Anthropology’s trouble with racism

Racism is an important Western idea of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Anthropology still isn’t sure how to deal with it.

The next three or four articles at Troubling Nature will deal with Anthropology’s confusion, and sometimes outright denial, about how to deal with the contemporary idea of racism.

The first will show how anthropologists, sometimes calling themselves ‘informatitians’, are employing Genome Wide Association Surveys (GWASs) to argue that indigenous people’s in Papua have more non-homosapien DNA than the people who call them ‘monkeys’. What are the implications of this apparent clash between science and commonsense?

The second will look at the ambivalent position of Anthropology’s professional bodies on the notion of race. To be clear, according to these associations, black people have lower IQs than white and this helps explain many things. And this idea isn’t racist. But why isn’t it racist? Because the professional bodies say so. But what if most people today say it is, in fact, racist? Isn’t racism a social construction? How can a scientific body make a confident assertion about a social construction? More work required by the professional bodies on that, surely?

The third will show how the discipline of Anthropology has an existential crisis. Its professional bodies, dominated by white scholars (most anthropoligists are white, so they can hardly be blamed) sometimes appear little more than (very) cheap PR machines; while black anthropologists seem confused about where they ought to go next.

Finally, probably, Troubling Nature will offer up a few thoughts about whether Anthropology is sustainable as a discipline in the modern era, or whether the time has come for the field of study to be placed under another academic umberella.