George Hunt and the invention of Kwakiutl culture

Get article décrit la carrière de George Hunt, collaborateur de Franz Boas et assistant de recherche de plusieurs autres ethnographes de la Côte Nord-Ouest. On y examine, sa méthodologie, ses rapports avec ses informateurs et avec Boas et, dans la mesure ou cela peut ressortir des sources documentaires, son attitude envers son travail. On discute aussi certains aspects spécifiques de sa vie privée, afin d'essayer de comprendre comment il a pu développer des talents d'ethnographe aussi remarquables. En conclusion, l'article présente une analyse de la contribution de Hunt à la définition anthropologique de sa culture, analyse qui met en lumiere le rôle important qu'il a joué dans 'l'invention' des Kwakiutl en tant qu'entité ethnographique.
This paper outlines the career of George Hunt, collaborator of Franz Boas and research assistant to several other Northwest Coast ethnographers. His methodology, his relationship with informants and Boas, and his attitudes toward his work are all considered, as far as possible working from documentary sources. The particular dimensions of his personal biography are discussed in an attempt to suggest how he developed such a remarkable expertise as an ethnographer. In conclusion, an analysis of Hunt's contribution to the anthropological view of this culture will be offered, one which centres on his important role in the 'invention' of the Kwakiutl as an ethnographic entity.     

The invention and promotion of cha-rye in Korea

Cha-rye (tea etiquette), now considered representative of Korean tea culture, is a new tradition developed during the Park Chung-hee government (1961–1979) and subsequently promoted nationally and internationally. With Korea's rapid industrialization and modernization in the 1960s and 1970s, traditional culture began to disintegrate, which caused various social problems and resulted in ethical and moral confusion among the people. A tea culture revival was proposed by some tea masters as a solution for the chaos in society, and cha-rye was designated a “tradition” to be restored. Anti-Japanese nationalist ideology proved a good facilitator for the transformation of Korean traditional culture, but controversies based in practical limitations arose among tea masters in the process of establishing a Korean-style tea spirit and practice. The re-invention of cha-rye demonstrates how a tradition has been created through the complex and multi-layered dynamics of Korea's rapidly changing political and social environment in combination with nationalist ideology.     

Youth homelessness and the racial knowledge gap

We know relatively little about homeless youth of color. Despite comprising almost three-quarters of the homeless youth population in the United States, youth of color, along with their unique needs, experiences, and wellbeing, have seldom been the subject of sustained and critical empirical inquiry. For example, in the context of education, the ways in which grade point averages, frequency of school change, and graduation rates may differ between homeless youth in general and homeless youth of color remain unknown. Even if we were to take the liberty of extending the existing comparative research regarding general student performance, the best we can surmise is that homeless youth of color fare worse according to all of these traditional success standards, but we haven’t the faintest idea how much worse or why. When it comes to vital questions about the wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable children in America, we are, at worst, asleep at the wheel and, at best, stumbling in the dark. On its surface, the “racial knowledge gap” appears to be a yawning expanse of missing information enveloped by a hazy mist of imprecise data interpretation, the meaning and significance of which I expound upon in this brief.     

Political correctness and the study of racial differences

I tabulate international data showing Africans and Asians scoring at opposite ends of a continuum with Europeans falling in the middle. This Asian-European-African gradient occurs in mean scores on a long list of characteristics including brain size, crime, sex hormones, sexual behavior, personality, family stability, speed of physical maturation, twinning rate, and social organization. It seems to me that only evolutionary theories are able to fully explain the consistency of the pattern across so many variables. Theories about social inequalities and social problems may need to be revised in the light of this new information. This challenge to the social science orthodoxy brought political correctness out in force against me, some examples of which I document here. However, numerous benefits derive from studying race particularly in the field of medicine which I illustrate with special emphasis on AIDS. I conclude that if more scientists would speak openly about the views they now voice only in private, our world would become not only a safer place, but a more enlightened one as well.     

The invention of religion: Aspects of the South African case

This paper examines the role played by popular culture in response to the effects of the unfolding social and political repression on the ordinary Zimbabwean after 2000. The arts is one sector where the Zimbabwean government fostered its repressive hegemony. An urban youth music genre called ‘urban grooves’ rose to prominence during the period under focus here and some of the artists colluded with the government in propagating an anti‐Western imperialism campaign. This paper evaluates the nature of the genre’s performance practices and its role in the government’s anti‐Western imperialism campaign. It also discusses the complexities associated with notions of complicity and resistance as urban grooves artists resisted both Western hegemony, as per the government’s campaign, and subverted the same government’s censorship of the urban youth’s and the general society’s imaginary and other freedoms.     

