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As Ruth Frankenberg in her book The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters argues, our daily lives are affected by race whether we are aware of it or not. We all see the world through a racial lens that colors our world black, white, Asian, Mexican, minority, or “other”. How we are seen and how we see others affects various domains of our lives and the lives of others; from the types of jobs we have, the amount of money we make, the kind of friends we make, the places we live, the foods we eat, the schools we go to, etc… The entire social structure we inhabit is affected by at least one social construction, race. Interestingly, most people in the United States (which consist of people of color) are aware of this, but have not dismantled it. Why is that?

Often times the word social construct is thrown around in various theoretical and general works without ever being defined or discussed. However, understanding what is meant by race as a social construct is vital to understanding the capacity race has to intersect and affect other aspects and domains of life and society, as well as how to dismantle it.

To begin, a social construct is ontologically subjective, but epistemologically objective. It is ontologically subjective in that the construction and continued existence of social constructs are contingent on social groups and their collective agreement, imposition, and acceptance of such constructions (for more on the notion of social constructions see The Construction of Social Reality by John Searle). There is nothing absolute or real about social constructions in the same way as there is something absolute and real about rocks, rivers, mountains, and in general the objects examined by physics. For example, the existence of a mountain is not contingent on collective acceptance, imposition, or agreement. A mountain will exist regardless of people thinking, agreeing or accepting that it does exist. Unlike a mountain, the existence of race requires that people collectively agree and accept that it does exist. Franz Boas, a physicist by training, supports this view of race best in his work Race, Language, and Culture where he observes that there is nothing biologically real about race. There is nothing that we have identified as race that exists apart from our collective agreement, acceptance, and imposition of its existence.

Race, although it does not exist in the world in any ontologically objective way, it still is real in society (as opposed to nature). Race is a social construction that has real consequences and effects. These effects, consequences and the notion that race is ontologically subjective is epistemologically objective. We know that race is something that is real in society, and that it shapes the way we see ourselves and others. Many rightly claim that race is conceptually unstable. However, this should not lead us to skepticism about race, i.e. that we cannot have any objective knowledge about race. We can know what race is and how it works regardless of the various shifts in meaning that have occurred through history and occur geographically.

The notion of race as a social construct I am proposing is partially captured by various works. In Takaki’s work A Different Mirror: A history of Multicultural America, race is a social construct produced by the dominant group in society and their power to define. In other words, the dominant group in society imposed the boundaries of group membership by defining race in terms of biology. If you were black, then you were biologically inferior to a white person. Takaki explains that Africans in America were first brought to America as indentured servants. After completing the terms of their servitude they were freed, and had the status of free men. The color line at the time had not been drawn. Nonetheless, with the growing population of free Africans in America, fear of losing hegemonic control began to spread through the white population. Due to this, race as a biological concept was developed and used to justify the enslavement of a growing free black population early in U.S. history. This initial biological understanding of race helped draw the color line. The boundaries of group membership were marked by skin color. Till this day the primary race indicator is skin color.

Frankenberg in her work The Social Construction of Whiteness expands on what race indicators and hence race identify today. She simply explains that race is an indicator of difference, but an indicator of what kind of difference she does not say. As we have seen through Boas’s work, there are no biological differences between different “races”. Additionally, race does not identify differences in culture and is always loosely connected to biology. According to Frankenberg culture is unbounded. We cannot conclusively say on the basis of skin color that someone participates in white, or black cultural practices (although many people still do). This notion of unbounded cultural practices is exemplified in Gary Taylor’s piece White Noise: What Eminem Can Tell Us About White America, where he describes a white man (Eminem) in the hip-hop culture. George Lipsitz in his work Lean on Me: Beyond Identity Politics also discusses how Joe Clark, a black man, engages in a form of racism that perpetuates white privilege and supremacy.

Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s work White Negroes, suggests that the difference Frankenberg speaks of is one of status. The meaning of race developed so far with Takaki, Boas, Frankenberg and now Pieterse suggests that race is a marker of status that includes or excludes one from broader social constructs and enables or disables certain powers. Race typically works through race indicators which are used to indicate which race you are, and consequently what sort of status you have in society, e.g. in President Jefferson’s time race indicated a status of slave or slave master. Since race and race indicators are collectively imposed and defined by the dominant group, so is one’s status. Additionally, since race is a social construct and is ontologically subjective, it continues to work only in virtue of collective agreement and acceptance. Many people may object that they are not part of the collective agreement and acceptance I am describing. Nonetheless, as Frankenberg discusses and admits she herself is evidence of, white people are often blind to racism and do not see the privileges they have due to their skin color. Regardless of white people being anti-racist, they participate within a racialized society which privileges them. As Frantz Fanon described in his book Black Skin, White Masks, many individuals may claim they are not racist while tacitly accept the dominant racist ideology by way of reaping the benefits coffered to them.

Let us summarize what we have said about what race is so far. First, race is a social construct contingent on collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition. Second, race has always been defined by the dominant group in society. Third, race indicates differences in status. The status indicated by which race you are, either includes or excludes one from broader social constructs, and disables or enables certain powers. To illustrate how this sort of understanding of race works let us look at the United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind case of 1923 and the United States v. Takao Ozawa case of 1922.

Thind, an Indian American man, filed for citizenship in the U.S. in 1923, and was denied on the basis of his not being white. The U.S. Supreme court found that while Indians were anthropologically categorized as Caucasian, the “understanding of the common man”, wrote Justice George Sutherland, “knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences”. Hence, despite being Caucasian, what many in the past (and almost everyone today) believed to be white, Thind was denied his status as white. The effects of the Supreme Court’s ruling retroactively affected all Indians who had already been granted citizenship. In the Takao Ozawa case in 1922, Takao argued that based on scientific evidence, he was white. Nonetheless, Justice Sutherland argued that he was not Caucasian, and hence could not be white, and consequently denied his citizenship. The rulings denying Takao and Thind’s citizenship strengthened anti-Asian sentiment.

