PART Introduction to Cultural Anthropology - Pearson Canada

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Race, Ethnicity, and Indigenous People Race refers to groups of people with supposedly homogenous biological traits. However, race is a culturally constructed category, not a biological reality. In South Africa, race is mainly defined on the basis of skin colour. In pre-twentieth-century China, however, the basis of racial classification was body hair (Dikötter 1998). Greater amounts of body hair were associated with “barbarian” races and the lack of “civilization.” Chinese writers described male missionaries from Europe, with their beards, as “hairy barbarians.” Even in the twentieth century, some Chinese anthropologists and sociologists divided humans into evolutionary stages on the basis of their body hair. One survey of humankind provided a detailed classification on the basis of types of beards, whiskers, and moustaches. Physical features do not explain or account for behaviour or ideas, as Franz Boas proved a century ago. Instead, the fact of being placed in a particular racial category and the status of that category in society are what explain racial behaviours and ideas. Rather than being a biological category, race in the anthropological view is a cultural or social category just like class. People’s perceptions about race and their use of racial differences may result in racism, discrimination and marginality of certain groups. Racial differentiation has been the basis for some of the most invidious oppression and cruelty throughout history. A concept of racial purity inspired Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to pursue his program of exterminating Jews and others who were not of the Aryan “race.” Racial apartheid in South Africa denied citizenship, security, and a decent life to all those labelled non-white (including, for example, “blacks” and “coloureds”). Ethnicity refers to a sense of group affiliation based on a distinct heritage or worldview as a “people,” for example, Caribbean Canadians or Italian Canadians, the Croats of Eastern Europe, and the Han people of China. This sense of identity can be vigorously expressed through political movements or more quietly stated. It can be a basis for social ranking, claimed entitlements to resources such as land or artifacts, and a basis for defending or retrieving those resources. Compared to the term race, ethnicity is often used as a more neutral or even positive term. But ethnicity has often been a basis for discrimination, segregation, and oppression. The “ethnic cleansing” campaigns conducted in the early 1990s by the Serbs against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia are an extreme case of ethnic discrimination. Expression of ethnic identity has been politically suppressed in many cultures, such as that of the Tibetans in China. Tibetan refugees living outside Tibet are struggling to keep their ethnic heritage alive. Among First Nations groups in contemporary Canada, a shared ethnicity is one basis for cultural and spiritual revival. Indigenous peoples, following guidelines laid down by the United Nations, are defined as groups who have a long-standing connection with their home territory predating colonial or other societies that prevail in their territory (Sanders 1999). They are typically a numerical minority and often have lost the rights to their original territory. The United Nations distinguishes between indigenous peoples and minority ethnic groups such as the Roma, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, and African Americans. This distinction is more useful in some contexts than others (Maybury-Lewis 1997b). The San peoples of Southern Africa, and their several subgroups, are an important example of indigenous peoples whose way of life was dramatically affected by colonialism and now by globalization (see the Ethnographic Profile). A drawing of an Ainu (indigenous) person of Japan in a Chinese anthropology textbook published in 1918. Gender Gender refers to patterns of culturally constructed and learned behaviours and ideas attributed to males, females, or sometimes a blended or “third gender.” Thus, gender variability can be contrasted to sex, which uses biological markers to define the categories of male and female. Sex determination relies on genital, chromosomal, and hormonal distributions and, thus, depends on Western science to determine who is male or female. Cultural anthropology shows that a person’s biological makeup does not necessarily correspond to gender. A simple example is that in the West, people tend to associate the activity of sewing with women, but in many other areas of the world, sewing (or tailoring) is mainly CHAPTER 1 ■ Anthropology and the Study of Culture 21
Ethnographic Profile San Peoples of Southern Africa San is a cluster name for many groups of southern Africa who speak related languages, all having glottal click sounds. Around 2000 years ago, the San were the only people living in southern Africa, but today they are restricted to scattered locations throughout the region. European colonialists referred to San people as Bushmen, a derogatory term at the time but one that San people now prefer over what some locals call them. Some San also refer to themselves with the English language term First People. For many centuries, the San supported themselves through collecting food such as roots and birds’ eggs and by hunting eland, giraffe, and other animals. Now, pressure from African governments, farmers, ranchers, game reserves, diamond companies, and international tourism have greatly reduced the San’s access to their ancestral land and their ability to survive. Some have been arrested for hunting on what they consider their land. The Ju/’hoansi (“True People”) are a subgroup of San who live in a region crossing the borders of Namibia, Botswana, and Angola and numbering between 10 000 and 15 000 people. As described by Richard Lee in the early 1960s, they were highly mobile food collectors and quite healthy (1979). Today, many have been forced from their homeland and live as poor, urban squatters or in government-built resettlement camps. Many work as farm labourers or in the international tourist industry, serving as guides and producing and selling crafts. The specifics of their situation now depend on government policy toward indigenous foragers in the particular country where they live. Conditions are most difficult for them right now in Botswana due to forced sedentarization. Transnational advocacy organizations, including Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) and First People of the Kalahari (FPK), are making progress in protecting the rights of San peoples. Recently, WIMSA waged an international legal case with a large pharmaceutical company and succeeded in ensuring that the San receive a portion of the profits from the commercial development of hoodia (Hoodia gordonia). Hoodia is extracted from a cactus indigenous to the Kalahari region. An effective appetite suppressant, it is now widely available in North America and on the Internet as a diet pill. Readings Richard Katz, Megan Biesele, and Verna St. Denis. Healing Makes Our Hearts Happy: Spirituality and Cultural Transformation among the Kalahari Ju/’hoansi. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1997. Sidsel Saugestad. The Inconvenient Indigenous: Remote Area Development in Botswana, Donor Assistance, and the First People of the Kalahari. Uppsala, Sweden: The Nordic Afrika Institute, 2001. Marjorie Shostak. Nisa: The Life and Times of a !Kung Woman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Video Bushmen of the Kalahari: A Bushman Story (National Geographic Videos, 1973). Website The Kalahari Peoples Fund: www.kalaharipeoples.org. Thanks to Alison Brooks, George Washington University, for reviewing this material. NAMIBIA Ju/’hoansi region BOTSWANA SOUTH AFRICA 0 250 500 Miles 0 250 500 Kilometres Richard Lee (left) asks Ju/’hoansi men about food plants of the Kalahari Desert. This photograph was taken in 1968. Lee, and many other researchers affiliated with the Harvard Kalahari Research Project, learned to speak the Ju/’hoansi language and make glottal clicks using the upper part of the larynx. ■ (Source: Stan Washburn/AnthroPhoto) San peoples have long consumed parts of the hoodia plant to suppress hunger and thirst when on long trips in the desert (right). Now, they cultivate it for commercial use in a diet pill. ■ (Source: Louise Gubb/CORBIS) MAP 1.5 Ju/’hoansi Region in Namibia and Botswana. Before country boundaries were drawn, the Ju/’hoansi freely ranged across their traditional territory (shaded area), depending on the seasonal availability of food and water. Now, they must show a passport when crossing from one country to another. 22
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