Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

identity construct #1: race 95
groups, which do. The statement “race is a social construction” does not
draw that distinction, and can lead to obfuscation rather than illumination.
Several distinct meanings have been attached to the term “social construction.”
One is that the thing in question has been wrongly thought to
be a product of “natural” (biological or physical) processes when it is in fact
a product of social ones. Masculinity and femininity are frequently cited
examples. Femininity in a given society involves not merely the possession
of certain bodily organs and a particular chromosomal structure (“nature”)
but socially prescribed ways of behaving. This notion of social construction
is sometimes but not necessarily conjoined with the view that only biological
or physical entities or processes are “real” while social ones are not.
In the classic nineteenth-century sense races were purported to be natural
rather than socially constructed; for they were understood as biological
entities, in the same sense that the human species is. A racialized group,
however, is socially constructed rather than natural, a group created by social
and historical forces and treated as if it were a race.
A second meaning of “social construction” is that the thing in question
is defi ned by social convention, and so is marked by an element of arbitrariness.
Conventions of games, such as strikes, passed balls, and fi eld positions
in baseball, are examples. What makes something a strike is in a sense arbitrary.
Baseball could have developed, or been “constructed,” in such a way
that four strikes instead of three counted as an out. In this sense strikes are
indeed social constructs. But within the actual rules of baseball, it is not arbitrary
that a particular pitched ball is a strike rather than a ball. Strikes are
perfectly real; one simply has to understand the sort of convention-bound
reality they possess.
An example of social construction more relevant to race is that of nations,
which are historically contingent human creations that need not have
existed or developed the particular character they have. The difference between
baseball and nations is that everyone recognizes the conventional
dimension of the former but not always the latter. Nations are sometimes
talked or thought about as if they were natural human forms, primordial
communities, created by God, destined to serve an historical mission, and
the like. Rather, nations are, in Benedict Anderson’s striking phrase, “imagined
communities.” 4 Because people can forget this, and especially because
a “natural” view of nations provides fertile soil for virulent and destructive
forms of nationalism, the idea of social construction can serve to remind us
of the historically contingent character of nations. In this sense, a socialconstruction
perspective is sometimes spoken of as “denaturalizing” that
which is constructed.