The above cases demonstrate a profound kind of contradiction. The cases demonstrate a contradiction that was overlooked regardless of how obvious it was. Thind was not granted citizenship because he was not white, regardless of being Caucasian, and Ozawa was denied citizenship for not being Caucasian, despite being white. What allowed for this contradictory position to be maintained was the Supreme Court’s dominant status. The power Takaki describes is evident in the courts ruling. The common “white” man, and his status as dominant, allowed him to define the parameters of race, despite contradictions. As a result, Thind and Ozawa were excluded. By being excluded, by way of being denied citizenship, all the various powers enabled by the status of U.S. Citizen were disabled. Such powers included the right to vote, run for political office, and various other legal powers. In addition, other powers that are not as codified or legal, such as access to work unions, certain academic institutions, and certain neighborhoods were also disabled. The effects of the Supreme Court’s ruling trickled down and strengthened racist immigration policies, e.g. the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, as well as affecting the lives of people of color in general.

The above contradiction points out how racist thinking has little to do with skin color, and much to do with status, power and fear. Roediger’s work Working Towards Whiteness exemplifies this point by showing how new immigrants, initially identified as “not white” but with an in-between status (regardless of having white skin), gained a new status (of white) and consequently- power. As we can see from the above cases and analysis, race is consistently utilized to maintain and control power due to fear of losing power and the current dominant position. Oddly enough, the ideology of white supremacy is inspired and maintained due to fear.

W.E.B. Du Bois in his work The Souls of White Folk questioned what it is about whiteness, that enables white men to commit crimes and not be condemned. In other words, he questioned why in virtue of being white, does a person have certain powers. With the analysis we have developed so far, we can answer Du Bois’s question. The answer is there is nothing inherent or intrinsic about white skin that enables white men to commit crimes and not be condemned. What enables white men to do so, is the structure of society in which they live. As we have seen, there is nothing ontologically objective about race and intrinsic or inherent in white skin that makes white people dominant. If there was, race would not be as fluid and unstable, and Thind or Ozawa would have been granted citizenship. Race and status are defined by the dominant group in society politically, economically, socio-culturally, and historically. The process of defining is made possible due to collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition. Additionally, the definition produced by the dominant group in society is constituted by collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition.

Frantz Fanon and his notion of socio-therapy, as developed in Black Skin, White Masks, advises that in order for racism to cease, society must abandon the notion of race. Fanon believed that only after society had realized that race is not real, would it overcome racism. Fanon is logically correct in assuming that racism will end when we no longer see through a racial lens, yet he is wrong in assuming that race is not real and that removing the lens is possible. To illustrate how he is wrong, take for instance Russell Simmons’ position towards homophobia and sexism in hip-hop. Simmons’ position is similar to Fanons. Simmons believes that by eliminating the words “nigger”, “bitch”, and “hoe” from hip-hop, it will solve the problem of homophobia and sexism within hip-hop culture. This is obviously misdirected because it simply evades the root of the problem. Frankenberg’s notion of power-evasive racist discourse can directly critique both Simmons and Fanon.

Thus far, I have repeatedly said that social constructs are contingent on collective acceptance, agreement, and imposition. It seems only natural to suppose that race will disappear altogether, as Fanon had hoped, once society stops collectively agreeing, accepting, and continuously imposing the notion of race. Nonetheless, this is a naïve supposition. Racism is engrained not only in the minds of people, but in the structure of society itself. Our legal system, our prison system, our educational system, our housing system, and various other aspects of society are all racialized. Take for example, Roediger’s assessment of the housing market after the Federal Housing Act in the 1930’s. Roediger shows how even capitalism–a layer in the foundation of U.S. democracy–is racialized by showing that the value of neighborhoods decreased and increased according to how it was racially organized. The more black people lived in a neighborhood the more the value of homes in that neighborhood would decrease. Abandoning the notion of race is not the solution to racism and white privilege. No matter how much we may attempt to make our legal language and documents racially neutral, race will always remain in the minds of people. Frankenberg’s notion of race cognizance seems to be a more viable and productive option. At the least, we have to come to terms with race, not abandon it but be aware of it, and understand it. Nonetheless, the general idea expressed in Fanon’s notion of socio-therapy (change society to cure the patient) seems to be correct. However, the change is not the abandonment of race, but instead a paradigm shift, or a revolution in the way race and differences are understood.

Emanuel Lusca recently contacted wishing to guest blog here at Anthropology.net. As a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, double majoring in anthropology and philosophy, I think Emanuel will fill some gaps in my lack of coverage of cultural anthropology topics… so I’m really excited to have him on board.

In his email, he explained that his anthropological interests are wide spread, stemming from his belief that anthropology is a self-reflexive exercise that aims to understand and explore oneself through the “other.’ He’s particularly interested n the intersection of ontology and epistemology in terms of the law, science, language and power. He told me he’s heavily influenced by thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Laura Nader, Bruno Latour, and others.

Currently, as a result of his religious upbringing, he is exploring the possibility of multiple understandings and lived realities in a shared world and the resulting ontological consequences and reconfiguration of power. He is applying to doctoral programs in cultural anthropology. And, the underlying question he is grappling with is how it is possible that demons be ontologically objective for a believer, and ontologically subjective for the theorist?

I welcome Emanuel to Anthropology.net, and hope you do as well!

About a week ago, I read and posted on a summary piece on cultural evolution research in PLoS Biology. The reviewer introduced me to Simon Kirby‘s work, which I found remarkable. Kirby and colleagues setup an experiment, one that observed the evolution of an artificial language from a set of random terms to an ordered, naturally adapting system in ways that assured its reproduction.

I didn’t know when Kirby was to publish his work, but lo and behold in this week’s issue of PNAS, I saw “Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language,” by Simon Kirby, Hannah Cornish, and Kenny Smith. The experiment involved showing subjects illustrations that were associated with nonsense words.

