Ethnicity

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14
Ethnicity
AnthropologyThe Exploration of Human
Diversity 11th Edition Conrad Phillip Kottak
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Ethnicity

• Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity
• Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities
• Peaceful Coexistence
• Roots of Ethnic Conflict

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Ethnic groupmembers share certain beliefs,
  values, habits, customs, and norms because of
  their common background

Ethnicity revealed when people claim a certain
ethnic identity for themselves and are defined by
others as having that identity
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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Race is ethnic group assumed to have a biological
  basis

• American culture doesnt draw a very clear line
  between ethnicity and race.

Ethnicityidentification with, and feeling part
of, an ethnic group and exclusion from certain
other groups because of this affiliation
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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Race/Ethnic Identification in the United States,
  2002
• Insert Table 14.1

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Statusvarious positions that people occupy in
  society

• Ascribed statuslittle or no choice about
  occupying status
• People are born members of a certain group and
  remain so all their lives
• Achieved statusgained through choices, actions,
  efforts, talents, or accomplishments
• May be positive or negative

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Social Statuses
• Insert Figure 14.1

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Status Shifting

• Sometimes statuses, particularly ascribed ones,
  mutually exclusive

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Some statuses arent mutually exclusive, but
  contextual

• Minority Groupsascribed status associated with a
  position in the social-political hierarchy
• They have inferior power and less secure access
  to resources than majority groups, which are
  superordinate, dominant, or controlling

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Race, like ethnicity, is cultural category rather
  than a biological reality

• Not possible to define races biologically
• American culture does not draw a very clear line
  between them
• Better to use term ethnic group instead of
  race to describe any social group

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Social Race

• Races are ethnic groups assumed by members of a
  particular culture to have biological basis
• Race is socially constructed

Social Racesgroups assume to have biological
basis but actually define in a culturally
arbitrary, rather than scientific, manner
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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• In American culture, one acquires his or her
  racial identity at birth

• Rule of Descentassigns social identity on basis
  of ancestry
• Hypodescentautomatically places children of a
  union or mating between members of different
  groups in the minority group
• Helps divide American society into groups that
  have been unequal in access to wealth, power, and
  prestige

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Race in the Census

• U.S. Census Bureau gathering data by race since
  1790
• Constitution specified that a slave counted as
  three-fifths of a white person, and Indians not
  taxed
• Attempt by social scientists and interested
  citizens to add a multiracial category to the
  census category opposed by NAACP and National
  Council of La Raza

Racial classification is a political issue
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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Race in the Census

• Number of interracial marriages and children
  increasing in U.S.
• Implications for the traditional system of
  American racial classification

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Race in the Census
• Canadian census asks about visible minorities

• ...persons, other than Aboriginal peoples
  (a.k.a. First Nation in Canada, Native Americans
  in the United States, who are non-Caucasian in
  race or non-white in colour
• Canadas visible minority population increasing
  steadily

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Figure 14.2
• Reproduction of Questions on Race and Hispanic
  Origin from Census 2000

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Figure 14.2
• Reproduction of Questions on Race and Hispanic
  Origin from Census 2000

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Table 14.3
• American Reporting They Belonged to Just One Race

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Table 14.4
• Canadian Visible Minority Population of Canada,
  2001 Census

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Not Us Race in Japan

• In 1986, former Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone
  created international furor by contrasting his
  countrys supposed homogeneity (responsible, he
  suggested, for Japans success in international
  business) with the ethnically mixed U.S.

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Scholars estimate 10 of Japans population
  minorities of various sorts

• Intrinsic racismbelief that perceived racial
  difference is a sufficient reason to value one
  person less than another

In Japan, the valued group is majority (pure)
Japanese, who are believed to share the same
blood
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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Children of mixed marriages between majority
  Japanese and others may not get the same racial
  label as the minority parent, but they are still
  stigmatized for their non-Japanese ancestry

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Majority Japanese define themselves by opposition
  to others

• Japanese culture regards certain ethnic groups as
  having a biological basis, when there is no
  evidence they do
• Burakumin are descendants of a low-status social
  class but genetically indistinguishable from the
  dominant population, they are treated as a
  different race
• Discrimination against burakumin strikingly like
  discrimination that blacks faced in U.S.

