Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

Peter Wade

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783713745
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For over ten years, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America has been an essential text for students studying the region. This second edition adds new material and brings the analysis up to date. Race and ethnic identities are increasingly salient in Latin America. Peter Wade examines changing perspectives on Black and Indian populations in the region, tracing similarities and differences in the way these peoples have been seen by academics and national elites. Race and ethnicity as analytical concepts are re-examined in order to assess their usefulness. This book should be the first port of call for anthropologists and sociologists studying identity in Latin America.

1
The Meaning of ‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’

‘Race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are not terms that have fixed referents. It is tempting to believe in a progressivist vision of social science that leads from ignorance towards truth – especially with the term ‘race’ which, in earlier periods, was commonly used in evidently racist ways that are now known to be manifestly wrong. It seems obvious that post-war understandings of the term ‘race’ are now ‘correct’. But I argue that we have to see each term in the context of a history of ideas, of Western institutionalised knowledge (whether social or natural science) and of practices. Race and ethnicity are not terms that refer in some neutral way to a transparent reality of which social science gives us an ever more accurate picture; instead they are terms embedded in academic, popular and political discourses that are themselves a constitutive part of academic, popular and political relationships and practices.

This does not mean that academic (including social scientific) concepts are completely determined by their social context. Such a rigorously relativist position would be tantamount to abandoning the enterprise of systematic enquiry into our social condition. It would also ignore the fact that such enquiry is, to some extent, driven by the dynamic of its own search after ‘truth’: when new facts, or new combinations of facts, become increasingly at odds with established ways of thinking about certain sets of facts, this creates a dynamic for change. There are legitimate standards – of logic, coherence, evidence – which mean that not all accounts of ‘reality’ are equally valid; some are clearly wrong. My point is simply that academic concepts are not independent of their social context, that the search for knowledge is not a steady progress towards a fixed end, but a somewhat contingent journey with no necessary end at all.

This is especially the case with sociological or anthropological knowledge which, however methodologically sophisticated, can never pretend to the rigours of experimental technique that have helped the natural sciences achieve the high levels of prediction and control that underwrite their claims to truth. Part of the reason for this is that knowledge of society is based on people studying people, rather than people studying objects or non-humans, and – whatever the arguments about the level of self-consciousness of non-human animals – this creates a reflexivity, or circular process of cause and effect, whereby the ‘objects’ of study can and do change their behaviour and ideas according to the conclusions that their observers draw about those behaviour and ideas. Thus social scientists are faced with an ever-moving target which they themselves are partly propelling in an open-ended journey.¹

In this chapter, I want to examine the concepts of race and ethnicity in their historical contexts and argue that we have to see both of them as part of an enterprise of knowledge. This knowledge has been and still is situated within power relations – which, as Michel Foucault has so famously argued, knowledge itself helps to constitute – and in which Western countries have had the upper hand.

RACE

Rather than starting with a definition of race which would seem to create a nice objective area of analysis against which previous approaches to the idea might then be judged more or less adequate, I will start with a look at how the term has changed in meaning over time, so that we can see what it has come to mean (without perhaps completely divesting itself of all its previous semantic cargo), rather than what it ‘really’ means.²

Race until 1800

Michael Banton (1987) gives a very useful outline of changing ‘racial theories’. The word ‘race’ entered European languages in the early sixteenth century. Its central meaning was what Banton calls lineage, that is a stock of descendants linked to a common ancestor; such a group of people shared a certain ancestry which might give them more or less common qualities. This usage was predominant until roughly 1800. The overall context was a concern with classifying living things and there was discussion and disagreement about why things were different, how permanently they were different and so on. In the concept of race as lineage, the role of appearance was not necessarily fundamental as an identifier. Thus one 1570 English usage referred to ‘race and stock of Abraham’, meaning all the descendants of Abraham. This included Moses, who had two successive wives; one of these was a Midianite (descendant of Midian, a son of Abraham), the other was a black Ethiopian woman. All the sons of Moses by these two women would be of ‘his race’, whatever their appearance (Banton, 1987: 30).