The subjects were asked to play a game of Memory, by trying to recall the terms with the illustrations. Regardless of the accuracy of their recollections, the associated terms were used as a foundation of the group’s subsequent language training. This was done over and over, and low and behold, detectable patterns began emerging. Terms began to be used to describe whether an illustration pictured horizontal movement or a bouncing object. The following graphs document the transmission error and measure of structure over each generation:

Transmission Error & Measure of Structure versus the Number of Generations

Clearly there’s some pattern forming. But, Kirby and team understood that these emerging languages were simplistic and limited. So the team switched it up a bit, and discarded duplicate words. This represented a sort of selection, which gave structure and allowed the language to be remembered. Throughout 10 generations, the grammar of laboratory language went from meaningless, ad-hoc bunch of words into an expressive mode of communication. The speakers didn’t change, it was the change in the meanings behind the terms. The following graphs document the transmission error and measure of structure over each generation with selection:

Transmission Error & Measure of Structure versus Number of Generations with Selection

So how did the subjects screen out their own linguistic predispositions? Most humans are exposed to at least one language, which would clearly bias them and affect their abilities to give structure to a set of gibberish. In other words, the ‘selection’ applied could have been favoring structures that matched existing languages.

Kirby said that’s not really a concern, because that languages that emerged in his experiments do not have much in common with the extant languages. And since the emerging languages resembled those from computer models, which did not have preexisting languages to muddle up the waters, then we’re not to worry. Kirby concludes that the,

“The best explanation for our results is the cultural system ‘discovering’ adaptations for all aspects of the transmission bottleneck rather than merely mirroring the native language of our participants.”

Kirby, S., Cornish, H., Smith, K. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707835105

Language is a product of culture. Or is it? Which came first — language or culture? That’s like asking if the chicken or the egg came first. But cultural behavior has been documented in animals who do not have language systems, like gorillas who have intricate systems of processing plants. Richard Byrne summarized this behavior,

“Gorillas do not make tools in the wild… but several of their food-processing skills consist of highly structured, multi-stage sequences of bimanual action, hierarchically organized and flexibly adjusted to plants of highly specific local distribution and these abilities are near-ubiquitous among the local population. In terms of intricate complexity, gorilla plant-processing actually exceeds anything yet described in chimpanzees, unless tool-use per se is taken to be intrinsically more complex than non-tool-use. Gorilla, like Pan and Pongo, apparently sometimes relies for its survival on elaborate, deft and intricate feeding skills that are highly unlikely ever to be discovered by a solitary individual.”

This example is just one of many. It documents that culture can be created, persist and change without language. It does so through mimicking and augmentation. So it is generally assumed that culture came first, and language emerged as a system of formalized symbols, sounds, gestures used a means of communicating culture.

Why am I mentioning this at all? Well, we’ve seen, read and reviewed a couple of recent studies investigating cultural evolution and patterns in linguistic diversity. Most notably is the paper by Atkinson et al., where Simon and team showed that language evolves in bursts. Additionally, Deborah Rogers and Paul Ehrlich showed that cultural things have functional and symbolic elements, the former of which is under naturally selective pressures.

Despite these advances, there are some who still think that culture and everything related with culture is nothing but noise. I don’t know where they get this idea from. Even John Herschel and Charles Darwin understood that extant ‘languages descended from a common ancestor,’ and, ‘the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.’ This observation was made before the publication of The Voyage of the Beagle and without a doubt helped lay the framework for the theory of evolution. The irony is that these vocal objections come from someone who specializes in studying material culture.

Anyways, I digress. John Whitfield, a science writer and blogger behind El Gentraso, has published a feature in the latest issue of the open access journal PLoS Biology where he summarizes “… the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution.” As anthropologists, we should appreciate the remarkable tangents between the dynamics of linguistic change and biological evolution. Because of these similarities, it is possible to use tools and frameworks used in studying biological evolution to study how language changes… even how cultures evolve. Furthermore, it is very possible that we may soon see a synthesis of theories, one that folds in both both biological and cultural evolution.

Whitfield summarizes research by Simon Kirby, which I didn’t know about but find fascinating.

“Kirby has asked subjects to learn a nonsense language and then teach it to new subjects, and so on. He found that the randomness quickly became regularized, as people unconsciously shaped words into something easier to remember and use, and devised rules to come up with words for things they hadn’t seen. Such a process may be at work in the spontaneous emergence over the past few decades of two sign languages—Nicaraguan Sign Language and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. Each of these has moved rapidly from a system of gestures to a fully fledged language with conventions for grammar and sentence structure. Kirby plans to use them as a test bed for his ideas about how structure in language can rapidly emerge.”

In the piece, Whitfield also got to ask Mark Pagel‘s what his thoughts are with synthesizing ‘the two’. Pagel is an evolutionary biologist. He was one of the coauthors of the paper with Simon Greenhill and Atkinson. He’s also published an earlier paper with Atkinson titled, “Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history.” Pagel responded saying,

“Languages are extraordinarily like genomes. We think there could be very general laws of lexical evolution to rival those of genetic evolution.”

Alex Mesoudi agrees. He told Whitfield,

“If there’s a model system for cultural evolution, then probably the people working on language have got it, because there’s so much data… Cultural change and biological change share the same fundamental properties of variation, selection and inheritance.”

William Croft is a bit more cautious but also understands that,

“these are two different instantiations of a general theory of evolutionary change. These are early days, but such a theory will give us insights that you can’t get just by looking at one domain.”

So what do you think — is it possible to synthesize the two? Or do they exist as two inherently different entities that change under different conditions?

Oh, you may also be interested in this related video discussion between Paul Ehrlich and Carl Zimmer — where Ehrlich advocates that cultural evolution needs its own theoretical framework aside from evolutionary biology. Strange proposition, especially because he used a natural selection framework in his latest PNAS paper.

