Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture

Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth.
Table of contents


  • Secrets of Special Ops Leadership: Dare the Impossible -- Achieve the Extraordinary.
  • The Constructor: Poems!
  • JSTOR: Access Check;
  • .
  • Dysfunctional / life journeys of a second generation jazz musician.
  • This Is What A Kiss Is!
  • Additional Information.

Baker's argument is pursued through several interrelated questions that, consistently maintained, are the integrity of the book as a whole. These include scholarly inquisitions into political motivations, key debates around racism and inequalities, and the differences in response to anthropology's gaze by "self-identified Negro elites" compared with those of "self-identified Indian elites," to point out a few.

Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture: An Interview with Lee D. Baker

The first chapter, "Research, Reform, and Racial Uplift," focuses on how black educators and white reformers utilized anthropology in mobilizing an uplift narrative for African Americans. It emphasizes the emergence of folklore studies in connection with movements of racial uplift in fostering the maturation of Negroes into a state of civilization amidst this peculiar age of American empire.

Charting contributions to the development of the American Folk-Lore Society through key patrons, proponents, and organizations—such as Andrew W.

Bassettle, Elsie Clews Parsons, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, William Wells Newell, and Franz Boas—the author notes how "few historians of anthropology have specifically explored the role of the field in the late nineteenth-century club and racial uplift movements within African American communities" A key factor is how "[T]he ethnology of Negro culture was used in diverse ways to play a small but significant part in the complex and ever-changing racial politics of culture" Chapter 2, "Fabricating the Authentic and the Politics of the Real," presents the political and collaborative work of James Mooney who challenged both the Christian civilization movement and the assimilationist programs of the government.

Here Baker emphasizes the marginalization of Mooney due to his advocacy for Indian rights.

Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture | Duke University Press

The major theme of this chapter is how anthropologists neglected the study of African American cultures, while they worked energetically in the study of American Indian cultures. This phenomenon constitutes a racial politics driven by a higher scientific value assigned to Indian cultures over African American ones. For book covers to accompany reviews, please contact the publicity department.

Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here. In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not.

Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture , Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated and misappropriated to wildly different ends.

He is the author of From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, — and the editor of Life in America: Identity in Everyday Experience.

Published by

Sign up for Subject Matters email updates to receive discounts, new book announcements, and more. Create a reading list or add to an existing list. Sign-in or register now to continue. Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture Author s: At the outset, Baker states that his intention is—to use his words—"demonstrate how and why anthropological concepts, particularly race and culture, have been lovingly adopted by some and disgracefully rejected by others; in each case it is often in the service of a specific political agenda" As a consequence, the major subjects of his essays—though primarily middle-class reformers—are a motley group.

They include such persons as Alice M.

Bacon, James Mooney, Jr. Brinton, and Franz Boas. These persons ranged from accommodationist racist to liberals. None were radical racists like the Southern politicians Benjamin R. Tillman and James K.

Access Check

Some of them Bacon and Mooney used culture "to promote racial uplift among African Americans and to contest it among American Indians"