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

98 reframing latin america
not object to these expressions. Frequently, however, this social interpretation
of race reimports all the associations of radical differentness among
groups and commonality among all members of a group, excepting only the
idea that characteristics of the group are grounded in their biology. At this
point in our history, I think any conferring of reality on “race” is likely to
carry these false and invidious associations. The term “racialized groups”
is preferable as a way of acknowledging that some groups have been created
by being treated as if they were races, while also acknowledging that “race”
in its popular meaning is entirely false [. . .].
Peter Wade, RACE AND ETHNICITY IN LATIN AMERICA 5
Race and ethnicity are not terms that have fi xed referents. It is tempting to
believe in a progressivist vision of social science that leads from ignorance
towards truth—especially with the term race which, in earlier periods, was
commonly used in evidently racist ways that are now known to be manifestly
wrong. It seems obvious that post-war understandings of the term race
are now “correct.” But I argue that we have to see each term in the context
of a history of ideas, of Western institutionalized knowledge (whether social
or natural science) and of practices. Race and ethnicity are not terms that
refer to some neutral way to a transparent reality of which social science
gives us an ever more accurate picture; instead they are terms embedded in
academic, popular and political discourses that are themselves a constitutive
part of academic, popular and political relationships and practices [. . .].
Ethnicity
The term ethnicity is at once easier and more difficult: its history is shorter
and less morally loaded, but it is also used more vaguely—sometimes as a
less emotive term for race. The word ethnicity began in academic parlance
and dates from the Second World War [. . .]. Ethnicity has often been used in
place of race either because the very use of the word race has been thought
to propagate racism by implying that biological races actually exist or because,
tainted by its history, it simply “smelt bad.”
But what does ethnicity mean? Banks collects a useful set of comments
from anthropologists and concludes that ethnicity is “a collection of rather
simplistic and obvious statements about boundaries, otherness, goals and
achievements, being and identity, descent and classifi cation, that has been
constructed as much by the anthropologist as by the subject.” 6 Ethnicity is
a social construction that is centrally about identifi cations of difference and