Pagel, M., Atkinson, Q.D., Meade, A. (2007). Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history. Nature, 449(7163), 717-720. DOI: 10.1038/nature06176

Byrne, R.W. (2007). Culture in great apes: using intricate complexity in feeding skills to trace the evolutionary origin of human technical prowess. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1480), 577-585. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2006.1996

Whitfield, J. (2008). Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution. PLoS Biology, 6(7), e186. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060186

I stumbled upon this list of 10 ‘extraordinary’ burial ceremonies that I want to pass onto you. Since we’re a anthropology focused community, it is very possible that you’ve heard of most of these rituals. I knew of several of them, but learned some new things as well.

The following are ones I found particularly noteworthy:

1. Air Sacrifice – Mongolia
   The lama, the spiritual leader of the community is,

   “the only one allowed to touch the corpse, and a white silk veil is placed over the face. The naked body is flanked by men on the right side of the yurt while women are placed on the left. Both have their respective right or left hand placed under their heads, and are situated in the fetal position…

   …The body is taken away from the village and laid on the open ground. A stone outline is placed around it, and then the village dogs that have been penned up and not fed for days are released to consume the remains. What is left goes to the local predators.

   The stone outline remains as a reminder of the person. If any step of the ceremony is left out, no matter how trivial, bad karma is believed to ensue.”

2. Sky Burial – Tibet
   

   “The deceased is dismembered by a rogyapa, or body breaker, and left outside away from any occupied dwellings to be consumed by nature…

   …The ceremony represents the perfect Buddhist act, known as Jhator. The worthless body provides sustenance to the birds of prey that are the primary consumers of its flesh.”

3. Pit Burial – Pacific Northwest Haida
   The Haida of the American northwest coast,

   “…Simply cast their dead into a large open pit behind the village.

   Their flesh was left to the animals. But if one was a chief, shaman, or warrior, things were quite different.

   The body was crushed with clubs until it fit into a small wooden box about the size of a piece of modern luggage. It was then fitted atop a totem pole in front of the longhouse of the man’s tribe where the various icons of the totem acted as guardians for the spirits’ journey to the next world.”

4. Predator Burial – Maasai Tribe
   The Maasai of East Africa, perform traditional burials but are reserved for only chief.

   “The common people are simply left outdoors for predators to dispose of, since Maasai believe dead bodies are harmful to the earth.”

5. Skull Burial – Kiribati
   The inhabitants of the tiny island Kiribati, in the South Pacific, lay out the dead in the house for as long as twelve days, they then bury the dead.

   “Several months after internment the body is exhumed and the skull removed, oiled, polished, and offered tobacco and food. After the remainder of the body is re-interred, traditional islanders keep the skull on a shelf in their home and believe the native god Nakaa welcomes the dead person’s spirit in the northern end of the islands.”

Clearly, there’s a theme to the ones I found interesting. I’m very curious to with how others view the body as a vessel. In contrast to many Judeo-Christian burials, these ones I’ve outlined don’t adorn their dead with fancy gravestones and a $6,000 coffin. Instead, they believe the body should be returned into the ecosystem.

Some of the commenters in the original post added some more interesting burial practices not mentioned, such as the Hanging Coffins in the Philipines. I’ve got one to add that is similar with the ones I plucked from the Brave New Traveler post, the Zoroastrian burial rites.

Being Iranian, Zoroastrian culture is pretty deeply engrained. I’ve known for sometime that Zoroastrian people used to present the corpse to a dog, preferably a dog with a spot above each eye which is thought to have increased the efficacy of its gaze. This ritual is repeated five times a day. Since Zoroastrian religion revolves around light and fire, after the first rite, a fire is brought into the room and is kept burning until three days after the removal of the corpse to the Tower of Silence during daytime.

The Tower of Silence is composed of three areas, one for men, women, and children respectively. The corpses are exposed there naked and presented to vultures. Once the vultures do their thing, the remains are dried by the sun and then are buried into the central well.

I’m very curious to know the origin of this ritual, because of the remarkable similarity between the Mongolian and Tibetan practices. As you know the Mongols control Persia and Tibet for quite sometime, where I suspect these practices were exchanged, amongst other memes.

Do you have any interesting burial practices to share with us?

Introduction

Before I dive into the concept of race, I just want to thank Kambiz for this opportunity to broaden not only my perspectives but everyone else’s as well. I am very excited to discuss subjects that interest me and make people think critically about culture and society. I am looking forward to this personal challenge to hold my own writing with an anthropological community. I humbly thank you all in advance!

Historical Context

All the history books that I have read suggest that race was first recognized when the Europeans came over to America and saw the Native Americans. But what did the Europeans think of the peoples on their trade routes? What was different about the Native Americans that sparked a racial hierarchy to begin? Or is it our history books that are flawed due to being written by either by Americans or Europeans and are therefore biased?

The main concern of the Europeans was religion and how people of different colors fit into that scheme. Were they also “Children of God or soulless creatures that needed to be saved? The discussion of the “conversion” of “savages” is an entirely different bag of issues, so to speak. But this is, nevertheless, the beginning of the mistreatment of people for their skin color…in theory.

Definition

The definitions that I am referencing are from “The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality” with Tracey E. Ore describing race as “a group of people who perceive themselves and are perceived by others as possessing distinctive hereditary traits.” Whereas ethnicity would be “having cultural traits such as language, religion, family customs, and food preferences.” I state the definition of ethnicity because the two can be confused with one another but they can also be intertwined.

Reason for Race, Not Justification

It is human nature to categorize things to make our reality more palatable. Also, it is a coping mechanism for status. Something as simple as the color of one’s skin can denote their position in a hierarchy and can save a conversation. One does not have to talk to someone to figure out their status if they can just look at them and know according to their skin color, hypothetically speaking. Now, I am not saying we all do this, but realize that ingrained within each one of us is our culture that society has presented to us since birth. I believe, no matter who you are looking at, you will make some sort of assumption or employ some sort of stereotype to that person. This may include race but more importantly hierarchy or status judgment.

