1. Pop Quiz
1. What is the ethnicity of the community among whom Philippe Bourgois conducted his fieldwork?
2. What is the key anthropological method he uses in his fieldwork?

2. October 13, 2015 Anthropology of Race
Harrison, Faye: Unraveling Race for the twentieth century (ENM)
Bourgois – In Search of Respect. Chapter 3, pages 77 – 113
American Anthropological Association Statement on "Race" (1998)
Jon Stewart -

3. Social Stratification
Informs practices of exclusion
Of Belonging
Rights and entitlements
Role and Duties
Citizenship
All of which are naturalized

4. Questions of Identity
Similarity and difference that orient us to the world around and influence social relations
Not fundamental, or ‘of blood,’ but a dynamic relationship between two complimentary aspects of social process (identification) and its product (identity)

5. Race
A category of people thought to be biologically similar to each other, and different from other races
due to shared descent from people of a particular region
Race, like ethnicity may be determined by the person, or by others

6. Race
We tend to think of “race” as being more biological, unchangeable, and real
BUT, anthropologists have shown our categories of race are arbitrary cultural constructs they are not “out there” in the biological world

7. Problem with race
far more variation within the groups than between the groups
94% of all human variation is found within any given "race”
“due to its operational ambiguity, arbitrariness, artificiality, and erroneous assumptions, the concept declined in usage.”

8. Franz Boas
showed that race, culture, and language actually had nothing to do with one another—but the idea of the nation assumes that they do

9. Imagined but not Imaginary
Race is a product of social and historical processes
But, “Racism is not only an ideology, discourse, or set of attitudes; it is a system of material relations with ideas, meanings, and sentiments embedded in those relations.”

10. Faye Harrison
Concept of race has gone in and out of anthropological focus
Ashley Montagu (1942) – jettisoned notion of race and embraced culture-centered concepts of “ethnicity”
1990s – re-emerged
Ethnicity and race indistinguishable

11. History of Race
The idea emerged in the historically specific context of Western colonial expansion and world capitalist development
Not a trans-historical phenomenon existing in all societies and cultures at all times

12. Eric Wolf 1982 – Europe and the People Without History
Racial categories “mirror” the political processes that alienated populations of whole continents from their lands and transformed them into a supply of coerced labor

13. Race in Contemporary Times
Race interacts with and intersects with other axes of difference, namely, class, nationality, ethnicity, and gender
Not limited to social orders structured around the immediate dominance of the “whites”
Ferguson, Missouri, Niqab question, immigration

14. New discourses and practices of racial politics
“less stable and more contradictory, ranging in visibility from subtle, hidden subtexts to flagrant acts of hate speech and genocidal violence”
Racialization, or the social processes that give rise to new racial identities or the transformation of the old ones

15. Global Apartheid
Global Apartheid – to characterize the widening gap in power, wealth, life expectancy in different parts of the world that follows racial and historical lines

16. Structural Violence
Symbolic, psychological, and physical violations emanating from situations and institutional configurations structured in dominance
For example, among poor Puerto Rican immigrants and crack dealers in El Barrio