RACE AND THE CULTURE OF ANTHROPOLOGY by Kamala Visweswaran: A Summary

RACE AND THE CULTURE OF ANTHROPOLOGY 

by Kamala Visweswaran, University of Texas At Austin 

                   

 

          This article written by Visweswaran is about the origin of race or racial classification with relation to the culture. As we all know that race is a biological phenomena not a cultural although it is found to be used in different aspects also. The race and culture is very much interrelated with each other. Earlier  It was a thought that race is based on culture but after UNESCO have stated the postulates of the rac. We all know that culture is not the basis of race even geographical, religion or language group or any other group of people does not makes race. It is not even based on skin colour or intelligence one have as member of the human population.

There was a period when the rise of the Brazilian race relations model in contrast to U.S. racial segregation. From the turn of the century until 1940, black leaders from Booker T. Washington to W.E.B.Du Bois visited Brazil to verify whether blacks were treated better there. There are many arguments is there related to the view that race is the surface manifestation of deeper phenomena such as class conflict. According to the writer the class is never analytically useful but that we should guard against reducing race to class positioning. The goal is to see how race structures class experience and to understand how class shapes the experience of race.

Again the ethnic group is never useful as a concept, according to Visweswaran the sociobiological and genetic bases of intelligence studies were once again the dominant paradigm because the modern concept of culture is too weak to offer substantial resistance. Indeed its political content was excavated in its initial refusal to speak of race and in its later ascendancy within the dominant ethnicity-based paradigm of the social sciences. The modern concept of culture is weak because of its inability to confront the false nature-culture split from which its very identity was drawn. To the extent that we have leaned  too heavily on a diseased culture concept, we have all contributed, indirectly, t its demises.

There are many problems about the concept of culture with race. Many scientists has presented many thought regarding this debate. The period from the end of World War I until the end of World War II actually saw the production of a number of ethnographies of race or studies of race relations within anthropology. Visweswaran has provided name of those ethnographies to make people know about that particularly. 

 

So, what the writer has concluded with is that the solution of the problem of the misunderstandings regarding the race and culture, is not to replace culture with race not the opposite one but to keep the two terms in constructivist tension with one another. The historical moment of splitting race from culture cannot be sutured, but we must learn to make a revitalized notion of culture name the conditions of that splitting, so that culture is not substituted for race and a notion of race as culturally constructed becomes as viable in anthropology as it is in ethnic and cultural studies.