Construction through Society

Race is a very dynamic human category. It is not the same anywhere at any given time due to the different constructs set up within a society and the personal translation of that construct. The construction is solely based upon the “recipe” for race throughout the society’s history. In America, race started out by the decision of whether or not the peoples of darker skin were animals or men. That is a pretty intense construct to break out of after years of this type of thinking and teaching! It has taken decades…no centuries to even come face to face with the equal rights issues because people are just stuck in society’s cultural mind of oppression!

Not only sociocultural factors are involved but a more “exact” science as well: biology. Scientists justified oppression due to skin color by coming up with biological factors that proved “they” were inferior to them. We have outgrown this phase (for the most part), though, which is relieving. There is still a commanding argument on whether or not biology has anything to do the color of skin of anyone. Yes, the color of skin varies but does it make someone biologically different to the point of them being inferior or superior?

Conclusion

The conception of race is truly in the eyes of the beholder. It depends on who is looking, judging, assuming and has little or nothing to do with biology but the history of a society that makes assumptions or stereotypes of people of darker skin to create a social hierarchy that is visible or easily identified. There is variation of skin colors depending on the region of one’s origin. But the emphasis put behind the skin is the creation of race. The emphasis that is put in place by a sociocultural system is where the interpretation and conception of race stems from. Race is just an idea and not a fact of inferiority.

I have brought up Paul Ehrlich a lot lately. And this morning Razib emailed me a link to an interview of Ehrlich by Carl Zimmer on Bloggingheads.tv, so I felt compelled to share the interview with you.

In the discussion, Zimmer and Ehrlich discuss Ehrlich’s new book, “The Dominant Animal, the ‘overrated idea of a meme,’ why the study of cultural evolution needs its own theoretical framework aside from evolutionary biology.

I’m particularly interested in the last topic, which comes in at the 20 minute mark, since Ehrlich coauthors links to natural selection in his latest PNAS paper but advocates that social scientists need to step up to the plate and explain why cultures have evolved. The most noteworthy remark Ehrlich makes on this topic is,

“The ball is really in the court of social scientists today. They’ve got to get reorganized and particularly get rid of their preposterous disciplinary boundaries. How can you possibly be a political scientists without knowing economics and sociology and vice versa.”

The two also talk about other selected topics on population growth and the nuances that come with it.

Cultural evolution has been a pretty active and heated topic in the anthropology blogosphere, especially between Martin, afarensis, and I. Afarensis continued the discussion today, returning to this topic but on the projectile point scope.

In some sort of weird coincidence, the professional press has also chimed in — not explicitly on projectile points, but on cultural evolution. I tip my hat to Simon Greenhill, who found these these two relevant pieces and posted about them in his blog HENRY. The first, a review on “Evolution in Archaeology,” by Stephen Shennan­ has been published in the Annual Review of Anthropology journal. The second, this column in Seed Magazine by Paul Ehrlich — who recently published a research paper in PNAS on cultural evolution, as well as a back and forth series of letters with a criticizer of his work.

Shennan is well versed in cultural evolution. He is one of the co-authors of a text titled, “The Evolution of Cultural Diversity: A Phylogenetic Approach.” In his Annual Review of Anthropology review, Shennan describes the history of how people have approached cultural evolution. He brings up the differences in the two analytical camps, ‘one centered on cultural transmission and dual inheritance theory and the other on human behavioral ecology,’ and how they have effected answering evolutionary questions with archaeological data. In summary, he effectively advocates that we need to find and agree on new, consistent ways of using archaeological data to answer evolutionary questions.

Ehrlich’s message starts out on a similar tone. In his second paragraph, he writes how we do not really “understand how cultures evolve.” He pays particular attention to the ambiguous nature of culture — something that “composed of overlapping phenomena from languages, religions, institutions, and socially transmitted power relationships to the information embodied in artifacts ranging from potsherds to jumbo jets,” and how it hard to extract patterns from all these varying sources that seem so bogged down with noise.

But Ehrlich ultimately reconsiles in that culture can be analyzed broadly, and under the same theoretical constraints that we analyze genetic evolution — so long as we through out that cultural evolution is progressive. His piece transitions into a summary of his recent research, but I still recommend you read it because it does a much better job with translating the science than I can, since he was one of the authors behind the piece.

Both are effective pieces in synthesizing evolutionary theory with the concept of culture. It is very problematic for one to discuss both or refute that culture doesn’t evolve without a strong understanding of the theoretical basis of evolution, selection, and change.

About 9 months ago, I shared some news of language extinction and the conservation efforts of K. David Harrison and David Anderson. My coverage was far from a thorough treatment of the subject, partially because I know little about the problem and the ways to remedy it. Fast forward to today, where I come across this video posted by Simon Greenhill on his blog HENRY.

The video is an interview of well spoken linguistic anthropologist K. David Harrison, by host Mark Molaro. In the video, David touches on many aspects, such as ownership of a language and what he considers ‘the greatest conservation challenge’ of humans. For anyone interested in the subject, I recommend you check out this 26 minute interview. Harrison integrates cultural issues as well as the importance of knowledge locked in unknown languages that can be useful to other disciplines such as botanists and zoologists.

Ownership of a language is a critical concept to understand. Speakers of widely spoken languages such as English, French, Chinese, Spanish, may not consider much ownership to their language. But to those who are one of the few speakers of a dying language, such as Chulym where only 30 or so speakers are alive, feel more attached to their language — it is something they identify with.

Harrison also outlines ‘the greatest conservation challenge’ of humans. See, every 2 weeks or so a language dies off. In contrast, species are going extinct at a much slower rate and yet a monumental conservation effort is put into saving this from happening. But studying, saving and/or curating languages aren’t given the same dedication as ecological or archaeological conservation. It is ironic that language, perhaps the most complex monument to human genius, has been ignored in our efforts to conserve the rest of the world.

