Unraveling “Race” for the Twenty-First Century (original) (raw)

2019, In Exotic No More: Anthropology for the Contemporary World. Jeremy MacClancy, ed. University of Chicago Press

Anthropological studies of race and racism in relation to the cultural, political, and economic forces that coconstruct them over historical time and geographical space have proliferated over the past few decades. In good part, the heightened interest is a response to intensifying racial tensions and identities in many parts of the world. In the history of humankind, race has come to be a significant dimension of positioning and power. As an ideologically charged distinction in social stratification, race is a culturally encoded social classification applied to people presumed to share common physical or biological traits. Racial categories have been used to mark purported natural differences even in contexts of relatively ostensible homogeneity. In such cases, racially designated populations are believed to share, at least in part, some socially salient ancestry and heritable characteristics construed to be of social consequence to the dominant social order. Racially stratified societies vary in the extent to which socially salient ancestry, perceived appearance, and sociocultural status (e.g., education, income, wealth, religion)-along with varying combinations of these-are used as cri-You are reading copyrighted material published by University of Chicago Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher.