Tag Archives: Race, genetics

Hacking Riffs on Rabinow

Ian Hacking has a very nice essay, that you can now download for free here, in the Fall 2006 issue of Daedalus. The essay sketches some recent trends in the new genetics, mostly taking its cue from Rabinow’s coinage of the term ‘biosociality.’

‘Biosocial’ is a new word, but its pedigree, although brief, is the best. Paul Rabinow, the anthropologist of the genome industry, wrote about ‘biosociality’ in 1992. He invented the word partly as a joke, to counter the sociobiology that had been fashionable for some time.

Hacking’s piece is an essay, and something of an exchange (Rabinow has put Hacking’s memorable phrase ‘representation and intervention’ to good use over the years) — so it doesn’t get bogged down in too many details. The main gist is that while sociobiology is out, the social fact of biology is in: reflexive genetic knowledge is more and more shaping the way that people imagine themselves and their relations. He touches on new developments in the science of ‘race,’ developments that my friend Duana Fullwiley calls ‘the molecularization of race.’ And he mentions Beck (‘risk’) and Fukuyama (‘transhumanism’) on the human future. The essay ends with a thought provoking vignette: Continue reading →

The Meaning of Whitemen

I just finished reading Ira Bashkow’s book “The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/185143.ctl for a review article that I am writing. Ira is a good friend of mine, but even setting aside our obvious intellectual affinities I must say that his book is one of the best ethnographies that I have read in a very long time time, and I really do recommend it to anyone — including anyone who is looking for a good mid-level ethnography to teach to undergraduates.

The topic of the book is what people in Papua New Guinea think of white people and more particularly how modernity is a ‘raced’ concept in Orokaiva thought. Orokaiva have been dealing with white for four generations and are hardly people whose encounter with ‘the outside world’ is hardly new. Along the way it deals with many of the hottest topics in Melanesian studies today — we have material that touches of partible personhood, cargo cultism, alternate modernities, identity, and consumption.

But the book is really about how humans imagine the other in order to say something about themselves. As a result it is not just about Orokaiva, but the possibility and utility of ethnography as a way of knowing. As someone with a keen interest in the history of anthropology and a genuine and informed commitment to the Boasian program (the book is about race after all), Ira has produced a book that defends the feasibility of anthropology as a comparative project. The introduction and conclusion deftly sketch out a defense against criticisms which claim that representing the other must necessarily mean disempowering those who you speak to.
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Harpending on Neo-Liberal Genetics: So, so wrong

The most recent number of American Ethnologist has “a review”:http://www.aaanet.org/aes/bkreviews/result_details.cfm?bk_id=3917 of Susan McKinnon’s book “Neo-Liberal genetics”:http://www.amazon.com/Neo-liberal-Genetics-Myths-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0976147521/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174411752&sr=1-1 written by Henry Harpending which is, frankly, libelous. I’ve “blogged about Neo-Liberal genetics before”:/2006/09/13/neo-liberal-genetics/ and have used it in my class to great effect, and I suppose that since I pretty much agree with McKinnon I am probably not the perfect person to write a review of the review. Nevertheless, Henry Harpending’s review is so confused and unfair that I simply can’t let it go unanswered.

In his review Harpending characterizes Neo-Liberal Genetics as “rambling screed criticizing the field of evolutionary psychology,” a field which “McKinnon dislikes [because of its] implied constraints on her political fantasies.” I get the feeling that Harpending imagines McKinnon to be ‘one of those postmodern feminists’ — indeed, he claims that McKinnon “does not complain that evolutionary psychology is bad science according to standard criteria for evaluating science: Instead she dislikes the ‘rhetorical structures and strategies of the texts.'”

Reading passages like this make me doubt whether Harpending has actually read the book — or at least has not read it very carefully. How can anyone argue (as Harpending does) that McKinnon “does not complain that evolutionary psychology is bad science according to standard criteria for evaulating science” when in plain English on page eleven of her book she writes: “I will make the argument that evolutionary psychology is bad science… this is the case because evolutionary psychologists have not been willing to put their fundamental premises and analytic categories at risk in an encounter with contrary evidence.”? Indeed, McKinnon is not arguing against science as a method of inquiry — she is arguing in the name of science against those who claim to act, but do not in fact act, with the rigor that science demands.