Support is required from outside to conserve language, and with that a change in the ways we approach language is needed. Harrison suggests that while curating a language is critical to the conservation, understanding the folk taxonomy, a.k.a. the folksonomy, is also imperative. He brings up examples of different single word terms to refer to different reindeer in some Siberian languages. When translated, these single words unravel into elaborate, information packed phrases. He uses that to explain how often times there is a lot of local knowledge hidden lesser spoken language, that can span millennia. Harrison advocates that other researchers entertain the possibility that languages are an untapped resource for knowledge.

But to do that, a restructuring of how we consider discovery is needed. We, as academics, are largely stuck in this colonial paradigm of how discovery is approached. Many zoologists, botanists, even anthropologists and archaeologists discover new things without absorbing native knowledge. It is an awfully imperial way of looking about it, if Western culture doesn’t know about it the rest of the world never know about it! But who’s to say local peoples didn’t know about a certain plant or animal for ages prior to the “Western discovery”? We need people to acknowledge the vast body of knowledge out there, locked in indigenous, endangered languages.

Harrison wraps up his talk emphasizing how language is an infinite system, and I couldn’t agree with him more. He’s put particular consideration on local knowledge, but there is also a lot of knowledge that can be extracted from language — such as human migrations, which will have gaping holes if languages are allowed to erode at the rates they are now.

Thank you, Kambiz, for letting me introduce my new book to the Anthropology.net community.

The story behind The Genius of Kinship is an interesting one. In 1991, then a student of history at the St. Petersburg State University, I wrote a course paper on the traditional social organization of the Shoshone Indians as could be gleaned from ethnographies and trappers’ accounts. Why would a Russian student be interested in the Shoshone Indians is an entirely different story to be told on a different occasion. Let’s just say I was researching Shoshone Indians because they were not widely known in the Russian ethnological literature. My advisors apparently noticed my interest in pre-industrial social structures, and recommended that I explored Shoshone Indian kinship structure in greater detail next year. I poured over literature on kinship studies in Russian, French and English for a few months and then looked at Shoshone kinship again. I was struck by their logical consistency and by the fact that this elegant simplicity was not mentioned anywhere in the basic literature on kinship. Typical case studies came from Australia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, Sino-Tibetan languages, but not from North America.

I thought that was puzzling: kinship studies, as we all know, were founded in the mid-19th century by the American lawyer, Lewis Henry Morgan, on the basis on Iroquois and other North American Indian tribes/nations. The birth of kinship studies coincided with the birth of anthropology as a romantic quest for the origins of Western civilziation. But by the end of the 20th century American Indian kinship structures are nowhere that prominent. Possessed by a pioneer’s zeal, I ventured into kinship terminologies around the world and initially amassed a database of over a thousand kinship nomenclatures from many linguistic families. In 1997, I defended my research as a Ph.D. dissertation at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in St.Petersburg, and in 2001 I published it as a book entitled The Phenomenon of Kinship. Without a particular premeditation, I followed in Morgan’s early footsteps when he wrote The Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1870) and conceived of kinship terminologies as a source of information about ancient human population dispersals. (Morgan as a famous social evolutionist emerged with the publication of Ancient Society in 1877 when he attempted to explain the diversity of human kinship structures as a matter of stages in the progressive maturation of humankind.) Over and over again, I caught myself thinking that American Indian kinship structures are unique and can provide a missing link for the evolution of Old World kinship structures.

When I came to the U.S. in 1997 as a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at Stanford, I faced another puzzling irony of history: it’s not just American Indian kinship structures that have been eclipsed from the anthropological agenda, American anthropologists were not doing kinship studies at all. As Sylvia Yanagisako said upon learning about my Russian research, “But nobody does this stuff here anymore.” Truth be told, she herself was part of a “revival” of kinship studies in the U.S. in the late 1980s but more along the lines of gender, with “kinship” being scowled at as a spurious Victorian invention. For some inexplicable reason, she was sceptical of kinship systems, structures, lineages, and especially terminologies. Speaking to other feminist professors at Stanford’s Department of Anthropology (later Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology) such as Jane Collier and Carol Delaney, I couldn’t figure out where all the good old kinship studies went. Where were Lowie, Kroeber, Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, Fortes, Levi-Strauss, Dole, Murdock, Tax, Scheffler, Lounsbury, Dumont, Allen, Barnes, Trautmann, Tyler, Kronenfeld, componential analysis, generative analysis, equivalence-rule analysis and other proud representatives of the anthropological tribe? Yanagisako, Delaney and Collier all referred me back to David Schneider who allegedly “proved” that “kinship” was a malignant excresecence on the body of the discipline manifesting all the imaginable vices from racism and colonialism to the masculine bias.

It didn’t make much sense: coming out of a former Soviet country with all its anti-racism and anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism-with-its-severe-exploitation-of-women-and-children, I still felt okay about kinship. Of course, it’s a tough field, not for everyone, but anthropology and kinship are inseparable. You can critisize, develop new theories, change paradigms, but still groom the central concept of the discipline. That’s how I felt.

Across the Main Quad at Stanford, another group of American anthropologists was setting up a different anthropology department called “Anthropological Sciences.” Jim Fox was teaching anthropological linguistics, Joanna Mountain population genetics, Merritt Ruhlen Greenberg’s multilateral comparison, Bill Durham general evolution. There was no kinship studies either, but at least Tom Trautmann once came in with a talk, Hill Gates asked me about the Russian kinship theorist, Mikhail Kryukov, and Joanna Mountain heard about African “segmentary lineages.” Needless to say, the Anthropological Sciences people were very much into out-of-Africa theory of human evolution. Correspondingly, they were supporters of Clovis-I in the Americas. I took classes with Joanna Mountain and worked in her genetics lab. She was a student of Luca Cavalli-Sforza. I also heard wonderful presentations from Richard Klein on African fossils, Peter Underhill on Y chromosome, Marcus Feldman and Lev Zhivotovsky (a Russian geneticist from Moscow) on autosomal markers, and Joe Greenberg on the peopling of the Americas. When Greenberg passed away in 2001, Christie Turner flew in from Arizona for the memorial conference, only to reiterate the “consensus” between his odontology and Greenberg’s linguistics as a rock-solid proof of a recent origin of American Indians. (By 2005, Matsumura and Hudson in “Dental Perspectives on the Population History in Souteast Asia” //
American Journal of Physical Anthropology 127 deconstructed Turner’s celebrated Sundadonty category as a result of relatively recent admixture, thus depriving his general theories of much of their power.) In 1997-1998, Tom Dillehay’s Monte Verde was coming into spotlight, and John Rick grudgingly accepted Dillehay’s dates, with a caveat that “Tom probably mixed up the strata” but now it’s too late to disprove his Monte Verde tome.