In general terms, the Bible supplied the framework for thinking about difference: the theory of monogenism was accepted – all humans had a common genesis, being the progeny of Adam and Eve. The main explanations for human difference were environmental and this was seen as affecting both the social and political institutions of human society and bodily difference – often the two were not really seen as separate.

For example, the Swedish botanist Linnaeus (1707–78), whose System of Nature was published in 1735, divided up all living things into species and genera, setting the basis for later classifications of difference. He presented various accounts of the internal subdivisions of the genus Homo. In one such (Hodgen, 1964: 425), ‘Americans’ were characterised thus: ‘Copper-coloured, choleric, erect. Paints self. Regulated by custom.’

What we would call cultural and physical features are presented together, showing that they were not necessarily seen as very different, but also showing that what we would now call cultural traits were seen as ‘natural’: such differences were naturalised without being biologised (see next section, below; see also Wade, 2002a).

Banton argues that the use of the term ‘race’ was quite rare between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries – the period of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment – and that ideas about the inferiority of non-European peoples, such as Africans, were not very widespread, especially among the major thinkers of the time. Thus he sees the oft-quoted Edward Long, son of a Jamaican planter, whose History of Jamaica (1774) is frequently claimed as showing typically racist attitudes, as an exception rather than the rule. Equally, he argues that Thomas Jefferson, who famously advocated abolition in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), may have thought of the gulf between blacks and whites in terms of species difference, but was criticised by others for his views.

Banton’s concern here is to contest ‘presentism’, the judging of the ideas of previous historical eras by the standards of our own. This, he argues, tends to lump all these different people together indiscriminately as ‘racists’, thus losing sight of the complex ways people thought about difference.

This is all very well, but Banton presents us with a history of ideas which is rather divorced from its social context. Audrey Smedley (1993) gives a rather different picture in which the guiding thread of ideas about the supposed superiority of Europeans, or whites, runs through the varying and complex ways of conceiving of human difference. The Bible may have implied monogenesis, but it also provided a means for asserting that Africans were inferior. Different peoples were said to be the descendants of the various sons of Noah and Africans were sometimes argued to be the sons of Ham, cursed by Noah for having seen him when he was drunk and naked.³ In medieval theology, blackness was often linked to the devil and sin, and Africans were often held to be inferior even during the early stages of this period (Jordan, 1977; Pieterse, 1992). Throughout the period Banton refers to, Europeans were generally thought of as more civilised and superior.

Smedley’s account – like many others – lays emphasis on the social, economic and political conditions in which the ponderings about human difference took place: explorations of Africa, the conquest of the New World, colonialism, slavery. Following a lead set by Horsman’s study of Anglo-Saxons’ ideas about fulfilling their ‘manifest destiny’ of superior political leadership based on freedom and democracy (Horsman, 1981), she focuses on the English and suggests various factors that made them particularly prone to exclusivist ideas of themselves as superior. These factors included the relative isolation of north-eastern European peoples from Greek and Roman knowledge, at least until the Renaissance; the rise from the sixteenth century of capitalism, secularism and possessive individualism (based on ideas of personal autonomy, the importance of property-owning and the accumulation of wealth); the importance given to hierarchy, often defined in economic terms; and the English experience with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonisation of the Irish who had already been relegated to the status of savages (that is, as supposedly bestial, sexually licentious, undisciplined, etc.). This sort of background set the scene for the brutal encounter of the English with the Africans and the native inhabitants of the New World, the usurpation of land as private property and the conversion of Africans into chattels.