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The AAA Race and Human Variation website is up

We’ve mentioned this site “before”:/2006/06/20/race-and-human-variation-website-is-up/ but now the AAA’s Race and Human Variation website is fully armed and operational, featuring a “blog”:http://www.understandingrace.org/cs/blogs/race/ as well as many other spiffy features. It is hard to tell who exactly the people blogging are (although you can read all about their “copyright”:http://www.understandingrace.org/about/copyright.html of the material on the site). The site is geared to non-academics, and has great interactive features like quizzes, interactive timelines, and games. It also has a lot of resources for educators, including “downloadable papers”:http://www.understandingrace.org/resources/papers_author.html and an “annotated bibliography”:http://www.understandingrace.org/resources/pdf/annotated_bibliography.pdf (PDF link). It looks like the site is powered by “Community Server”:http://communityserver.org/. I’m excited by the website and will certainly find ways to integrate it into my teaching. The “Who Is White”:http://www.understandingrace.org/lived/who_is/index.html flash quiz could certainly be paired with “All Look Same”:http://www.alllooksame.com/.

Apocalypto Roundup

I haven’t seen Apocalypto yet, but there has been a lot of buzz on the blogosphere, so I thought I’d present some of the highlights.

Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log says:

Originally the buzz surrounding the film was mostly about Gibson’s choice to shoot the entire film in Mexico with local actors speaking Yucatec Maya. Now, of course, observers are more interested in speculating if the film will be dead-on-arrival at the box office thanks to Mel’s notorious anti-Semitic rant and DUI arrest last July. But linguistic issues are still getting some attention in the Apocalypto coverage, for instance in this Associated Press article describing the mixture of excitement and ambivalence among the Yucatec Maya community about a major Hollywood movie filmed in their indigenous language.

He then goes on to discuss the “foreboding Greek title,” after which he links to this post by John Lawler:
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Thinking about diversity in the aftermath of Michael Richards

A lot has been said about Michael Richards’ (AKA “Kramer”) meltdown in which he used the “N-word” and suggested that lynching was an appropriate response for hecklers in his audience. (For those who missed out, you can watch the meltdown on Google Video.) The most anthropological response I’ve seen was by Six Apart’s Anil Dash who argues that the incident was partially about the “mismatch between white and black culture in regard to social standards in public settings”:

Put more succinctly, Michael Richards lost his shit for the same reason white people always get mad when black people talk at the movies. It’s about control, and who sets the standards, and clearly Richards is someone who gets filled with rage when he’s not in control.

… there’s a significant tradition in many African American communities to see entertainment venues as a forum for interaction, as a place for dialogue and conversation inspired by, or even directly in response to the performance. Whether it’s call-and-response in church or at a hip hop show, it’s not merely acceptable to be talking or reacing, it’s expected. Would showtime at the Apollo be as fraught without that expectation?

Conversely, a lot of white culture places an expectation on respect for the performance. There’s a standard of reverence for the person on stage, or the film being screened. And there’s an underlying sense of value: Hey, we all paid to be here, so be quiet!

It is an important insight because I think a lot of liberals think that a genuinely inclusive society will be the same as what we have today, just with more colorful faces; but that can’t be the case. As one of my college professors put it: “Some people think that diversity just means inviting more African Americans into their houses. They don’t anticipate that these African Americans might want to rearrange the furniture.” Many Americans seem to feel that while Richards’ outburst was unfortunately worded, he was in his right to defend himself against audience hecklers. This position ignores the way in which those very social norms are themselves racialized.

The End of Chutnification

One article I like to use when teaching about colonialism is Ann Stoler’s “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power” from di Leonardo’s Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge. There is a book length version of the argument as well, but the article does the job. (It works very nicely together with Claire Denis’ film Chocolat)

Central to Stoler’s argument is the claim that colonial policy towards marriages between colonial officers and native wives changed when the mixed-race children began to blur the color line that legitimated European rule. She looks at how in Indonesia, India, and elsewhere, the colonial governments began a policy of encouraging officers to bring wives from home, and how the presence of these wives then created new tensions as a result of the perceived need to protect these women from sexual assault. (The number of people executed for attempted rape does not match any changes in the number of such assaults actually reported.)