Industry racial employment by skill level: The effects of market structure and racial wage gaps

Theories of expense preference suggest that market power gives employers the latitude to engage in employment discrimination. Additionally, labor market theory indicates that discrimination should cause a larger decline in black employment for prevalent and easily replaced low-skill workers relative to scarce, high-skill workers. Using industry-level data, we examine the relationship between worker skill level, market structure, and racial employment and we find that noncompetitive market structure reduces black employment for low-skill workers. In general, our findings indicate that market structure has less influence on the racial composition of highly trained workers relative to easily replaced low-skill workers     

An examination of the propensity of women and racial minorities to specialize in sex/gender and racial/ethnic relation studies

Since scientists may study topics that are of personal interest to them it seems reasonable that women and racial minorities respectively are more likely to study sexism and racism. One would expect a disproportionate number of women and ethnic minorities to, respectively, belong to the sex/gender and race/ethnic specializations. Information from a 1991 survey of American socilogists confirms this prediction.     

The creative economy: invention of a global orthodoxy

This essay considers how policy thinking about culture has been steadily transformed into an overwhelmingly economic subject matter whose central trope is the “creative economy”. The development of current ideas and their background are discussed. Policy ideas first fully developed in the UK have had a global resonance: the illustrative examples of the European Union and the United Nations are discussed. The embedding of creative economy thinking in British cultural institutions such as the BBC and cultural support bodies is illustrated. The impact of current orthodoxy on academic institutions and research is also considered. Countervailing trends are weak. New thinking is now required.     

The location of ethnic and racial groups in the United States

The distinctive regional and urban locational patterns of thirty-three ethnic groups in the United States are analyzed from two different perspectives. First, who are the numerically important groups in each region? Second, from the perspective of the groups themselves, where are they spatially concentrated? We hypothesize that the forces generating distinctive ethnic locational patterns are strongest at the time of the initial settlement; thus the longer a group has been present in the United States, the less geographically concentrated it will be. This is found to be true for most ethnic groups except blacks and American Indians, whose specific social and political situations explain their particular concentrations. However, the early settlement patterns still affect the ethnic makeup of various areas of the nation, even though the concentrations have diminished over time. Moreover, although the 1975–1980 patterns of internal migration (analyzed through a Markov Chain model) are tending to reduce some of the distinctive geographic concentrations in the nation, this will still not fully eliminate distinctive ethnic concentrations. Groups differ in their propensities to leave or enter each area in a way that reflects the existing ethnic compositions of the areas. Thus even with the massive level of internal migration in the nation, there is no evidence that the substantial ethnic linkage to region is disappearing.     

Reconstituting racial histories and identities: the narratives of interracial couples

This study explores the process by which interracial spouses construct narratives about their racial histories, identities, and experiences in their relationship together. Ten black-white couples were interviewed individually and conjointly. The results reflected interracial spouses' experience of their life together, their perception of others' perceptions of them, and their unique processes of negotiating racial, gender, and class differences. Black spouses, compared with white spouses, demonstrated a greater awareness of and sensitivity to social resistance to interracial couples, and black spouses' familial and personal histories were sometimes relegated to silence in the couple relationship. I discuss recommendations for marriage and family therapists working with interracial spouses.     

Assimilation and stratification in the homeownership patterns of racial and ethnic groups

"This study investigates homeownership differences among twelve racial/ethnic groups using the [U.S.] Public Use Sample data (PUMS) of the 1980 census.... The study identifies a number of differences among non-Hispanic whites, blacks, American Indians, and Asian and Hispanic groups in access to homeownership.... For every group there is a strong correspondence between homeownership and various individual-level factors: age, household composition, socioeconomic position and language acculturation. The observed differences in ownership are substantially attenuated when group differences in some of these variables are controlled."     

Global gendered anti-Black belonging and racial ideology

We review theorizations of gendered anti-Blackness and the scholarship on the politics of belonging. Bridging together this literature, we propose gendered anti-Black non-belonging as an alternative framework for addressing African descendant women's expressions and realities of belonging in the United States and Portugal. We select these two cases for their remarkably distinct—yet related—racial ideologies of the state. In the United States, colorblindness is the main ideology of the state whereas in Portugal anti-racial ideology pervades. As we will highlight, the experiences of belonging among African descendant women in the United States and Portugal challenge the veracity of these racial ideologies which work to render gendered anti-Black oppression invisible. In both cases, anti-Black non-belonging means that African descendant women are vulnerable to gendered state violence and racist practices impacting their individual and group belonging; as a result, the right for Black bodies to be in a particular place and space is constantly contested, and, often, violently regulated and disciplined. Yet, anti-Black belonging is both a matter of oppression and resistance. African-descendant women draw from their everyday knowledge of domination to employ resistance. In doing so, as we will argue, they rewrite the national narrative of race, gender and belonging in Portugal and the United States.     

