brought to bear on it, and how racial ideas informed their conceptions of development and progressive social change through elite scientific and political intervention. Central to this project was an organic notion of “civilization” in which “nature” and “culture” did not so much overlap as flow seamlessly one into the other.     

The Lens of Science: Anthropometric Photography and the Chippewa, 1890–1920

ABSTRACT

Nineteenth-century anthropologists struggled to establish themselves as scientists in a cultural milieu of enthusiasm for “curiosities.” Because commercial photographers appropriated the “authenticity” of photographic realism, the need increased for ethnographic photographers to distinguish between such realism and the “scientific authority” of their own visual productions. Through a case study of anthropometric photography of the Chippewa, this article examines the tension between, on the one hand, ethnographers' exploitation of the technological and symbolic attributes of photography to promote the scientific and political goals of the discipline, and on the other hand, the influence and function of visual genres and visual allegories in conditioning and framing what viewers accepted as “real” and “true.”