Hall (1992b) makes a more general argument about Europe as a whole. He emphasises how the idea of Europe as an entity emerged during this period, from broader and more inclusive concepts of Christendom – which included, for example, black Christian Ethiopians seen as allies in holy wars against Islam (Pieterse, 1992: ch. 1). During the fifteenth century, non-European Christians were gradually excluded from the domain of Christendom itself and by the sixteenth century Europe had replaced Jerusalem as the centre of the known world. Despite internal wars and quarrels, Europe was being drawn together by mercantile capitalism and technological development (see also Jones, 1981). It was also being increasingly defined in opposition to Others – Africans, native Americans. The image of the wild man, the savage who reputedly existed on the peripheries of Europe (Taussig, 1987: 212), and of the infidel who had been fighting Christendom for the Holy Land were being increasingly supplemented and displaced by the image of the paganism and savagery located in Africa and the New World – although in all cases, ambivalence (for example, of hate and desire) attached to such images. In short, then, ideas about human difference, while they may have involved a concept of race that was diverse, contested and even not very central, were certainly powerfully structured by ideas of European superiority. Kant (1724–1804), the philosopher whose influence has been so important in Western thought, may not have written much directly about race, but he did comment thus: ‘the fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid’, and David Hume (1711–76) could also state that ‘the Negro’ was ‘naturally inferior to the whites’ (Goldberg, 1993: 31–2).

Goldberg (1993) also paints a broad picture. He sees the concept of race as emerging with modernity itself – ‘race is one of the central conceptual inventions of modernity’ (1993: 3) – and as intertwined with basic ideas about morality. Whereas in previous eras, morality was defined in terms of virtue and correct behaviour, or of the prevention of sin, in the modern period, and with the discoveries, people began talking in terms of stocks or breeds of humans people with engrained, natural qualities. Human identity and personhood became increasingly defined by a discourse of race, certain races became defined as non-rational or aesthetically inferior (lacking in the ‘natural’ balance of beauty and harmony) and race could define certain people as fit for slavery.

Race in the Nineteenth Century

Banton (1987) then moves on to consider the concept of race as type. This concept, which built on existing ones and developed in diverse and contested ways during the nineteenth century, was based on the idea that races were permanent, separable types of human beings with innate qualities that were passed on from one generation to the next. Now everyone (or thing) that was alike in nature and appearance was thought to have descended from a common ancestor. Moses’ sons, in this view, would not belong to the stock and race of Abraham: some would be considered to belong to the black race, while others might be mixed race, Semites or perhaps Caucasians. Within this overall view, typologies of humankind proliferated and there was heated debate about whether types were separate species or not. Polygenism – the theory that different human types had separate origins – gained ground, despite its divergence from biblical teachings (Anderson, 2006). Ideas about evolutionary change (in a pre-Darwinian sense), which had been present in the seventeenth century in concepts of the gradual progression from primitive forms of human life (of which the ‘lower’ peoples were often thought to be exemplars) towards supposedly superior forms, were adapted to ideas about racial types as stages on an evolutionary scale. Racial types were hierarchically ordered, as racial ‘lineages’ had been before, but now the basis of the hierarchy was thought of in terms of innate differences of ‘biology’, the term proposed by Lamarck, among others, in 1802 to describe the scientific study of living organisms (Mayr, 1982: 108). ‘Natural’ differences were increasingly seen as specifically ‘biological’ differences.

Stocking (1982: ch. 2) compares two French scientists of the early nineteenth century, Degérando and Cuvier. In his writings, Degérando hardly mentioned race and saw difference as environmental, although he did see ‘primitive’ peoples as being examples of previous stages in progression of humans towards European perfection. Cuvier, in a sign of things to come, expounded a ‘static non-evolutionary tradition of comparative anatomy’, and spent his time collecting (or rather stealing) bones and skulls for comparative measurement to assess racial difference. This was an early example of a whole industry of anatomical measurement, designed to specify racial typologies, with great attention being paid to the skull since brain size was held to correlate with superior intelligence. Although many of the practitioners of this science were medics and naturalists, anthropology was often the label they used for their investigations.

This was the age of scientific racism when ‘even for self-proclaimed egalitarians, the inferiority of certain races was no more to be contested than the law of gravity to be regarded as immoral’ (Barkan, 1992: 2–3). The conceptual centrality which Goldberg asserts for race can also be seen in this statement by Robert Knox, Scottish medic and author of The Races of Men (1850): ‘That race is everything, is simply a fact, the most remarkable, the most comprehensive, which philosophy has ever announced. Race is everything: literature, science, art – in a word, civilisation depends on it’ (cited in Pieterse, 1992: 49).

