BODIES &BECOMING:

THE EMERGENCE &

PERSISTENCE OF RACE
ANT102 M4 2023 INTRODUCTION TO THEORY IN ANTHROPOLOGY: CLASSIFICATION AND
CONSEQUENCE
DR DOMINIQUE SANTOS D.SANTOS@RU.AC.ZA
 Race as Biology or Racial Science?

• Key period of late eighteenth and nineteenth century:

scientific expansion coincided with imperial expansion.

• Scientific racism = the creation of race as an idea, or the

creation of very idea that there are distinct races, and that
these distinctions represent higher and lower stages of
human evolution.

• Scientific racism did not simply justify racial inequality (as

natural) but gave moral legitimacy to slavery, empire and
apartheid.
 SOCIAL /BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE AS
•
•
RACIAL
Anthropology’sSCIENCE
origins intertwined with scientific racism.
Speculations on classifying people in hierarchical, racial categories –
powerfully natuaralises race and inequality as biological fact.
• Counter- narrative from within anthropology/sociology right from
the start – ideas about race classification and hierarchy which
characterised early anthropological thought are refuted right from
the start (Ref Mignola – De-coloniality begins with Coloniality)
• Antenor Firmin - De l'égalité des races humaines (1885) (English:
On the Equality of Human Races), was published as a rebuttal to
French writer Count Arthur de Gobineau's work
Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (English: Essay on the
Inequality of Human Races)
SOCIAL SCIENCE /NATURAL
SCIENCE AS RACIAL SCIENCE

• This scientific history can also be understood as part of

the history of sociology and anthropology.
• EG - Francis Galton (Charles Darwin’s cousin) was not
only central to the history of Eugenics in Britain, but
participated in The Sociological Society in the early 20th
century.
• He formed part of what has been identified as a “school
of racial sociologists.” See:
http://www.dfte.co.uk/ios/early20.htm.
• Cuvier – French Naturalist – influential classification of
species. Morbid fascination with Sarah Baartman
SCIENCE, RACE AND EMPIRE
• Foucault History of Sexuality describes
power as ‘an incitement to discourse’.

• Colonial Era is a time of proliferation or

multiplication of discourses. Accounts for
the truth of the ‘colonized’ by the
formation of scientific classifications and
typologies.

• Technologies of measuring difference by

measuring the bodies of others.

• History of ideas (of race) is thus also a

history made up of bodies (who lived, who
breathed).

Image from Nott and Glidden, Types of Mankind

(1854)
 THE CIVILISING MISSION
• Empire justified as a moral project: to
bring the others into the light/
enlightenment (‘the white man’s burden’).

• Empire justified as a gift.

• How do these ideas continue into the

present? Development paradigms.

• How did ideas about race begin to travel

further?

• Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather

(1995)
– Explores the extension of racial vocabulary
into the popular domain through
commodity culture, in particular self-
claening products
RACE: ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF A
WORLDVIEW
Audrey Smedley (1997) Origin and Evolution of a
Worldview
• Race is an illusion with a lot of social power – ideas of
race, and racial inferiority and superiority developed
through plantation economies exported around the world

“All anthropologists should understand

that “race” has no intrinsic relationship to
human biological diversity, that such
diversity is a natural product of primarily
evolutionary forces while ‘race’ is a social
invention”
 EMERGENCE OF RACE AS AN IDEA
American Anthropologist Audrey Smedley “Race the Power
of an Illusion”
• Race doesn’t really exisit in the way it is understood today
prior to the 18th century
• Emergence of solidified ideas of races (eg ‘Black’ or
‘White’ races) intertwined with growth of plantation
slavery
• Market for sugar grows hugely in 18 th Century – demand
for labour increases. African workers most valued
(African artisanship, work ethic, resistance to tropical
diseases are positive attributes) compared to enslaved Irish
and Indian workers – increase in the trade in African
people to accommodate increased labour demands.
• Anti-slavery movement met with powerful pro-slavery
movement emphasizing the less-than human qualities of
African people – ideological warfare.
APARTHEID, SCIENTIFIC RACISM &
VOLKEKUNDE
HOMELANDS, HARLEM & HOLLYWOOD (ROB NIXON
1994)
Erasmus, Z., 2017. Race otherwise: Forging a new humanism for South Africa. NYU Press.

