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A Day Without An Anthropologist Is Like ...

What would we do without anthropologists? (No, don?t tell me. That question was rhetorical.) I had a professor in college who defined an anthropologist as ?a sociologist in a tent,? but then he was a sociologist and may simply have been presenting his latest survey findings.

In any event we last encountered an anthropologist here, in the form of John L. Jackson Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania. In his article discussed in that post he shared with the Chronicle of Higher Education?s blog readers the following pearl of anthropological insight ? that racism has evolved ?from blatant to subtle, from explicit to inferential, from biological to cultural....? And the point of this observation?

The point isn't that race is less important now than before. It is just more paradoxical. Race is real, but it isn't. It has value, but it doesn't. It explains social difference, but it couldn't possibly....

Well, I?m glad we got that cleared up. And the CHE?s blog editor must be appreciative as well, since now Prof. Jackson is a regular commentator there. In his latest comment he describes the current controversy among one school of scientists and social scientists who believe race is not biologically based, another school who believe it is, and even a third school, of mainly non-scientists, ?who argue that race isn?t real (the first group is right) but that even the people in that camp use race in ways that are similar to their rivals.? With regard to the first two,

Each camp sets the other one up as being more powerful ? and dangerous. They make accusations about one another?s intentions and morality. And they both imagine the other to be a serious problem to the future of scholarship.

And what does our anthropologist say? Well, he says, it is ... and it isn?t.

Race?s complicated relationship to reality (real vs. unreal, there vs. not there) is exactly what has everyone so preoccupied. Of course, just as those junior high school kids in Florida [to whom Prof. Jackson gave a talk] could imagine that race is and isn?t biological at the same time, a little of both and a little of neither, racial experts are caught in the same quicksand ? of accusation and innuendo, of charges and countercharges. Race is a social construction, but it is also more than that, and this complicated, contradictory notion of race is exactly what makes racism so tenacious, perched right atop the electrified fence between those racial camps

Of course if ?race? (whatever it is ... or isn?t) weren?t so ?complicated? and ?contradictory,? we wouldn?t need deeply perceptive anthropologists looking beneath the misleadingly superficial obvious to give us such a, well, electrifying explanation of it.

Full post as published by Discriminations on May 16, 2008 (boomark / email).