Introduction To Cultural Anthropology - Lecture Notes 6-7

Chapter 6: Language (153) *Chapter 4 I. What does “Ethnicity” Mean to Anthropologists? A. There is a lack of clarity for the terms nation, nationalism, and nation-state all which often blur together and at times seem indistinguishable from ethnicity. 1. Ethnicity as identity a) Ethnicity is one of the most powerful identities that humans develop: as a sense of connection to a group of people who we believe share a common history, culture, and (sometimes) ancestry. (1) We build a sense of relationship, belonging, and shared identity through connection to family, religion, hometown, language, share history, citizenship, sports, age, gender, sexuality, education, and profession. (2) One of the strongest sources of solidarity 2. Creating Ethnic identity (157) a) Anthropologist ethnicity as a cultural construction, not as a natural formation based on biology or inherent human nature. (1) Origin myth a story told about the founding and history of a particular group to reinforce a sense of common identity. (2) Ethnic boundary markers a practice or belief, such as food, clothing, language, shared name, or religion, used to signify who is in a group and who is not. (3) Genocide the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic or religious group. (a) Because ethnicity is not biologically fixed, selfidentification with a particular ethnic group can change according to one’s social location. (4) Situational negotiation of identity an individual’s selfidentification with a particular group that shifts according to social location. (a) Example: Choosing to identify with another social location. Mexican-American. (5) Constructing Indian Identity in the United States (159) (a) Immigration experience affects ethnicity and ethnic identification. (b) Immigrants reshape their home-country ethnic identification to build alliances and solidarity in their new host country. (c) Ethnic boundaries are often fluid, messy, and contested. (i) South Asian Lesbian Gay Alliance (SALGA) has been denied permission to march in the Indian Parade. II. How is Ethnicity Created and Put in Motion? (161) A. 1. Ethnicity as a source of conflict a) Study of ethnicity requires an open-mindedness to new ideas of how ethnicity is formed and how it works. b) Ethnicity involves many perspectives, disagreements, and at times competing for loyalties. c) Ethnicity may not be a problem by itself, instead the struggle for wealth and power uses the convenient narrative of ethnicity to galvanize a population and used to achieve power. 2. Mobilizing Ethnic Differences in Rwanda a) Hutu and Tutsi lived together shared a common language. b) They were distinguished by occupation and social status. Hutu were primarily farmers while Tutsis were cattle owners. c) Through a flawed study based on the pseudoscience of eugenics (Chapter 5) d) This resulted in a mass genocide. 3. Orchestrating Ethnic Conflict in the former Yugoslavia a) The war began in 1992 among Catholic Croats, Orthodox Christian Serbs, and Bosnian Muslims as national political leaders scrambled for control over land and power. b) Ethnic cleansing efforts by the representative of one ethnic or religious group to remove3 or destroy another group in a particular geographic area. B. Ethnicity as a source of opportunity 1. Ethnicity is not only mobilized to rally support in times of conflict. 2. Today ethnicity is being packaged and produced for a multibillion-dollar market: food, clothing, music, fashion, and cultural artifacts. a) Bafokeng, Inc.m in South Africa. C. Ethnic Interaction in the United States: Assimilation versus multiculturalism 1. The United States is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world: immigration from various regions in Europe, the importation of African slaves, and the conquest of Native American peoples. 2. The diverse population has experienced extremely different paths to incorporation into U.S culture. a) A melting pot is a metaphor to describe the standard path into U.S culture. b) Assimilation the process through which minorities accept the patterns and norms of the dominant culture and cease to exist as separate groups. 3. As s result of new languages, cultures, and religious practices have been III. transformed into ethnic whites through marriage, work, education, and the use of English. 4. The melting pot has never been completely successful in the United States because of intense rivalries and violence. 5. Immigrants and their children are creating new ethnic identities and new ways of becoming American. a) Multiculturalism refers to the process through which new immigrants and their children enculturated into the dominant national culture and yet retain an ethnic culture. What is the relationship of Ethnicity to the Nation? (169) A. States regional structures of political, economic, and military rule. B. Nation-state a political entity, located within a geographic territory with endorsed border, where the population shares a sense of culture ancestry, and destiny as a people. C. Nation a term once used to describe a group of people who shared a place of origin; not used interchangeably with the nation-state. D. Nationalism the desire of an ethnic community to create and/or maintain nationstate. 