I don’t want to create a false equivalency. There is a very important difference between a political party which relies on minority votes and one which tries to suppress them. There is an important difference between a party which engages in dog-whistle politics to win over swing voters and a party for which such voters are their electoral base. But that doesn’t get us away from the fact that – in American politics – we are always talking about relative racisms. Many of those supposedly racist voters voted for Obama in the last election, and many minority voters handed the election over to Trump in their state simply by staying home on election day.¹ I don’t write this because I want to assign blame, but simply to illustrate how crude a tool “racism” is when trying to make sense of this all. So, if racism can’t help us, how do we talk about this phenomenon which is so central to contemporary politics?

It is not an easy riddle to solve, but one important part of the solution can be found in in the writings of Michel Foucault. Just a part of the solution, mind you, but for my own thinking on the matter it has been key. For that reason I was very happy when a bunch of anthropologists announced that they wanted to read read Michel Foucault’s lecture eleven in Society Must Be Defended as a means to think through “the interplay of sovereign power, discipline, biopolitics, and concepts of security, and race” on inauguration day. This is because the concept of biopolitics is a very useful addition to the analytical toolkit we have for talking about the diverse phenomenon grouped under the term “racism.” As with any such analytical tools, the benefits of highlighting certain features necessarily obscure others, and there are entire books written to try to sort out exactly what is lost and what is gained by using these tools; however, today I would like to simply focus on one aspect of this lecture which has been particularly useful to me: Foucault’s use of the term “population.”

There is a widespread belief that racism is a natural feature of human society. Talk to many a non-anthropologist about racism for long enough and they will likely shrug their shoulders at some point and say something to the effect that “Well, ever since the dawn of humanity we have always thought that people in the next village didn’t bathe and slept with their daughters.” This naturalization of racism is pernicious because it depoliticized racism and makes it seem like a byproduct of human character rather than a deliberate strategy of rule. Foucault’s notion of a “population” does a lot of important work in correcting this precisely by focusing attention on how racism became a “positive” force in the construction of the modern state. Note that “positive” here is not meant to imply something good, but rather something that has the power to actively shape the world. If racism were simply a feature of humanity than the role of racism in politics could only be negative. That is to say, modernity would be characterized only by the progressive removal of racism from politics rather than by a constant search for new ways to institutionalize racism into the very fabric of our institutions. At the same time, however, it is precisely because there are aspects of the concept of “population” which are seen as serving the greater good that it is so successful a strategy for the perpetuation of racism.

Foucault puts it this way:

racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship . . . The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer.

Thinking about populations involves a qualitative shift in the nature of state power, because it requires the state to “intervene at the level” of the kinds of general phenomenon that are indicated by “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures” in order to “optimize a state of life” for the population as a whole. This is a new kind of thinking, obsessed not with the good of a select few, but the good of the “average.” Even if such thinking ultimately serves the interests of the few, it is crucial to understand that these interests are filtered through the ideology of the population as a whole and the importance of those few is interpreted in terms of the contribution to the greater good.

Foucault is concerned here with the Holocaust and the Nazi regime, but the ideas are just as usefully applied to the colonial encounter, or to the prison-industrial complex. In 1871 the British colonial government in India passed the Criminal Tribes Act which began the process of listing entire communities as “ born criminals ” subject to restrictions on their movement and eventually led to their internment in labor camps. With over two hundred different communities registered as so-called “Criminal Tribes” (now referred to as De-notified Tribes or DNTs) under this act, it doesn’t make sense to think of them as a “race,” but as I argued in an 2013 post on this blog, the logic of their oppression today is very similar to the kind of racial profiling African Americans are routinely subject to in the United States.

The concept of population also helps us discuss the concept of a “Muslim registry” without resorting to the concept of “racism.” As I said above, using a population highlights some aspects of a problem while obscuring others. Certainly there is a strong racist component to “flying while brown” that mustn’t be ignored. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that Islam is a religion and not an ethnic group. Actually, considering the wide diversity of religious practices that go under the name of Islam, it might be even more accurate to refer to it in the plural, but the logic of the War on Terror has served to impose its own reality upon the world such that all that diversity is subsumed under the logic of a “population.” It is precisely because “Society Must Be Defended” that we have no-fly lists which have a disproportionate number of Muslim names on them, that we have surveillance of American Muslim communities, that we force Muslim immigrants to turn informers on their own communities in exchange for an expedited green card, that we routinely deny immigration benefits and citizenship to Muslims and those from Muslim-majority countries based on vague and baseless “national security indicators.” Oh, and did I mention that all of this was done under Obama?