It was with this discussion in mind that the following account of changes in Indian colonial rule from William Dalrymple caught my eye:

During the 18th century it was almost as common for westerners to take on the customs, and even the religions, of India, as the reverse. These white Mughals had responded to their travels in India by shedding their Britishness like an unwanted skin, adopting Indian dress, studying Indian philo sophy, taking harems and copying the ways of the Mughal governing class they came to replace – what Salman Rushdie, talking of modern multiculturalism, has called “chutnification”. By the end of the 18th century one-third of the British men in India were leaving their possessions to Indian wives.

In Delhi, the period was symbolised by Sir David Ochterlony, the British Resident, who arrived in the city in 1803: every evening, all 13 of his Indian wives went around Delhi in a procession behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant. For all the humour of this image, in such mixed households, Islamic customs and sensitivities were clearly understood and respected. One letter, for example, recorded that “Lady Ochterlony has applied for leave to make the Hadge to Mecca”. Indeed, Ochterlony strongly considered bringing up his children as Muslims, and when his children by his chief wife, Mubarak Begum, had grown up, he adopted a child from one of the leading Delhi Muslim families.

Dalrymple’s account of the reasons for this change are not at odds with those of Stoler, but the emphasis is different. On the one hand he attributes it to the “rise of British power” which “quickly led to undisguised imperial arrogance,” but he also attributes it to the “ascendancy of evangelical Christianity, and the profound change in social, sexual and racial attitudes that this brought about”:

The wills written by dying East India Company servants show that the practice of cohabiting with Indian bibis quickly declined: they turn up in one in three wills between 1780 and 1785, but are present in only one in four between 1805 and 1810. By the middle of the century, they have all but disappeared. In half a century, a vibrantly multicultural world refracted back into its component parts; children of mixed race were corralled into what became in effect a new Indian caste – the Anglo-Indians – who were left to run the railways, posts and mines.

The focus of Dalrymple’s article is actually on the 1857 mutiny and the parallels to the current situation in Iraq. It is a taste of his new book The Last Mughal.

(via Arts and Letters Daily)

Fashioning Natural History

Via BoingBoing, a fashion spread set in a Natural History museum, with the models looking very much as if they are part of the diorama.

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It would be kinda cool and funny if it weren’t for the disturbing history of this kind of thing. Although my guess is that C. Taylor took these pictures fully aware of this history and probably intending some kind of ironic commentary on it.

You can see the entire photo shoot here.

Anthropometry, the Game

Speaking of anthropometry, this is a fun game: you are presented with pictures of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans and asked to identify which is which. I got two thirds of them correct, which is much better than the average of one third. It would be much tougher, I’m sure, if the game had not included hair styles, makeup, and clothing as part of the pictures. If you’ve lived in Asia for a while, those give you a lot of clues.

Breaking News: Intrepid Explorer’s First Contact with a Vanishing Race of Noble Savages

I’ve been too busy to actually sit down and read Paul Raffaele’s Smithsonian article on getting “up close and personal with New Guinea natives who say they still eat their fellow tribesmen” until now. What finally prompted me to do so was this recent article in The Age responding to a “60 Minutes” segment about Raffaeles and the boy Wa-Wa. (I discovered both articles via the unflagging anthro-blogging of Anthropologi.info.)

I was amazed by how cliche ridden Raffaele’s article is. It was startlingly reminiscent of the kinds of articles National Geographic published a century ago: The intrepid explorer ventures into a dangerous and unknown territory for the sole purpose of making contact with natives who practice bizarre and grotesque rituals and are deeply suspicious of the explorer whose humanity they question (but finally accept). The experience causes tears to well up in Raffaele’s eyes.

Responding to the “60 Minutes” version of the story, Sarah Hewat writes:

Before we go pointing the finger, let’s look for the primitive fetishist within. Those who saw the 60 Minutes report perhaps did not notice the shorts being worn by members of the “forgotten” tribe, and the black plastic bags they were holding? And did audiences notice that they were speaking Bahasa Indonesia, rather than, as was claimed, an ancient dialect?

Now, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that people are still accused of witchcraft and killed (even eaten) for the crime. But one would like some good-old-fashioned ethnographic understanding of the practice rather than the raw exoticism that Raffaele offers up. In India, witchcraft accusations are closely related with the marginalization of the Adivasi population, battles over land, and gender relations. In short, they are a thoroughly modern phenomenon. But Raffaele portrays these practices as some kind of enduring primitive trait, and I find that pretty hard to stomach.