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Phenotype and Fluidity Race in Brazil
• Race in Brazil different from race in U.S. and
  Japan

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• The Brazilian construction of race is attuned to
  relatively slight phenotypic differences

• Phenotypeorganisms evident traits, its
  physiology and anatomy, including skin color,
  hair form, facial features, and eye color

More than 500 distinct racial labels reported
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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• The Brazilian construction

• Brazilian race far more flexible, in that
  individuals racial classification may change due
  to achieved status, developmental biological
  changes, and other irregular factors
• No hypodescent rule ever developed in Brazil to
  ensure that whites and blacks remained separate

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Stratification and Intelligence

• Over the centuries, groups with power used racial
  ideology to justify, explain, and preserve their
  privileged social positions

Anthropologists know that most behavioral
variation among human groups rests on culture not
biology
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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Stratification and Intelligence
• Within any stratified society, differences in
  performance between economic, social, and ethnic
  groups reflect their different experiences and
  opportunities rather than biological differences

Stratified Societyclass-based society
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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Occasionally, doctrines of innate superiority are
  set forth by scientists, who tend to come from
  the favored stratum of society

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Jensenism asserts that African-Americans are
  hereditarily incapable of doing as well as whites

• Named for Arthur Jensen, the educational
  psychologist who observed that on average
  African-Americans perform less well on
  intelligence tests that Euro-Americans and
  Asian-Americans.
• Environmental explanations for test scores much
  more convincing than genetic explanations

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Tests invariably measure particular learning
  histories, not the potential for learning

• Links between social, economic, and educational
  environment and test performance show up in
  comparisons of American blacks and whites
• Studies of identical twins raised apart also
  illustrate the impact of environment on identical
  heredity

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Ethnic Groups and Ethnicity

• Studies provide overwhelming evidence that test
  performance measures education and social,
  economic, and cultural background rather than
  genetically determined intelligence

All contemporary human populations seem to have
comparable learning abilities
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Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities

• Nationonce synonymous with tribe or ethnic
  group has come to mean a state

• Stateindependent, centrally organized political
  unit
• Nation-statesrefer to an autonomous political
  entity

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Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities

• Most nation-states are ethnically heterogeneous

• Migration
• Conquest
• Colonialism

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Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities

• Nationalities and Imagined Communities
• Nationalitiesethnic groups that now have, or
  wish to have or regain, autonomous political
  status (their own country)

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Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities

• Nationalities are imagined communities
  (Benedict Anderson)

• Members do not form actual face-to-face community
• Only imagine that they belong to and participate
  in the same group
• Stresses that language and print played crucial
  role in growth of European national consciousness

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Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities

• Political upheavals and wars divided many
  nationalities

Migration causes certain nationally based ethnic
groups to live in different nation states
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Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities

• Colonial powers created multiethnic states

Erected boundaries that corresponded poorly with
preexisting cultural divisions
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Ethnic Groups, Nations, and Nationalities

• Colonial institutions also helped create new
  imagined communities beyond nations

• Négritudeblack association and identity,
  developed out of common experience of French
  colonial rule in variety of African countries

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Peaceful Coexistence

• Ethnic diversity may be associated with positive
  group interaction and coexistence or with conflict

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Peaceful Coexistence

• Assimilation

• Process of change when a minority ethnic group
  adopts the patterns and norms of its host culture
• Melting pot model

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Peaceful Coexistence

• The Plural Society
• Ethnic distinctions can be maintained, rather
  than assimilated, despite decades, or even
  generations, of interethnic contact

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Peaceful Coexistence

• Barth defines plural society as society combining
  ethnic contrasts and the economic interdependence
  of the ethnic groups

Ethnic boundaries are most stable and enduring
when the groups occupy different ecological niches
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Peaceful Coexistence

