SSRC asks: Is Race ‘Real’? (with update)

Complementing the AAA’s website devoted to contemporary anthropological thinking on race, the SSRC has its own much more academic website devoted to looking at recent developments in scholarship. The site says it is the ‘online companion’ to the three part PBS documentary, ‘Race – the Power of an Illusion.‘ Thus, most of the articles, including pieces by AAA President Alan Goodman and anthropologist Roger Lancaster, argue persuasively that race is a consequential cultural construct, not a natural fact. (Interestingly, this puts them somewhat at odds with what I understand Ian Hacking to have recently argued.) I especially like the Lancaster piece published on the website. Lancaster, like Susan McKinnon, sees an ‘elective affinity’ between neoliberal market ideology and ‘bioreductive’ explanations that understand present social and political circumstance as simply the expression of a fundamentally unchanging human nature encoded in genes. He writes:

…the rise of genomania seems inextricable from the long decline of public sociology (and of public intellectuals generally). This decline began in the Nixon years: It first took form as conservative discontent with penal and welfare policies informed by sociological expertise. Highly publicized attacks on public intellectuals like Margaret Mead fed this process, which accelerated throughout the Reagan/Bush years and has yet to be reversed.

This morning, I happened across an interestingly complementary piece in Anthropology Today by Tim Ingold (‘The trouble with “evolutionary biology”‘ — you have to have a subscription) attacking recent neo-Drawinian attacks on sociocultural anthropology. Lancaster & Co. I think show nicely what Mary Douglas and other anthropologists have been arguing for a long time: that appeals to the putatively ‘natural’ ordering of human affairs are actually ideological statements designed to de-politicize social life as ‘we’ know it.

(Update 27.06.2007:  Coincidentally, yesterday’s New York Times features an article by Nicholas Wade, who especially provokes Lancaster’s ire:  “If scientific racialism now enjoys respectability in the serious public sphere, this development owes much to the labors of a single New York Times science reporter, Nicholas Wade.”)

Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.