Anthropology and Racial Politics

Serena Golden
April 16, 2010
Inside Higher Ed
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/16/baker

Anthropology may loosely be defined as the study of
human culture -- but throughout the discipline's
history, some cultures have been deemed more worthy of
study than others. Who determines which cultures merit
the most study -- and how, and why?

In a new book, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of
Culture (Duke University Press), Lee Baker explores how
anthropological study of American Indians helped to
shape academic and popular ideas about race and culture
-- and how those same concepts informed the
discipline's very different treatment of African
American culture in the 20th century. Baker, who is
associate professor of cultural anthropology,
sociology, and African and African American studies and
dean of academic affairs in the Trinity College of Arts
and Sciences at Duke University, responded via e-mail
to questions about the book.


Q: You describe a "dramatic shift" in the first half of
the 20th century, when the federal government
"promulgat[ed]... policies to first destroy and then
protect American Indian culture." This swift change
"mirrored shifts in American popular culture,
aesthetics, and attitudes toward traditional or
authentic Native American cultures." Can you give an
overview of how and why such a dramatic about-face
occurred?

A: In 1883, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)
developed a policy called the Religious Crimes Code,
which authorized agents to use force or imprisonment to
repress and stop American Indian religious practices
that they deemed subversive, immoral, or an impediment
to the goal of "civilizing" the Indian. This followed
the much more comprehensive Dawes Act of 1887, which
divided up tribal lands into small, individually-owned
parcels. This allotment mechanism created a putative
surplus of land that was sold to developers, railroads,
and ranchers. The idea was to force rapid civilization
based on individualism or speed the process of
assimilation by destroying communal ways of life, but
the amount of land provided to individual families was
not large enough to be sustainable. The act and its
various amendments were in place for almost a half a
century, and American Indian families lost an estimated
90 million acres of treaty land. These two policies
reinforced other punitive policies, practices, and
violence tethered to an explicit "vanishing policy" --
a policy designed to make American Indian culture
disappear.

In 1890, Sitting Bull was shot dead, and the army
quickly stopped one of the last so-called uprisings
with their massacre at Wounded Knee. In 1893, Fredrick
Jackson Turner delivered his influential paper on "The
Significance of the Frontier in American History,"
detailing how American culture was tied to frontier
expansion, but the frontier was now closed. By the turn
of the 20th century, the western frontier was finished
and the threat of American Indians diminished.

Americans began to focus on preservation and
conservation of land, wildlife, and water, which fueled
movements to establish public spaces and establish more
national parks. As boarding schools, the Dawes act, and
the BIA articulated macabre vanishing policies, early
anthropologists like James Mooney and Frank H. Chushing
began to practice salvage ethnography. They attempted
to preserve and conserve Indian culture by writing and
describing the practices that they viewed as quickly
disappearing. Tourism to the Southwest, a growing
appreciation in Indian art, living ethnological fair
exhibits, and wild-west shows all promoted a pacified
yet exotic and distinctively American way of life. At
the same time, summer camps and organizations like the
Camp Fire Girls were promoted, and teenagers around the
country began dressing up to play Indian. American
Indian culture slowly became America's exotic but safe
"other."

The devastation of the Dawes Act, boarding schools, and
years of violence and dislocation was slowly recognized
by the federal government. With the help of John
Collier, Franklin D. Roosevelt's politically astute
commissioner of Indian affairs, Congress passed the
Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934. Better known as the Indian
Reorganization Act (IRA), this was part of Roosevelt's
sweeping New Deal legislation, and it was meant to
curtail future allotments, empower tribal governments,
and put structures in place to enable improved health,
education, land acquisition, and cultural preservation.

Q: One of the book's recurrent themes is the "obvious
division of labor... in social sciences" wherein
anthropology has tended to focus, for the most part, on
"out-of-the-way indigenous peoples," while sociology
has been the discipline to study immigrants and ---
especially -- African Americans. How and why do you
think this division may have come about?

A: There were two early schools of anthropology in the
United States. The most familiar to anthropology
students is the one pioneered by Samuel Morton and
Louis Agassiz; they focused on measuring brains and
bodies to rank-order the races. This is usually called
the "American School of Anthropology," which culminated
in Josiah Nott's and George Gliddon's 800-page tome of
scientific racism entitled Types of Mankind (1854). I
suggest, however, that there was a late-18th century
Americanist tradition, begun by Peter S. Du Ponceau and
Albert Gallatin and focusing on Native American
linguistics and philology, which gave rise to the
Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) at the Smithsonian,
founded in 1879. Unlike the American School of
Anthropology, which focused on brains and bodies, the
Americanist tradition focused on customs and behaviors.

Beginning with Lewis Henry Morgan through John W.
Powell and Frederic W. Putnam, and then continuing with
Franz Boas and his students, the primary focus of
academic anthropological inquiry in the United States
was American Indian languages and customs. It was not
until World War II that anthropology in the United
States did much else. In the timeless words of Michel-
Rolph Trouillot "the `scientific' study of the Savage
qua Savage became the privileged field of academic
anthropology." Anthropologists got the savage slot, and
continued to fill it with descriptions of out-of-the-
way others. Sociologists in the United States described
in-the-way others, and focused on recent immigrants and
African Americans; they rarely focused on American
Indians. In general terms, sociologists were used to
support broader ideas of cultural assimilation, while
anthropologists were used to support ideas of cultural
preservation and conservation.