Neo-liberal Genetics

In the spring I’ll be teaching a class on “Anthropology and Contemporary Problems” in which we’ll cover some hot-button issues in our current culture and what anthropology and its adjacent disciplines can tell us about them. One of the topics we’ll spend a week or so on is evolutionary genetics. While the anthropological knee-jerk reaction against all forms of biological determinism has left us with a long and rich and other emotionally overheated literature, I must say that I’ve been particularly impressed by how much work has focused on just evolutionary psychology. So we have not just the articles in “Anthropologists Talk Balk: Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong”:http://www.amazon.com/Why-America-Pundits-Wrong-Anthropologists/dp/0520243560/sr=8-1/qid=1158167294/ref=sr_1_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books but whole volumes devoted to the subject, including “Alas, Poor Darwin”:http://www.amazon.com/Alas-Poor-Darwin-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0609605135/sr=8-1/qid=1158167194/ref=sr_1_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books and also “Complexities: Beyond The Nature Nurture Divide”:http://www.amazon.com/Complexities-Nature-Nurture-Susan-McKinnon/dp/0226500241/sr=8-6/qid=1158167205/ref=sr_1_6/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books.

If you are looking for something short and sweet, however, I’d reccomend Susan McKinnon’s “Neo-Liberal Genetics”:http://www.amazon.com/Neo-liberal-Genetics-Tales-Evolutionary-Psychology/dp/0976147521/sr=8-1/qid=1158166684/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books, one of “Prickly Paradigm’s”:http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/history.html newest pamphlets. It’s a compact criticism of evolutionary psychology’s approach written with clarity and vigor, but not so much passion that it can be dismissed as ‘partisan political correctness’ — at least not by most reasonable people. I think it’ll be perfect to read against The Evolution of Desire or some such.

And, of course, it has Neo-liberal in the title which is apprently a selling point these days.

John Hodgman’s Racial Categories

John Hodgman (the “PC” from the recent apple ads, and author of Areas of my Expertise) is a regular guest on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In this clip he tackles the increasing difficulty demographers face in tackling ever more complex racial categories by offering up a handy new system of his own. I don’t think colonial (and post-colonial) anthropologists could have done any better.

(Sorry the sound is a bit out of sync, but you take what you can get on YouTube!)

Anthropometry: Alive and Kicking

One of the most remarkable documents we encountered during the past two weeks immersed in the British colonial archives was the 1988 All India Anthropometric Survey, North Zone : Basic Anthropometric Data. Why, in 1988, did the late K. S. Singh oversee the publication of an anthropometric survey, full of tables listing the skull sizes and other features of the various “peoples” of India? Anthropometry has a long history in India, especially with regards to the “Criminal Tribes” we were investigating; but why was India still producing such documents in 1988?

One answer is that this was simply the last gasp of a colonial legacy. The anthropometric data was collected in the 1960s. No new data was collected for this survey. In an article explaining the survey, Singh explains that the survey was set up during the last days of British rule:

The Anthropological Survey of India was set up in December 1945, barely 20 months before the transfer of power. The reason for this has to be sought in the intensive lobbying by administrator-anthropologists – including J.P. Mills, J.H. Hutton, W.V. Grigson, W.G. Archer with anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and C. von Furer-Haimendorf – over 15 years to create a special dispensation for the tribes under the Government of India Act of 1935 and through various suggestions and proposals including those for the creation of a Crown Colony in the North East and a protectorate for the tribals.

Their special interest in the tribes derived from a romantic tradition that presented the tribes in pleasant contrast to castes, the ‘unravished’ hills and plateau where they lived which reminded the colonial rulers of their homeland, and from their appreciation of the strategic location of the tribes and the enormous resources that their lands contained. However, these proposals were shot down by the home office which felt that the British regime would be much too impoverished after the Second World War to commit its meagre resources to such ventures.

But I’m not sure Singh can get off the hook so easily. In the last chapter of her excellent book Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia Clare Anderson points out several ways in which the survey relied upon unreliable colonial ethnography in its analysis. Indeed, Singh’s more recent Peoples of India from 1995 seems to rely almost entirely upon highly questionable colonial sources for its chapters on the various Denotified Tribes (former “Criminal Tribes”).