The concept of racism is often used as a value judgement. As a way of diverting attention from our own complicity with the racist project of the modern state. The concept of a population helpfully puts the role of state projects front and center and lets us see clearly how deeply embedded we all are in this system. If we are going to fight the racism of a Trump administration we are going to have to get over our own sense of smug self-satisfaction and start asking some very hard questions. Foucault’s concept of population helps us start asking those questions, even if it doesn’t provide all of the answers.

Let’s start with taking ideas seriously. There are three problems I see with this argument. First, whose ideas do we look to? Not only is Islam a large and diverse religion, of which the kind of political Islam associated with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are a minority, but even those following the Muslim Brotherhood are much more diverse in their thought than most observers are willing to acknowledge.

Yet the declaration of jihad was tearing the Muslim community apart. There was never a consensus that the jihad in Afghanistan was a genuine religious obligation. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood refuted the demand to send its members to jihad, although it encouraged relief work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those who did go were often unaffiliated with established Muslim organizations and therefore more open to radicalization. Many concerned Saudi fathers went to the training camps to drag their sons home.

Even if we could identify a coherent ideology, or perhaps abstract certain commonalities across this diversity, we still have the problem that these ideas are not necessarily clearly understood or interpreted in the same way by those who act in its name. For instance, this profile of Chérif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, says he described himself as a “ghetto Muslim” and that not long ago he was so ignorant about religion that one source said “He couldn’t differentiate between Islam and Catholicism.” But we need not rely on such profiles to understand that real people are bundles of contradictions who often believe in multiple contradictory ideas at the same time.

This brings us to the second objection which is that, for anthropologists, “emic” accounts of people’s own motivations are only one of several sources of data that anthropologists use in the process of constructing an “etic” interpretation. Taking people’s own words seriously means interpreting those words, not simply accepting them at face value. Psychologists understand that many explanations are post-facto justifications, not necessarily reflective of the thinking that led up to the action in the first place. This is one reason why anthropology doesn’t just rely upon interviews, but on participant observation as well.

Third, for the past fifty or so years anthropologists have increasingly shifted from thinking about forms of culture as a “code” from which people take marching orders to a view of culture as a form of social action, highlighting how people create and transform ideology and social structure through social action (including speech). (See my discussion of Asif Agha’s book.) Treating religious belief as a form of social action moves us from a conception of religion as a form of brain washing to taking seriously how people actually use religion, even transforming it through their lived practices.

But by focusing so much on individual interpretation, agency, and practice, do we go too far in dismissing difference? This is a valid concern. Anthropologists do not think action takes place in a void, nor do we dismiss the importance of ideology. However, we tend to treat these things at a different level of analysis than do many who rely entirely on written texts for interpreting culture. For anthropologists, culture is often manifest not so much in specific ideas, but in underlying rules of interpretation or in the very categories through which people think about the world. Thus, the numerous Chinese words for “uncle” reflects a history of patriarchal family relations and so, while Chinese people’s actual family practices no longer adhere to many of the old patriarchal customs, the words and categories they use to think about family still reflect upon that history and are meaningful for them.

In short, differences matter, ideas matter, beliefs matter, but for an anthropologist they don’t matter in the way that many people who talk about Islam think they matter. You can’t say we need to take people’s ideas seriously but then deny them the agency to interpret and act upon those ideas in their own unique and historically contextualized ways. An Arab kid growing up in the suburbs of France is going to read Islam in a uniquely French way and his radicalism may have much more in common with a follower of Le Pen than it does with someone living in the Middle East. That is why it is important to understand the socio-political context of French racism, not because those who bring it up are trying to blame the victims or something silly like that.

The question is not that Boas was wrong about culture. It is rather that he told anthropologists that they are the only ones who are right.

This quote is from the conclusion to the penultimate chapter of Bauman and Briggs’ award-winning book Voices of Modernity. The book employs a Foucauldian genealogical approach to trace the development of folklore studies from its roots in the Scottish Enlightenment, through its development under German Romanticism, ending up with Boas and the birth of anthropology. In doing so the book focuses on a number of interrelated ideas about culture, language, and modernity as well as methodological issues in the creation of texts from oral traditions. When they awarded the book with the Edward Sapir Book Prize the Society for Linguistic Anthropology wrote:

Bauman and Briggs argue that contemporary efforts to make schemes of social inequality based on race, gender, class and nationality seem compelling and legitimate, rely on deeply rooted ideas about language and tradition. Showing how critics of modernity unwittingly reproduce these foundational fictions, they suggest new strategies for challenging the undemocratic influence of these voices of modernity.

