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lucern -> RE: There isn't such a thing as 'races' in humanity. (8/9/2007 3:02:11 AM)
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Late reply, had to take a break from wasting too much time yesterday:
quote:
ORIGINAL: seeksfemslave
Lucern: Does that whacking long post above include.......
Its OK to define race using social/physical/cultural /intellectual markers ?
Not really sure, my eyes glazed over and my mind boggled lol
Not paying attention eh? Where's my ruler? No, I get that near-professional explanations use near-professional levels of stuffiness. I'll open a window.
Let me divide this up. The astute will notice a pattern, nonetheless.
It's OK to define race using social markers? Reinterpreting social markers as social interactions, so long as one lets society do the defining, and understand race as per "race is real" #1 from that post, yes, it's in fact necessary to take this into account to appreciate race in its social context.
It's OK to define race using physical markers? If I'm studying you as part of a population, you can bet I'll pay attention to which physical markers you intend to use in your constructions of race. In the book I'm finishing today, Philipe Bourgois' In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, he does just this, noting that a particular Puerto Rican informant both hated African Americans as well as Puerto Ricans with afros. The presence of an afro, for him, was an African trait that made these Puerto Ricans black in his eyes. It is a necessary component of looking at how someone views race. This is not to be confused with defining race by physical markers yourself, per se.
It's OK to define race using cultural markers? As above, so long as the group you are observing are using cultural markers to form racial precepts, it's necessary to document their use of race as such.
It's OK to define race using intellectual markers? I haven't actually seen this outside of pseudoscientific endeavors to establish race by means as diverse as craniometry and standardized tests, but yeah if they're doing this, it's important to note.
It doesn't matter if they're determining race astrologically, or by the roll of a 20-sided die. If they're determining race, we have an obligation to understand how they're doing so (among so many other things). In short, for analysts, theorists, and critical thinkers about race, it is NOT okay to define it yourself along those lines. It becomes necessary to understand race as it is used. Once you know what a particular racial idea is, then you can ask more important and interesting questions, like how far a racial idea travels, who uses it and in what contexts do they use it, and most importantly, what impact the use of race has, whether it's social, economic, or political (or all of the above and more).
This kind of research of course always fails to reify grand theories of race. If race constructed in myriad ways, that raises questions about "Race is real" #2 from my post, doesn't it?
By the way, about the Mbuti. I'm not a specialist on indigenous peoples, but what group of people has stayed the same even in the past 100 years? How would that be possible? Is it an archaic anthropology that assumes that cultures are inherently stable, only changing from the outside contact with cultural outsiders. Doubts about this began to surface in the 40's and 50's. People were getting called out on it during the 1970's. There is a very long and boring social theory that dominated the discipline that lead people to assume stasis was the norm. Suffice to say, there is good reason why this paradigm ended. I'm threatening, here and now, to share this snoozer of a theory in full detail if you people don't drop it. Nah, I'm just kidding. It's called functionalism and/or structural functionalism. Hardly worth the google though.
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