Cultural components in the concept of race / Edmund R. Leach.

  • Leach, E. R. (Edmund Ronald), 1910-1989.
Date:
[1974]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Cultural components in the concept of race / Edmund R. Leach. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/11 (page 12)
    Anatomical difference is a convenient rather than a necessary com ponent of race prejudice. There have been many historical instances in which the focus of hostility was a difference of custom rather than a “real” difference of physique, such as skin colour. But in any situation of race prejudice, the essential idea is always that the subordinate group, which is to be deprived of the full social rights of “people like us”, constitutes “a breed apart”. If it so happens that the members of the group in question actually look different physically than this provides a focus ready made and makes it all the easier to preserve the prejudice. Whether the prejudice eventually dissipates itself through social integration or is perpetuated indefinitely from generation to generation depends on the structure of the social system as a whole rather than on the continued existence of any visible stigma. The burakumin of Japan have been treated as a race apart and confined to a ghetto type existence for well over a thousand years, but they look no different from anyone else. Compared with that dismal story our own recent social history suggests a more favourable prognosis. Contrary to our own self image we are a most intolerant society and the periodic outbursts of persecu tion against Jews and “aliens” of all kinds do us no credit at all. But there have been a number of occasions during the past 500 years when London, in particular, contained large visible “coloured” populations which were temporarily the object of venomous discrimination. The fact that in most cases these groups somehow disappeared after a few decades is encouraging. More recent history points in the same direction. Twice during the past century there has been a large influx of population from Poland and the former Baltic states into Great Britain. The first, at the end of the 19th Century, was mainly Jewish and for fifty years the social problems connected with their assimilation was perceived by the general public as a problem of “race”. Anti-semitism is still around in this country but no one 1 imagine would claim that it still lies at the heart of our “race problem”. The second wave of Baltic immigrants came here during and after the last World War and they seem to have melted into the social landscape without arousing racial hostility at all. The point is, I suppose, that because a high level of social mobility is the norm rather than the exception in British society, any under privileged minority quite quickly tends to lose its self-evident identity. A Jew of Polish origin, or the grandson of a Latvian can only be recog nised as such if the individual concerned chooses to declare himself. But a Sikh who wears a beard and a turban, an Indian woman who wears a sari, and a West Indian with a dark skin can be recognised at sight. That is where the English folk-concept of race now finds its focus, but since a very large part of the “visibility” of the people concerned depends upon custom rather than anatomy this particular set of associ ations could well be transitory. We simply do not know. Incidentally, as the examples I have already cited indicate, race concepts in folk taxonomy have a marked tendency to be bi-polar. For the Ancient Egyptians men were free or slave, red or black. Admit tedly contemporary South Africa distinguishes White, Black and Coloured but for most purposes the Coloured category gets pushed down into the Black. And so too with ourselves. However complex the facts of the case may be, we manage to reduce it to a binary opposi tion “black” versus “white”. The expression “black immigrant”, like the word race itself, is so marvellously elastic that it is made to include people of West Indian, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese and African ethnic origin, many of whom were born in this country anyway. This brings me back more or less to where I began. At the beginning of the paper I formed the conclusion that while race difference is a manifest fact which can be objectively measured either by a study of morphology or a study of genetics, races as such are arbitrary entities with no “objective” existence at all. This is because morphology and genetics lead us to divide up the continuum in quite different ways. Now at the end of my paper I am saying the same sort of thing about our use of the concept of race. We use the concept to discriminate a variety of different sorts of previously existing social collectivity, but we are able to do so only because the isolate concept a race has no explicit “objective” meaning whatsoever. References birdsell, j. B. (1972). Human Evolution: An Introduction to the New Physical Anthropology. Rand McNally & Company, Chicago. buettner-janusch, J. (1966). Origins of Man: Physical Anthropology. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York. buettner-janusch, j. (1973). Physical Anthropology: A Perspective. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York. hooton, e. A. (1947). Up from the Ape. The Macmillan Company, New York.