While these themes run throughout their book, they sometimes seem to have only historical importance. After all, scholars like Herder or the Grimm brothers are associated with the rise of nationalism and so there doesn’t seem much that is “unwitting” in their reproduction of these ideologies. It is only in the penultimate chapter on Boas, a scholar known for his critiques of racism and nationalism, that the relevance of these earlier scholars (and the importance of the genealogical method) really becomes clear to the reader. In this genealogy Boas is “ego,” but before this chapter he has been absent from the story.

To understand their critique of Boas it is necessary to first understand Boas’s theory of culture and this is best approached (they argue) by understanding his theory of language. Boas in many ways presaged contemporary Chomskyan linguistics. He made charts showing the articulation of vowel sounds, and was one of the first to anticipate the distinction between phonemic and phonetic analysis (from which the terms “emic” and “etic” come from). Just as it is hard to learn to distinguish the phonemes in a foreign language once one is already an adult, Boas came to think of culture as a set of practices into which people are socialized early in life, able to deploy at will but largely unaware of the underlying rules.

This view of language, grounded in his “universal, objective phonetic grid” and internalized as a set of subconscious practices was an important step in moving Boas away from Herderian evolutionary approaches which saw contemporary language as a degenerative form of a once-pure folkloric forms.

Folklore enabled Boas to attack evolutionism by rejecting degenerative bias of traditional philological approaches and countering E. B. Tylor’s view that each folk element is a survival from a previous social form, one that was rational in its origins but became increasingly irrational. For Boas, folklore was deeply embedded in culture, and it was irrational all the way down.

In his view of language and culture as irrational (non-rational might be a better way of putting it) Boas nonetheless held on to another evolutionary theory, one “inherited from Aubrey and Locke” in which “tradition limits progress towards enlightenment and rationality”

He accordingly constructed culture as a force that limits individual freedom through the pervasive influence of “the fetters of tradition.”¹

Racism, nationalism, colonialism, etc. were, for Boas, not so much political-economic phenomenon as they were the result of culture and tradition. This created a contradiction for Boas, for while culture defined the object of anthropological study, it was also an obstacle to the cosmopolitan form of knowledge anthropologists hoped to produce.

Anthropologists must indict a phenomenon that only they can represent authoritatively, and they stake their claim to authority on the broader public and political stage by promising to help rationalize the very cultural (traditional, unconscious) patterns of which they are supposed to be the visionaries and spokespersons. Fully realizing Boas’s utopian vision of cultural enlightenment would eventually put anthropologists out of a job…

For Boas, only anthropologists could cultivate “a ‘purely analytic’ approach to the study of particular languages and cultures” which enabled them “to circumvent the natural tendency to project one’s own categories onto others.” Bauman and Briggs find this view particularly troublesome. Not only do they see it as promoting forms of inequality in which anthropologists and other experts know best what is in other people’s best interests, but they also see it as legitimating certain forms of neo-racism.

Boas’s theoretical move thus dehistoricizes and depoliticizes imperialism by reducing it to general effects of a universal process of reifying unconscious categories when applied to cross-linguistic and cultural encounters. Balibar (1991) argues that this sort of reasoning provides neo-racists with a cultural logic that naturalizes racism. Although he seems to suggest that this trope constitutes a neo-racist distortion of anthropological constructions, we would argue that it follows from Boas’s own culture theory.

This is not to say that Boas was a racist. Too often (especially on the internet) there is a tendency to oversimplify any argument which discusses the links between racism and certain representational or theoretical practices, boiling it down to “X was a racist.” This would be especially unfortunate in the case of Boas whom the authors acknowledge as a champion of anti-racism. As they conclude:

Boas’s attempt to fashion anthropology as a cosmopolitan discipline deserves broader appreciation. The difficulty is that the fundamental modernist move of claiming consciousness and rationality for oneself and one’s followers and denying it to others was embedded deeply within the concept of culture that lay at the heart of this project.

I would like to think that contemporary anthropological theories of culture, especially those grounded in practice theory avoid many of these problems, but I think that this view of culture is still widespread outside of anthropology. The proponents of the New Atheism movment and their ilk strike me as especially prominent examples of this modernist move, especially when they talk about Islam. It seems strange to me to associate Boas with Islamophobia, and I think he would be more careful not to pick out any particular culture for derision, but in the way he dehistoricized and depoliticized these issues, he would perhaps have had a difficult time articulating a coherent critique.