Mellet, P.T., 2020. The lie of 1652: A decolonised history of land. Tafelberg.

Nixon, R., 2022. Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African culture and the world beyond (Vol. 15). Taylor & Francis.

Bonner, P., Delius, P. and Posel, D., 1935. The shaping of apartheid: Contradiction, continuity and popular struggle. Apartheid's
genesis, 1962, pp.1-41.
IF RACE DOESN’T EXIST,
WHY DOES IT STILL MATTER ?
BLOOD TYPES AND
COMPATIBILITY
ON THE PERSISTENCE OF RACE AND RACISM AND
THEIR CONSEQUENCES
BLOODLINES, BLOODTYPES AND
IDENTITY
• 1900 – Karl Landsteiner led the research
identifying that blood could be divided into
distinctive groups with different qualities
• Big impact
• Clinical medicine – organ transplants and blood
transfusions now more safe and possible
• Forensic science- could establish if blood at
crime scene was human/animal/type of blood
• Legal determinations of maternity and paternity
• New ways to differentiate and align between
people
 THE PERSISTENCE OF RACIAL THINKING

• Anthropologist Susan Lederer (2013) – Bloodlines: blood types, identity

and association in twentieth-century America
• Discovery of different blood types fed into racial thinking and search for
biological tests to distinguish the blood of different races (a classification
system born out of 18th/19th century scientific racism)
• Blood types crossed socially constructed racial boundaries
• Blood donation became a social practice to ensure transfusions could
happen
• The American Red Cross refused donations from African- Americans –
later, marked cards with racial types

“Social typologies trumped scientific

typologies” (Lederer 2013)
Lederer, S.E., 2013. Bloodlines: blood types, identity, and association in
twentieth‐century A merica. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute,
19, pp.S118-S129.
RACE AND THE
COMMODIFICATION OF
FERTILITY
RACE AND COMMODIFICATION OF
FERTILITY

• Anthropologist Daisy Deomampo explores how race plays a

role in determining the value of eggs for fertility treatments.
• Ethnographic fieldwork in an egg bank in Hawai’i – a
racially heterogenous population (‘Mixed’ – Indigenous
Hawaaian, Asian, European, African)
• ‘Pure’ Caucasian and Asian eggs the most valuable, and rarer.
• Racial work done in the classification of human body parts,
substances, fluids which are commodified in a market
economy
• Race is constructed, assigned value and commodified -
Intertwined processes of racialization and commodification
 SELLING EGGS IN HAWAI’I

“Chinese, Japanese, Korean,

Vietnamese. Those types of Asians.
And Caucasians. Those are the most
popular. That’s usually the biggest
factor when recipients are deciding
what egg donor they choose. So of
course we are trying to recruit more
for those populations because those
are the ones that are going to be
bought – as bad as that sounds! But
then because we’re in Hawai‘i, there
are a lot more local people; so mixed,
less educated people, those are the
ones that are volunteering.”
Interview with Informant at Hawai’ian Egg Bank
Reference: Daisy Deomampo (2019) Racialized
Commodities: Race and Value in Human Egg
Donation, Medical Anthropology, 38:7, 620-633
THE DANGERS OF
EMBODYING
AMBIGUITY
BEING ‘MATTER OUT OF PLACE’
PURITY AND DANGER

• What are the dangers (and potential) of embodying ambiguity in rigid racial systems?

• Victor Turner (1967) ‘Betwixt and Between’ in The Forest of Symbols

• Mary Douglas (1966) – Purity and Danger – notions of purity, pollution and the danger to the logic of
race as self-evident posed by people whose bodies or experience fall ’out of place’

• Danger also to the people who fall ‘out of place’- Sandra Laing

• Potential – people and experiences that are ‘out of place’ in racial classification systems also show the
instability of racial categories – so while these categorisations may draw on differences in people’s
bodies to claim authority, they too are emergent and contested.
POLITICS OF PURITY

Ref: Michael J. Monahan (2011)