There is a significant literature on the tremendous confusion (and corresponding need to maintain the illusion of certitude) that pervades colonial ethnography in India. In later posts I will write more about this (as I begin to read through this literature myself), suffice to say that much of what we read in these documents seemed more akin to cheap detective fiction than to ethnography. One document would say that a particular group ate jackal and that their women tended to be faithful to their husbands, whereas another would say the opposite about the same group (even when seemingly relying on the former document). We never learn on what basis this information is gleaned. But more than simply inaccurate, I would not even consider a listing of ethnic “traits” as ethnography in the first place.

So why was the Indian government still giving credence to such materials as late as the 1990s? Is it simply colonial ethnography on auto-pilot, or might it be that such forms of knowledge production are still seen as a useful means of legitimating certain kinds of state interventions amongst indigenous populations, many of which remain “troublesome“?

Ota Benga

I try to avoid linking to MySpace, but when the NY Times mentions that Ota Benga has his own MySpace page, I suppose its news. Even though Ota Benga died in 1916.

Next month it will be 100 years since Ota Benga was put on display in the monkey house at New York’s Bronx Zoo. It may seem unthinkable that something like this would happen today, but the recent controversy over the “African Village” in the Augsburg Zoo suggests that it is important to remember what happened to Ota Benga.

The new resident of the Monkey House was, indeed, a man, a Congolese pygmy named Ota Benga. The next day, a sign was posted that gave Ota Benga’s height as 4 feet 11 inches, his weight as 103 pounds and his age as 23. The sign concluded, “Exhibited each afternoon during September.”

Visitors to the Monkey House that second day got an even better show. Ota Benga and an orangutan frolicked together, hugging and wrestling and playing tricks on each other. The crowd loved it. To enhance the jungle effect, a parrot was put in the cage and bones had been strewn around it. The crowd laughed as the pygmy sat staring at a pair of canvas shoes he had been given. “Few expressed audible objection to the sight of a human being in a cage with monkeys as companions,” The New York Times wrote the next day, “and there could be no doubt that to the majority the joint man-and-monkey exhibition was the most interesting sight in Bronx Park.”

I won’t go into the details, but the Times piece provides some excellent background as to how it was that Ota Benga ended up in the zoo on that day. We are also referred to the book: Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume.

The exhibit quickly sparked protests from the Colored Baptist Ministers’ Conference who objected not only to the racism of the exhibit, but also to its Darwinism. This relates to an earlier post I wrote on Savage Minds about how contemporary debates about teaching Darwin in the schools overlook the fact that one of the main objections to Darwin at the original Scopes monkey trial was the racist and eugenic implications of contemporary Darwinism.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game

After all the player-hating that happened the “last time”:/2006/06/27/cognitive-science-meet-the-angel-of-history/ I focused on popular reporting on anthropology’s adjacent disciplines, I’m hesitant to mention the article that’s been brought up on “Livejournal”:http://community.livejournal.com/anthropologist/949283.html and “antropologi.info”:http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/anthropology.php?p=1971&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 about “an article on Anglo-Saxon apartheid in early Englands”:http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_b/papers/RSPB20063627.pdf and the racial genetics that underlie it.

There are things that I find curious about the article — the assumption that ‘marriage’ and ‘reproduction’ are the same thing and that ethnic identity is always corelated with a genetic marker for instance — but there doesn’t seem to be very much to be ‘racial’ to me. The fact that the word doesn’t appear in the article being the main reason. But even if you are suspicious of euphemisms such as ” ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Ethnic Group” there are more sophisticated critiques of this method than ask if it’s racist. The fact that the topic is a large migration of conquerors into a new land helps this article out of a lot of potential problems because it is in fact talking about a situation with a large migration of conquering people and the clear ethnic differences them and the locals on the receiving end. If the paper was about how the biogenetic substance of Anglo-Saxon conquerors somehow helped them in their conquest, or that they remain a separate ‘race’ today (rather than having pretty quickly blended in with everyone else, as the paper argues) then that would be something else again.

If you’re interested in learning more you can check out the webpage of “The Center for Genetic Anthropology”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/index.html at University College London, which is also “Ruth Mace land”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/bioanth/staff_member_mace.htm or, if you prefer “Fiona”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/bioanth/res-students_jordan.htm “Jordan”:http://evolutionaryanthropology.wordpress.com/ land. The center also has some “popular”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/ScienceSpectra-pages/SciSpect-14-98.html “summaries”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/ns/nsbg.html of what it is up to, although I have a soft spot in my heart for Seth Sanders’s take on one study on “race and religion in Africa”:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/transition/v010/10.1sanders.html one member of the center co-authored.