1. Imagined communities and invented tradition a) Imagined community the invented sense of connection and shared traditions that underlie identification with a particular ethnic group or nation whose members likely will never all meet. b) Over the past two hundred years, people have shifted their primary association and identification from family, village, town, and city to an almost universal identification with a nation or the desire to create a nation. c) Studies reveal most ethnic groups and nations are recent historical creations, our connection to people within these groups recently imagined, and our shared tradition recently invented. d) As people shared communication and information through newspapers and books published in a common language, Anderson suggests, they began to define themselves to imagine themselves as part of the same nation, the same community. e) Another view suggests nations are not ancient configurations but instead are recent construction with invented traditions. (1) For example, we imagine the French nation-state to have a deep and unitary history, but prior to the 1800s the French were a scattered collection of urban and rural people who spoke different languages, celebrated different holidays and festivals, practiced different religions, and held primary loyalty not to the French state but to their city, town, village, or extended family. f) New education system introduced a standard national language. g) Second, the construction of an extensive network of roads and railways integrated rural areas into a national market economy. 2. Anti Colonialism and Nationalism a) Efforts to imagine a national identity among a diverse group of people gains strength through the need-perceived or real- to join together against the threat of a common enemy. b) Outsides-”others; who do not belong to the group may be stereotyped along lines of religion, race, language, ethnicity, or political beliefs. c) War is the most dramatic strategy for evoking nationalism and mobilizing a population for the project of nation-building. d) The territorial boundaries created by European colonial powers ignored local realities in favor of colonial economic and political interests. 3. The challenges of developing a sense of nationhood (172) a) A case study from Iraq that will expand your understanding of nation, nationalism, nation-building, and the modern nation-state. (1) Are there any Iraqis in Iraq? (a) Ethnic violence among Sunni, Shia, and Kurdsviolence that the media portrays as the true obstacle to democracy and peace. Chapter 5: Race and Racism *Chapter 5 I. How is Race constructed around the World? A. Racial categories are human constructs; they are not found in nature. 1. Race and the legacy of Colonialism a) Global expressions of race and racism are deeply rooted in the systems of classification that western Europeans created as they expanded their colonial empires into Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas. b) Colonialism: is the centerpiece of European global economic activity, combining economic, military, and political control of people and places to fuel Europe’s economic expansion and enhance the European position in the emerging global economy. c) The classification of people based on phenotype create a hierarchy of races-with Europeans at the top. (1) Traits such as intelligence, physical abilities, capacity for culture, and basic worth are linked with this classification. (2) This framework was used to justify colonial conquests, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the eradication of the indigenous population of the Americas. d) Anthropologists often refers to “racisms” in the plural, reflecting the variety of ways race has been constructed among people in different places. e) After World_war II, colonial-era racisms shifted as national liberation movements struggled to end occupations by foreign powers. (1) In today’s global world, flexible accumulations produce new relationships between corporations and workers; the migration of workers within countries and across national borders yields new racial formations. (2) Racisms today, though rooted in similar historic realities are shifting as they intersect with other systems of power, whether those are ethnicity, gender, sexuality, kinship, or class. (a) Race, Class, and Gender, and Hundreds of Races in Brazil (i) US and Brazil are the two largest multiracial countries in the Western Hemisphere. (ii) Miscegenation: A demeaning historical term for interracial marriage. (iii) Race intersects closely with class, including land ownership, wealth, and education. (social status). II. How is Race constructed in the United States? A. Race is perhaps the most significant means used to mark differences in U.S culture. It can be found on census forms, school applications, and birth certificates, as well in media and casual conversation. 1. Race and the U.S Census a) Information is recorded every 10 years. (1) 1850’s only options were White, Black and Mulatto (mixed). (2) 1870’s options included White, Black, Mulatto, Chinese, and Indian (Native Americans). (3) Respondents did not identify their own race, instead, census workers assigned them to a racial category based on their appearance. (4) 1940’s options included White, Negro, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, and Korean. (5) 2010’s included 4 separate “race” boxes and allowed people to check one or all. 2. History of U.S racial categories: constructing Whiteness a) American colonial life was built on the importation of indentured workers from Europe and slaves from Africa, along with the expropriation of land from Native Americans. b) White Supremacy: the belief that whites are biologically different from and superior to people of other races. (1) Intelligence differed and nonwhites believed to be not fully human in a spiritual sense. (2) Whiteness: A culturally constructed concept originating in 1691. Virginia designed to establish clear boundaries of who is white and who is not, a process central to the formation of U.S racial stratification. (3) Jim Crow: Laws implemented after the U.S Civil War to legally enforce segregation, particularly in the South, after the end of slavery.