Challenging a culture of racial equivalence

We live at a time when our understandings and conceptualizations of ‘racism’ are often highly imprecise, broad, and used to describe a wide range of racialized phenomena. In this article, I raise some important questions about how the term racism is used and understood in contemporary British society by drawing on some recent cases of alleged racism in football and politics, many of which have been played out via new media technologies. A broader understanding of racism, through the use of the term ‘racialization’, has been helpful in articulating a more nuanced and complex understanding of racial incidents, especially of people's (often ambivalent) beliefs and behaviours. However, the growing emphasis upon ‘racialization’ has led to a conceptualization of racism which increasingly involves multiple perpetrators, victims, and practices without enough consideration of how and why particular interactions and practices constitute racism as such. The trend toward a growing culture of racial equivalence is worrying, as it denudes the idea of racism of its historical basis, severity and power. These frequent and commonplace assertions of racism in the public sphere paradoxically end up trivializing and homogenizing quite different forms of racialized interactions. I conclude that we need to retain the term ‘racism’, but we need to differentiate more clearly between ‘racism’ (as an historical and structured system of domination) from the broader notion of ‘racialization’.     

Invisible no more: White racialization and the localness of racial identity

What does it mean to be white? How do whites see themselves and other white people, racially? These are empirical questions, questions that sociologists have spent decades trying to answer. Among numerous findings, none have been as pronounced as white racelessness; the theory that whites possess invisible, or raceless, identities. Despite its influence on our understanding of race, the construction of whiteness as an invisible identity has been called into question, as a number of scholars, past and present, focus more on the local dynamics of white racialization. For a growing cross-section of whites, modern cultural and demographic change has shattered the illusion of white normality, causing them to confront their own racial identities in intimate and explicit ways. How do these and other whites respond to being seen as white? Though adept at detailing the way whites conceptualize white racial identity, generally, sociologists have been far less successful in examining how whites conceptualize white racial identity, locally. In this article, after reviewing both general and local constructions of white racial identity, I argue that going forward, researchers need to dispense with contextual overgeneralizations and focus more the localness of white identity formation.     

The Hobo Anomalous: Class,minorities and political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World

This article is an analysis of minority political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Against the tendency in recent social and cultural theory to dichotomize class and difference, it argues that it was in and through the IWW's formulation of class that minority political and cultural invention occurred. Using the framework of Deleuze and Guattari's minor politics, the article shows how the IWW's composition in the simultaneously diffuse and cramped plane of work operated against the major political identities and subjects of worker, immigrant, American, citizen and 'people', and towards the creation of minority political knowledges, tactics and cultural styles premised on the condition that 'the people are missing'. Seeking to understand the IWW's modes and techniques of invention, the article explores the general plane of IWW composition, its particular political and cultural expressions (in songs, manifestos, cartoons and tactics), and its minor mode of authorship. The article focuses in particular on two aspects of IWW minority composition, the itinerant worker, or hobo, and the politics of sabotage.     

Two accounts of the management of racial different in psychotherapy

Abstract

In this paper, the authors present material from their clinical work, in which racial difference impinges directly on the psychotherapeutic encounter. They examine the primitive origins of racism from a psychoanalytic view point and discuss their management of related issues within the framework of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Part of a session from a psychotherapy group is described by Sue Davison, in which one member is excluded as part of a dramatisation entered into by all the group members for defensive purposes. The therapist, by calling attention to the painful reality which was banished from awareness, enabled the group members to recover their capacity to think, rather than re-enact the trauma.

The case study by Fakhry Davids describes work with a woman whose struggle in life is against a racist, intolerant mother. This mother is projected onto her black therapist, and a session is described in which the dynamics of this projection begin to be unravelled. Her therapist is experienced as an intolerant, oppressive mother to whom the patient's own hatred and intolerance has become attached, and the patient is enabled to take back some of these projections. The defences she uses illustrate a common way in which so-called “liberals” disown their hidden racism.     

Three current issues in ethnic and racial studies

Prevailing orthodoxies in British studies of ethnic and racial relations have been challenged, most recently by perspectives developed within cultural studies. The issues that divide the contending parties have still to be clarified. Three of them appear to be: (i) problem definition; (ii) problem selection; and (iii) conceptual obsolescence.