Q: How did "the role anthropology played in shaping
popular conceptions of the culture for Native
Americans" differ from "the role it played in shaping
popular conceptions of culture for African Americans,"
and why was this difference so pronounced?

A: In 1914, the influential sociologist Robert Park
suggested that "the chief obstacle to assimilation of
the Negro and the Oriental are not mental but physical
traits. It is not because the Negro and the Japanese
are so differently constituted that they do not
assimilate. If they were given an opportunity the
Japanese are quite as capable as the Italians,
Armenians, or the Slavs of acquiring our culture and
sharing our national ideals. The trouble is not with
the Japanese mind but with the Japanese skin. The Jap
is not the right color."

Before the 1930s, many scholars believed that African
Americans had lost their culture during the middle
passage. Any distinctive customs or behaviors black
folk performed were too often viewed as a bad copy of
white culture. Like the boarding schools for American
Indians, many Negro normal schools tried to assimilate
black students in hopes that their culture too would
vanish. The difference was that black American culture
was rarely seen as distinctive, nor was it viewed as
very exotic. Perhaps more importantly, as the threat
level of American Indians waned, the threat level of
African Americans waxed. It was not until the Harlem
Renaissance or the New Negro movement that black
culture in the United States began to be viewed widely
as distinctive and authentic and worthy of scientific
study.

Before World War II, the consumption of a pacified and
out-of-the-way Indian in Wild West shows, World's
Fairs, and museums can be juxtaposed with the
consumption of a dangerous and in-the-way Negro in
blackfaced minstrelsy, professionally promoted
lynchings, and buffoon-saturated advertising. World's
Fair organizers routinely rejected requests to erect
African American exhibits, and philanthropists flat-out
rejected requests to erect a museum to showcase African
and African American achievements. While many
performers dressed up to play "authentic" renditions of
somber Indians, others blackened up to play exaggerated
renditions of knee-slapping Negroes, and there was no
African American analog to the Campfire Girls and
Indian Guides; middle-class white kids never went to
camp to dress up to play Sambo. If one can compare
popular historical and cultural representations of
African Americans and Native Americans in these terms,
and then connect this view to the distinct roles
anthropology and sociology played studying these two
groups, maybe one can get a better understanding of how
the division of labor within the social sciences helped
to contribute to very different politics of culture.

Q: How did the work of the anthropologist Franz Boas
influence the American's public's understanding of race
-- for better and worse?

A: Franz Boas is widely credited for delimiting race
from language and culture. When he arrived in the
United States from Germany in 1887, most Americans made
little distinction between race and nation, peoples and
culture. Many scholars believed the races were
organized in an evolutionary hierarchy that began with
savagery and moved through barbarism and ended with
Christian Civilization. Franz Boas used the scientific
method to demonstrate that races were not organized in
a hierarchy, and that cultures should be viewed and
understood within their own historical contexts. The
notion that the world has multiple cultures and
different races that are neither better nor worse,
neither advanced nor retarded, can be attributed to the
scientific work that Boas began in the 1890s. Although
this had a significant long-term impact in terms of
challenging the ideas of racial inferiority that served
as the basis for Jim Crow segregation, Boas's research
articulated a particular racial politics of culture
that provided a compelling argument against racial
uplift and cultural assimilation. Many progressive
whites and boarding-school educated American Indians,
as well as prominent African American leaders like
Booker T. Washington, believed that cultural
assimilation was the most effective strategy to combat
racial discrimination. Anthropologists, who earnestly
believed that American Indians could and should be able
to maintain their culture, were at odds with other
well-meaning whites who believed that Indians should
fully embrace or perform the white man's culture.

Q: What are some of the key ways in which
"anthropological concepts have been used in the service
of political projects"? Do such concepts continue to
bear on the American political or cultural discourse
today?

A: In an effort to better fight the war in Afghanistan,
the military has developed the Human Terrain System
(HTS), in which social scientists give on-the-ground
advice to military units. Many anthropologists are
rightly concerned that basic anthropological ethics,
like securing informed consent and being able to
publish findings within the scientific community, are
being violated with this program. Moreover, the program
has not been adequately assessed and there are not good
metrics in place to demonstrate how well it works. The
program is hotly debated, and it is a very contemporary
example of how anthropology and other social sciences
become appropriated and used for projects other than
traditional knowledge production. Although I am deeply
committed to using knowledge in the service of society,
this book provides examples of the unintended
consequences and the tricky relationships that emerge
when knowledge is used within the frame of specific
political projects. I don't think scientists or
theorists should pull back in any way; I just hope that
scholars realize that when they enter into the public
sphere, they may lose control of how their work is
employed, and scholars should not be surprised when the
work they produce is used in a way that is inimical to
their values.

_____________________________________________



for more of my work please go to:

http://www.redroom.com/author/rodney-d-coates


The man who has no imagination has no wings. 
Muhammad Ali


Rodney D. Coates
Professor


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