The context for the rise of this science – and science it was held to be, even if it was bad science and immoral by today’s standards – was the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. There is no easy correlation here, because the apogee of scientific racism was the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, whereas first the slave trade then slavery itself were mostly abolished by 1863.⁴ Also, some racial theorists were opposed to slavery on humanitarian grounds, while, conversely, some southern US slave-holders opposed racial typologies on religious grounds (Banton, 1987: 9, 45). But it is no coincidence that just as abolitionist opinion gained dominance in Europe, making the institutionalised inferiority of blacks morally insecure, theories began to emerge that could justify the continued dominance over blacks (not to mention native Americans, Asians and Orientals) in terms of supposedly innate and permanent inferiority, and now with the full power of scientific backing. In any case, slavery was partly opposed in terms of its unsuitability for a modern industrial society based on free wage labour (Eltis, 1987), rather than because it oppressed black people, so opposing slavery was no guarantee of a positive stance on racial equality.

The other main social context was the rise of imperialism which, following on from the first main phase of colonialism between about 1450 and 1800 based mainly on settler colonies and mercantile capitalism, began in the nineteenth century to expand rapidly into Asia, Africa and the Pacific, with less direct settlement and more emphasis on the extraction and cultivation of raw materials and on the sale of industrial goods. Goldberg continues his analysis of the intertwining of ideas of moral philosophy and racial theory in Western thought by arguing that, in the nineteenth century, utilitarianism became central and that, although the concept of race might not be directly invoked, the principles of utility and the collective good allowed authoritarian rule in which the most rational – the white colonisers – decided on rational grounds what was best for the less rational – the black colonised. Thus John Stuart Mill, the great exponent of utilitarianism, who followed his father into the colonial service in India where 6000 civil servants controlled vast areas of the subcontinent, preached the need to govern the lower, less civilised orders (Goldberg, 1993: 35).

Race in the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century saw a period of changes and contradictions during which the meanings attached to the term ‘race’ varied very widely. On the one hand, eugenics emerged as a convergence of science and social policy, the term coined at the turn of the century by Francis Galton, scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin. It was based on scientific racism and the idea that the reproductive capacities of biologically ‘unfit’ individuals (for example, the insane) and, more generally, the ‘inferior races’ should be restricted, just as the breeding of domestic livestock might try to eliminate unwanted traits. The movement had quite a strong influence in Europe and the US and also affected Latin America (Stepan, 1991); by the time it became part of Nazi policy in the 1930s, it had lost much ground elsewhere. On the other hand, however, this period also saw the dismantling of scientific racism.

The latter trend had several sources. Darwin’s evolutionary theories indicated that it was no longer possible to think in terms of permanent racial types: breeding populations adapted over time. However, these ideas, published as early as 1871 (The Descent of Man) took a long time to impact and did not scotch scientific racism; rather the latter adapted to the former with the development of social evolutionism according to which superior, ‘fitter’ races were more ‘successful’ in terms of their capacity to dominate others (Stocking, 1982: ch. 6).

Franz Boas, the anthropologist, also played an important role in challenging scientific racial typologies (Stocking, 1982: ch. 8). A Jew with a background in physics, he left behind the anti-Semitism of late nineteenth-century Germany and migrated to the US where he did anthropometric research – measuring heads, as many others were doing at the time. He dis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1. The Meaning of ‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’
• 2. Blacks and Indigenous People in Latin America
• 3. Early Approaches to Blacks and Indigenous People, 1920s to 1960s
• 4. Inequality and Situational Identity: The 1970s
• 5. Blacks and Indigenous People in the Postmodern and Postcolonial Nation – and Beyond
• 6. Black and Indigenous Social Movements
• 7. Studying Race and Ethnicity in a Postcolonial and Reflexive World
• Notes
• References
• Index