So, I was caught in a cross-fire: on the one hand, feminists and post-structuralists “proved” that kinship studies was the unfortunate invention of the confused Cro-Magnon male; on the other hand, archaeology and genetics from across the Quad “proved” that humans came from Africa some 50,000 BP and peopled the Americas no earlier than 11,500 BP (okay, 12,500 BP but Dillehay must have confused the layers). In 1986, Greenberg tried to endorse the latter view linguistically with his tripartite division of American Indian languages into Amerind, Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. (This classification was eventually rejected by the actual specialists in American Indian languages, and with it went down the linguistic counterpart of the out-of-Africa model.) But there was a gap between molecular genetics and linguistics, namely demography, social structure, marriage practices, residence patterns and kinship terminologies. Only this sociocultural bit of evidence could imbue our human origins story with necessary realism. I thought kinship studies could definitely furnish this missing link, and whether human kinship is about “biology” or about “culture” was an utterly secondary matter. I was contemplating terms like “idenetics” and “gignetics” (from Greek gigno ‘to give birth’, a cognate of gen-) to dub this mature state of kinship studies in the 21st century.

Human origins and dispersals research in the 1980s-1990s was driven by “physical” disiplines, those being archaeology/paleontology and genetics. Sociocultural data, meaning linguistics, kinship systems, mythology, were lagging behind. As late as 1980, Robert Austerlitz published a paper in a highly-specialized linguistics periodical called Ural-Altaische Jahrbucher calling attention to the fact that American Indians harbor much more linguistic diversity than the Old World. In 1992, Johanna Nichols published Linguistic Diversity in Space in Time and concluded that our perspective on early human languages comes from America and Australia/Oceania and not from Africa and Europe. Sociocultural anthropology was supposed to contribute kinship studies to the growing interdisciplinary effort, but it forsook it for the sake of abstract ethical polemics. This is all the more bizarre and unfortunate, since anthropology had been working with worldwide databases of kinship terminologies and forms of social organization long before blood groups were discovered, never mind mtDNA sequenced. (In 1967, Murdock sampled 800 kinship terminologies for the patterns of sibling nomenclature that gave a pretty good overall resolution of what patterns are found on what continents.) And the futility of post-modernist moralizing was vividly manifested “across the Quad,” where any reflexivity was tantamount to heresy. Both versions of anthropology looked equally sterile to me.

As a true patriot of Stanford’s Anthropology, I escaped the split of the department into Cultural and Social Anthropology and Anthropological Sciences by migrating for two quarters to the University of Chicago. I listened to terrific Terry Turner on the Kayapo, the late Kostas Kazazis on Indo-European historical linguistics and Balkan dialectology, flamboyant Michael Silverstein on evidentiality, and cowboy-hatted Ray Fogelson (once Yanagisako’s professor at the University of Washington) on American Indian studies and psychological anthropology. I saw legendary Marshall Sahlins from behind and narrowly missed Eric Hamp and Paul Friedrich. And lo and behold, Tom Dillehay himself was there teaching “Andean Prehistory” for half-a-year from the University of Kentucky. For his class, I wrote a paper suggesting that a crucial piece is missing from our human origins research (namely, kinship systems and related linguistic typology), that the out-of-Africa theory is quick and premature, and that if we look closely at American archaeology we won’t be able to see the exact process by which an adventurous group of Siberian hunters colonized the Americas. Symptomatically enough, Cavalli-Sforza assumed a relatively recent entry into the Americas in order to substantiate his claims of an African origin of modern humans; genetically, American Indians and Africans are polar opposites, hence, if we know that America was peopled late, then we can be sure that Africa was the cradle. Looking at Pleistocene archaeology with a critical eye leads one to believe that the data can’t exactly justify using America as an inverted yardstick for Africa. Clovis tools are found everywhere in the Americas but not in Siberia; microblades are found everywhere in Siberia from 20,000 BP but in America they never penetrated south of the Vancouver Island.

Dillehay gave me an A-, and put me in touch with a fellow out of California by the name of Alvah (Pardner) Hicks who’s been trying for a good decade to convince people to look at America as a possible homeland of modern humans. Hicks was in the midst of the 1990s hoopla around the peopling of the America: he attended conferences, dated skulls in South America, corresponded with Tad Schurr, Dave Meltzer and Lou Binford, buttonholed Lyle Campbell and Emoke Szathmary and summarized a myriad of human origins-related scholarly articles for the Mother Tongue readership (kinda doing blogging before blogging became popular). He tried his best to at least make people consider the possibility that American Indians could have migrated into Siberia at the end of the Ice Age. (Franz Boas talked about it a hundred years ago after the Jesup expedition.) But scholars simply refused to listen to Hicks: he brought to the table wacky ideas and he didn’t have a Ph.D. Nevertheless, Dillehay put me in touch with Hicks probably because I had one extra Ph.D. to give away.