The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics
of Purity
• Notions of race rely on ideas of purity of racial
‘belonging’ for their salience
• This can include counter narratives that seek to
redress negative associations with some racial
groups
• Don’t ‘see’ race until you’re on the wrong side of it,
or don’t fit in.
• ‘Cis Racial’ – phenotypiocal appearance and social
context fits with existing social typologies of race
BEING OUT OF
PLACE/IN PLACE
UNDER APARTHEID
WAITING: ETHNOGRAPHY OF WHITENESS
• Vincent Crapanzano (1984) Waiting: the Whites
of South Africa
• Ethnography of a ‘white’ community in the
Western Cape during the last decade of apartheid
• Quality of stagnation and ‘waiting’ for something
to happen. Isolation from other communities.
Fearful and paranoid/in limbo (liminality).
• What historical and beaurocratic process had
isolated them in this way, separating them from
other people? (who lived close by in townships,
and worked in their homes and businesses)
• Psychological and social impacts of this isolation
from wider society
TORQUE
• Bowker and Star (1999) Sorting Things Out Hannah Arendt (1963)– ‘The Banality of Evil’
– Classification systems are often sites of social Report on Eichmann in Jerusalem
and political struggle “The quiet bureaucrat ‘just following orders’ is in
– Politically and socially charged classification a way more chilling than the expected monster”
agendas (such as apartheid) often presented
first at a technical level
– Makes them difficult to see and matter-of-fact
– Stubborn refusal of race to fit the
classification system developed by apartheid
– TORQUE – interaction of classification
systems and biography
APARTHEID & TORQUE

• Racilaised legislation existed in South Africa prior to apartheid

• 1913 Land Act – ‘expropriation of land without compensation’
• Sol Plaatjie – Recorded effects on social and economic lives of those displaced by
the effect – early South African ethnography
• 1948 – National Party came into power – much more detailed and rigid
legislation
• Obsession with order and control
• 1950 Population Registration Act/ Group Areas Act (followed by Immorality
Act )
• People to be strictly classified by race group.
• This would determine here you could live, work and who you could be intimate
with – lasted 4 decades
• Comprehensive surveilence system disproportionately affected those classified as
‘native’ or ‘black’
PURITY AND DANGER (AGAIN)
“Many people did not conform to the typologies constructed under the law: especially
people whose appearance differed from their assigned category, or who lived with or
were related to, those of another race, spoke a different language from the assigned
group, or had some other historical deviation from the pure type” Bowker & Star

• Case of Sandra Laing – Physical appearance did not fit with the white Afrikaans
family she was born into.
• Re-classified as ‘Coloured’ after starting school (reported by school authorities)
• Family went to court to have classification reversed back to ‘White’ – but racism in
society continued
• Tragic (and dangerous) consequences for her life course due to not fitting clearly
into defined categories of race/notions of racial purity and boundedness.
•Parents upholding apartheid logic by trying to get their darker skinned child classified
as white. Torque – strain as their biographies try to fit a system that can’t/won’t
accommodate them.

(We will watch Skin, film about the Laing family on Thursday)
CROSSING CLASSIFICATIONS/BEING
CROSSED BY CLASSIFICATIONS
• Many examples of people manipulating categories
in order to live with their own family/obtain social
mobility
• Ernest Cole – classified as ‘Native/Black’ – got
himself reclassified as ‘Coloured’ so he could have
more physical mobility (no pass book) in order to
pursue his career as a photographer.
• His photographs document the intricacies of
everyday life under apartheid. Travelled to the
USA and documented segregated life in the
Southern states.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ernest-coles-
photographs-reveal-americas-apartheid-c7z9xcqwp
 MESHWORKS
Ref: Tim Ingold (2016) On Human Correspondence
• Theoretical concept of ‘Meshworks’ to understand the
workings of social formations and experience, and the shifting
parameters of classifications of the body.
• Moves away from rigid categories
• Helps to see biological differences in appearance as a
continuum, rather than discrete and separate entities –where
does ‘race’ begin and end?
• The notion of meshworks and the continuum is also helpful to
think about experiences of gender and sex
• There is enormous mobility in individual experiences of race
(and gender) – at what point does your body ‘feel’ more raced?
When does it not? Does your experience of your ‘raced
(marked) body’ shift according to where you are and who you
are with?

Ingold, T., 2017. On human correspondence. Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute, 23(1), pp.9-27.
SKIN (2008)
FILM ABOUT LAING FAMILY
HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=HHM19L0CWM4