Abstract: From Boas to Black Power investigates how U.S. cultural anthropologists wrote about race, racism, and “America” in the 20th century as a window into the greater project of U.S. anti-racist liberalism. Anthropology as a discipline and the American project share a common origin: their very foundations are built upon white supremacy, and both are still reckoning with their racist legacies. In this groundbreaking intellectual history of anti-racism within twentieth-century cultural anthropology, Mark Anderson starts with the legacy of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and continues through the post-war and Black Power movement to the birth of the Black Studies discipline, exploring the problem “America” represents for liberal anti-racism. Anderson shows how cultural anthropology contributed to liberal American discourses on race that simultaneously bolstered and denied white domination. From Boas to Black Power provides a major rethinking of anthropological anti-racism as a project that, in step with the American racial liberalism it helped create, paradoxically maintained white American hegemony. Anthropologists influenced by radical political movements of the 1960s offered the first sustained challenge to that project, calling attention to the racial contradictions of American liberalism reflected in anthropology. Their critiques remain relevant for the discipline and the nation.

Abstract. In anthropology and ethnology, a struggle has been going on for several decades between … aggressive and reactionary ideas on racial and ethnic problems. The twentieth century has seen an increase in progressive scientific thinking directed against chauvinism and racism, with a hitherto unheard-of scale of revolutionary movement and struggle for national liberation and rights on the part of the peoples of colonies and ethnic minorities of multinational states. The work of anthropologists and ethnologists against racism and chauvinism was not, however, completely devoid of contradictions, which sprang mostly from the concept of cultural relativism. Functionalism and cultural relativism in the treatment of ethnographical problems in modern Africa are also evident in attempts to attribute these problems to cultural differences between peoples, and to explain racial conflicts in terms of the incompatibility of cultural values. This trend in bourgeois social life is sometimes called culturalism or culturism.

Summary: Ethnocentrism and its relationship to prejudice is explored by Bizumic in this article, focusing on the angles of different social science disciplines on both topics. He identifies four main possible reasons for prejudice and ethnocentrism, being: “(1) evolutionary factors, (2) threat and conflict, (3) self-aggrandizement, and (4) socialization and norms”, and explains how each social science arrived to such theories.

https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.03153-6

Abstract: In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter’s residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women’s experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit’s history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.

Summary: The authors write a short overview of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, with a focus on the different aspects of society these take place at, including within both personal life and the wider culture. The entire handbook approaches the three areas from a critical perspective; however, this chapter is focused on a primary overview of the topics.

https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446200919.n1

Summary provided by publisher: Nación Genízara examines the history, cultural evolution, and survival of the Genízaro people. The contributors to this volume cover topics including ethnogenesis, slavery, settlements, poetics, religion, gender, family history, and mestizo genetics. Fray Angélico Chávez defined Genízaro as the ethnic term given to indigenous people of mixed tribal origins living among the Hispano population in Spanish fashion. They entered colonial society as captives taken during wars with Utes, Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, and Pawnees. Genízaros comprised a third of the population by 1800. Many assimilated into Hispano and Pueblo society, but others in the land-grant communities maintained their identity through ritual, self-government, and kinship. Today the persistence of Genízaro identity blurs the lines of distinction between Native and Hispanic frameworks of race and cultural affiliation. This is the first study to focus exclusively on the detribalized Native experience of the Genízaro in New Mexico.

Abstract: This article deals with some deep forms of prejudice in American anthropology in terms of its dominant ideas and its products. The foundation of this prejudice seems to be Western individualism. It expresses itself by excluding contrary ideas from its public forums (publications, symposia, and so forth) and by elaborating and escalating ideas in conformity with it. In spite of its cross‐cultural protestations, American anthropology will become White American anthropology unless our fraternity consciously takes a more open‐minded approach to other competing assumptions—rooted in other cultures—about man and what makes him run. There is a world of difference between a truly cross‐cultural science of man and a White centered science of man with cross‐cultural decorations.

doi:10.1525/aa.1973.75.1.02a00010

Summary: Martin explores how anthropology can approach prejudice in the wider society through an applied lens. Specifically, she explains how anthropology has the potential to be a tool to combat conservative ideologies of genetic inferiority based on race and ethnicity in the United States.

Summary: Urciuoli’s ethnography on Puerto Rican’s experiences in New York City explores how prejudice  impacts people based on the languages they use, in this case both Spanish and English. Specifically, she shares people’s stories on their lives while offering an analysis of the prejudiced power structures surrounding language and culture.

Abstract: The current research examined the role of the belief in free will on prejudice across Han Chinese and white samples. Belief in free will refers to the extent to which people believe human beings truly have free will. In Study 1, the beliefs of Han Chinese people in free will were measured, and their social distances from the Tibetan Chinese were used as an index of ethnic prejudice. The results showed that the more that Han Chinese endorsed the belief in free will, the less that they showed prejudice against the Tibetan Chinese. In Study 2, the belief of the Han Chinese in free will was manipulated, and their explicit feelings towards the Uyghur Chinese were used as an indicator of ethnic prejudice. The results showed that the participants in the condition of belief in free will reported less prejudice towards Uyghur Chinese compared to their counterparts in the condition of disbelief in free will. In Study 3, white peoples’ belief in free will was manipulated, and their pro-black attitudes were measured as an indirect indicator of racial prejudice. The results showed that, compared to the condition of disbelief in free will, the participants who were primed by a belief in free will reported stronger pro-black attitudes. These three studies suggest that endorsement of the belief in free will can lead to decreased ethnic/racial prejudice compared to denial of the belief in free will. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.