When I returned to Stanford in 1999, I rushed to the library to update my kinship terminological database. The Russian library resources are no match for the Stanford ones, and the several years I spent at Green library comparing kinship terminologies from America, Africa, Oceania, Australia and Eurasia were totally worth it. I dug into obscure Brazilian Ph.D. theses, old French dictionaries of rare Austroasiatic languages and Joe Greenberg’s own collection of African language studies. In the end, I assembled a database of some 2500 languages, diligently assembled a comprehensive bibliography and screened this sample for a bunch of typological markers, such as self-reciprocal terminology, “Crow-Omaha,” sibling nomenclature, formal morphology, etc. Some of these typological/polysemic markers were well-known in the literature, others I had to describe anew. When the ordeal was over, I realized that my initial findings were reinforced and bolstered. American Indian kinship terminologies are archaic, while African kinsip terminologies are transformed.

This is the central thesis of The Genius of Kinship. But it’s not the only one. I introduce the reader into the history of kinship studies within and outside of anthropology, compare the ideas about kinship held by Morgan, Darwin and Lyell and conclude (very much in a post-structuralist vein) that our 19th century ideas about human kinship influenced our ideas about human origins. We looked into archaeology and paleontology for answers to the questions of where we came from, while outright dismissing evidence from living human populations (language, kinship, folklore). We were interested in what was left behind in a garbage pit, not in what was passed down to the next generation. We sought our origins in Neandertals, while letting American Indians pass into oblivion. We bypassed American Indian linguistic diversity and grammatical uniqueness and declared them a “recent” population in virtue of the fact that no fossil hominids were ever found in the Americas.

The Genius of Kinship is not meant to be an advocacy for an out-of-America theory of human origins and dispersals. This is a gigantic task. Rather, it’s a revival of kinship studies in anthropology in conjunction with the recent advances in linguistics, psychology, sociology and historiography, a nitty-gritty typological analysis of a large sample of kin terminologies and its application to the prehistory of such accepted language families as Na-Dene, Austronesian and others. One of the results of this revival is a suspicion that the 150 years of finagling with anthropological knowledge (are Indians savages? shall we continue with kinship or shall we switch to gender? only archaeology can furnish reliable data, let’s look at Neandertals, languages are too difficult to comprehend, while we need something tangible to look at, etc.) has resulted in a confused picture of human origins and dispersals in which fundamental assumptions remain unproven, while every new piece of evidence is either swept under the carpet or instantly reinterpreted to fit the consensus.

For instance, the original mtDNA paper, namely “Radiation of Human Mitochondrial DNA Types Analyzed by Restriction Endonuclease Cleavage Pattern” published by Johnson, Doug Wallace and Cavalli-Sforza in the Journal of Molecular Evolution 19 (1983) clearly showed that American Indians have the highest frequency of the ancestral human mtDNA “morph combination” (That was a restriction-site analysis, but still it provided a foundation for all subsequent research, the only difference being that at some point the tree was flipped around and the Africans were declared the oldest population.) The tree topology in this early paper bears close resemblance to the map of human blood types, with American Indians being preponderantly type O. Now, match Johnson et al. (1983) with Ward et al.’s (1992) intriguing paper on extensive mtDNA diversity among the Nuu-Chah-Nullth exceeding that of African !Kung, and ponder as to why American Indians are widely considered to be a young population. In order to explain away an inconvenient fact, Ward et al. had to resort to an argument that American Indians brought this diversity with them from Siberia. Now that pre-Clovis coprolites attest to the antiquity of mtDNA A and B lineages in North America (see Gilbert et al. Science 320 [5877], 2008), even The Onion is smart enough to ridicule Ward et al.’s logic when it writes: “How can we be sure that some ancient nerd didn’t just carry an already thousand-year-old petrified turd with him when he crossed over the land bridge from Asia?”

Or, take Edward Vajda’s recent discovery of a linguistic connection between an isolated Siberian language, Ket, and Na-Dene in North America. The system of verbal prefixes is better preserved in Na-Dene than in Ket, the Ket sibling terminology is radically transformed from its Na-Dene prototype (The Genius of Kinship, p. 325). Or, the fact that the Kets’ neighbors, the Selkups and the Evenkis have a subtype of the purely American Indian mtDNA haplotype A2 (Tamm et al. Beringian Standstill and the Spread of Native American Founders. PLoS One, September 2007, no. 9). Isn’t it a genetic illustration of Boas’s and Hicks’s “back-migration”? While we find traces of American Indian genes in Siberia, the reverse isn’t true: we haven’t found such a close variant of a Siberian gene in the Americas. Or, if one reads Russian and opens up Vladimir Napolskikh’s dissertation on the Earth-Diver myths in America and Siberia, a simple scheme shows that all the archaic variants of this widely-spread motif are in North America, while all the derived ones are in Siberia.

There’s a puzzling contradiction in our data (if this data is looked at through unbiased interdisciplinary lenses), namely that “physical” disciplines such as archaeology/paleontology find lots of support for out-of-Africa, while “ideational” disciplines such as linguistics and kinship studies have Africa as a secondary spread zone and not a homeland. Which data should we trust? Can we ever hoe to build a robust theory on the basis of archaeology’s always-fragmentary-and-accidental evidence? Or, as Eldridge ad Gould famously claimed, such a theory can only be built on the basis of data coming from living biota? How do we now that the currently popular out-of-Africa interpretation of mtDNA and Y chromosome data is not simply a theoretically possible scenario and and the adaptation of a new system of information to suit the existing archaeological/paleontological consensus but a true description of unique population events? All our population genetic maps show the world at 1492, when Africa was probably genetically most diverse, but by 2008 America is arguably the most diverse continent: what scenario of human evolution would we develop hundreds of years from now provided that we wouldn’t know upfront that America was peopled from Europe, Asia and Africa after 1492? We dismissed America as a “New World” and its inhabitants as an Asian offshoot back in the 16th century, which is long before any scientific evidence has been accumulated, but can we reject the possibility that our modern archaeological, genetic, linguistic and ethnological data is consistent with two opposite “single-origin” scenarios? If so, can we rationally adjudicate between the two scenarios without demolishing one as “wacky” and then using the rubble to lionize the other?