Why is it important to remember these things? Racism is not simply essentialism, but a peculiarly rigid and emotionally loaded way of stereotyping other human beings. Group boundaries are not given; they are, as Howard Becker learned from Everett Hughes (see Becker’s Tricks of the Trade), negotiated in ways that lead to agreement by insiders and outsiders that a distinct group exists. We know, too, thanks to Mary Douglas in Natural Symbols that the intensity with which groups insist on clear boundaries is a variable in human societies. Some groups are more open or closed than others. That is what makes the contemporary habit of focusing on “racist” words and treating their definitions as givens at which we should be offended politically naive as well as intellectually dubious. In our eagerness to condemn bits of language, we forget that “those” people, the ones who talk like, that may be potential allies and get off our high hobby horses to engage with them and seek common ground.

Although racism may not be a natural aspect of human society. the pioneering research by cognitive psychologists such as Susan Gelman and cognitive anthropologists like Lawrence Hirschfeld demonstrates that humans ‘essentialize’ in regard to their perception and thinking about their own and different “racial” or ethnic groups. Essentialism is the cognitive tendency to treat members of certain categories or groups as though they have an underlying, invisible nature that governs the observable characteristics of their membership in that category. In ‘The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought,’ Gelman offers a wide variety of data based on extensive psychological experimentation that explain why such essentialist thinking is so pervasive in a child’s understanding of the natural and social world. In his book ‘Race in the Making’ (MIT press, 1996) through a comparative study of French and US children, Hirschfeld demonstrates how children easily essentialize different “races,” or what he refers to as ‘ethnoraces.’ Both Gelman and Hirschfeld hypothesize that there may be a specific cognitive domain or module in the human brain that predisposes individuals to essentialize human groups. Hirschfeld refers to a ‘humankind’ module that may exist in the brain that results in these essentialist conceptions of different human groupings. A racial or ethnic group is essentialized when members of the group (or outsiders of the group) assume that all group members share some internal property or ‘essence’ that is supposedly inherited and that creates the behavioral patterns typical of that group. As groups are essentialized, individuals make inferences about how the people in those groups think and behave. Many ethnographic descriptions refer to how ‘races,’ ‘ethnicities,’ or ‘nationalities’ become essentialized and naturalized.

These cognitive studies help understand why Sam Huntington’s representations of whole civilizations as sharing a common culture that has resonated so widely throughout the world, along with popular expressions in the media and public political discourse about a “Muslim culture,” an “African American culture,” “Hispanic culture,” “Jewish culture,” “Hindu culture,” “American culture,” or “Western culture.’

Anthropologists have long recognized the pervasive essentialization (both past and present) of different groupings within human populations. Since the days of Franz Boas, anthropologists have agreed that neither language nor culture is inherited through biological transmission or genetics. However, it appears that most humans nonetheless tend to reify and essentialize ethnic or national (or even ‘civilizational’) groups as having homogeneous cultures and modes of behavior. This is a serious methodological problem for the anthropologist and social scientist, but it appears to be a pervasive cognitive bias and default for most of humanity. These widespread, essentialist conceptions of human groups, “races,” “ethnicities,” or “civilizations” parallel the early anthropological Herderian and Benedictian configurational and simplified models of culture.

By the way, Hirschfeld’s wife is the well-known anthropologist Ann Stoler whose nuanced Foucauldian perspective on postcolonialism has informed many of us. This cognitive research can be combined with good intensive ethnography and is an example of combining cognitive anthropology, ethnography, hermeneutics, and cultural transmission.

I offer two thoughts for your consideration. First, as new way of talking about racism you offer Foucault’s “biopolitics” and “population.” Each, I assume, has some specific meaning in Foucault’s usage but this is not spelled out. “Biopolitics” seems to imply a connection between biology and politics, but what that connection is remains obscure. Are we talking, as Foucault himself sometimes did, about politics embedded in bodily posture and habit in a way that seems natural? Or something else? To the uninitiated, this connection remains unclear.

“Population” is a different problem. “Population” is a common word. We talk freely about the population of Taiwan or Staten Island or a population of butterflies. It works well as a neutral description of individuals inhabiting a certain geographical or social space who might be persuaded to regard themselves as a tribe or nation united by blood, soil, language, or religion, for example. But the mechanisms by which they are supposed to be persuaded remain unarticulated; I think, by way of contrast, of Benedict Anderson’s description of the use of print media to create the imaginary communities we now call nations.

Leaving these terms as unexamined abstractions results in an argument whose overall shape resembles that of the Enlightenment, then Marxist, view of religion as a tool of state power used to compel obedience or an opiate of the people used to secure their passive acquiescence in whatever the rulers demand. What is omitted is the fact to which Geertz points us in “Religion as a Cultural System,” borrowing from Santayana, the proposition that people no more practice a universal Religion than we speak a universal Language. From this perspective, I am forced to ask if there is a universal Racism or a host of particular racisms in need of anthropological analysis. Then, I find myself wondering what it implies for anthropology that the anthropologists’ protest in this, the second decade of the twenty-first century, requires reading a French philosopher who died, perhaps an omen, in 1984.