• Ethnic Nationalism Runs Wild

• Yugoslavia fell apart mainly along ethnic and
  religious lines in the 1990s
• Much of ethnic differentiation based on religion,
  culture, political and military history, and some
  differences in language
• Yugoslav Serbs reacted violentlywith military
  interventionafter 1992 vote for independence of
  Muslim-led Bosnia Herzegovina

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Peaceful Coexistence

• Ethnic Nationalism Runs Wild
• Backed by Yugoslav army, Bosnian Serb militias
  rounded up Bosnian Muslims, killed groups of
  them, and burned and looted their homes

• In spring 1999 NATO began bombing campaign
  against Yugoslavia in retaliation for Serbian
  atrocities

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Peaceful Coexistence

• Ethnic Nationalism Runs Wild
• How can we explain Yugoslavias ethnic conflict?

Ethnic distinctions represent peoples
perceptions of cultural differences, and people
may overlook even very strong cultural
similarities when circumstances make their
differences more important
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Peaceful Coexistence

• Multiculturalism and Ethnic Identity

• Multiculturalismthe view of cultural diversity
  in a country as something good and desirable
• Opposite of assimilationism
• Multicultural society socializes individuals no
  only into the dominant (national) culture but
  also into an ethnic culture

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Peaceful Coexistence

• In U.S. and Canada, multiculturalism is of
  growing importance

• Reflects an awareness that the number and size of
  ethnic groups grew dramatically in recent years

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Peaceful Coexistence

• Ethnic Composition of the United States Figure
• 14.4

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Peaceful Coexistence

• One response to ethnic diversification and
  awareness has been for many whites to reclaim
  ethnic identities

Mutliculturalism seeks ways for people to
understand and interact that dont depend on
sameness but rather on respect for differences
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Peaceful Coexistence

• Several forces propelled North America away from
  assimilation model toward multiculturalism

• Reflects recent large-scale migration
• Multiculturalism related to globalization
• Ethnic identities used increasingly to form
  self-help organizations focused mainly on
  enhancing the groups economic competitiveness

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Peaceful Coexistence

• In face of globalization, much of the world is
  experiencing an ethnic revival

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Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• Can be political, economic, religious,
  linguistic, cultural, or racial

• Ethnic difference often lead to conflict and
  violence because of a sense of injustice due to
  resource distribution, economic and/or political
  competition, and reaction to discrimination,
  prejudice, and other expression of threatened or
  devalued identity

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Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• Prejudice and Discrimination

• Prejudicedevaluation of given group based upon
  assumed characteristics of that group
• Discriminationdisproportionately harmful
  treatment of a group it may be de facto
  (practiced, but not legally sanctioned) or de
  jure (part of the law)

Stereotypesfixed ideas, often unfavorable, about
what the members of a group are like
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Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• Although multicultural model increasingly
  prominent in North America, ethnic competition
  and conflict are just as evident

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Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• Ethnic antagonism flared in South-Central Los
  Angeles in spring 1992

• Angry blacks reacted to the acquittal of 4 white
  police officers charged in the videotaped beating
  of Rodney King
• Attacked whites, Koreans, and Latinos
• Violence expressed frustration by African
  Americans about their prospects in an
  increasingly multicultural society

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Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• Aftermaths of Oppression

• Ethnocidedominant group may try to destroy the
  cultures of certain ethnic groups
• Forced assimilationdominant group forces certain
  ethnic groups to adopt the dominant culture

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Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• Aftermaths of Oppression
• Ethnic expulsionaims at removing groups who are
  culturally different from a country

Refugeespeople who have been forced (involuntary
refugees) or who have chosen (voluntary refugees)
to flee a country, to escape persecution or war
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Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• Aftermaths of Oppression
• Colonialismpolitical, social, economic, and
  cultural domination of a territory and its people
  by a foreign power for an extended time

Cultural colonialisminternal domination by one
group and its culture/ideology over others
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Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• First, Second, and Third Worlds
• Insert Figure 14.5