Group items tagged

What writers like these and others commenting in a similar vein agree upon is the absence of a readily identifiable foreign national tradition among black Americans. Thus there is no cherished alternative-there is no way to go but into the American mainstream, as it appears. But Frazier and Glazer and Moynihan carry the point too far, in our terms of what culture means. An ethnic culture does not have to be foreign, and all those who are one hundred percent American are not American in the same way. There is a black culture. largely evolved in America as a response to black American conditions, just as "black" has become a term for an ethnic group only in America. As Singer (1962) describes it, there has been an ethnogenesis on American ground. [Page 196] Myrdal, has a clearer view of this fact, but in his dramatic terms he rejects the possibility that maintaining or even strengthening the separate black culture would be to the advantage of black people. Obviously there is at least some kind of a disagreement between such views and those of protagonists of cultural nationalism. Maulana Ron Karenga (1968:164) states that black people must free themselves culturally before they can succeed politically. Stokely Carmichael (1968 a:158) sees the fight for the cultural integrity of black people as one of the struggles of the black power movement. And Julius Lester (1968:84-85) suggests that white Americans have consciously attempted to commit cultural genocide ever since the days of slavery-it was impractical to let black people have a culture of their own. The nationalists clearly feel that black culture at present has too little integrity.

WE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES ARE A MIXED BREED. WE HAVE COME from all parts of the world; all races of men compose our biological aggregate. We have created an official ideology to fit this condition which declares than men of all races and all cultures are equally precious in the eyes of God and are, therefore, equal,-and here we pause for a long afterthought-"At least, they should be equal, in the thoughts and actions of men." In the second thought we see the ever-present basic conflict that permeates our way of life: a deep faith in the principles of equality which we proudly proclaim, and a fundamental, unofficial, unacknowledged, and almost guilty belief that certain Americans are the "real" ones and superior, while all others are second-class citizens and inferior. Our communities' social systems reflect this conflict when attempting to organize the lives of men who hold these opposing beliefs. Commonsense observation of these communities, buttressed by the more exact findings of social science, demonstrates that despite our equalitarian credo two types of separate and subordinate groups have emerged in the United States. All dark-skinned races with Mongoloid or Negroid ancestry are placed by our social system in subordinate groups, and all deviant cultural groups, speaking different languages, professing different faiths, and exhibiting exotic manners and customs are set apart and classed as inferior.

Here is a relatively long list of "cultural universals." 

Slave society was stratified into three castes: a small number of Whites, a smaller number of "free people of color" (generally mulattoes), and a huge Black slave population. White-minority rule led to the development of a "white bias": European phenotypic and cultural traits were more highly valued than their African or Creole counterparts. With Emancipation, the castes were transformed into classes, but the White bias persisted, resulting in a "color-class pyramid": a White upper class, a "Brown" middle class, and a Black lower-class majority. The addition of Chinese, East Indian, and Lebanese immigrants, who did not have a clear place in the color-class pyramid, made stratification more complex. Color and ethnicity still influence social interactions, but the White bias and the color-class pyramid have become less evident since the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Jamaica is still highly stratified by wealth; it has a very small, prosperous upper class, a small middle class, and a huge, impoverished lower class. In the mid-1960s Jamaica had the highest rate of income inequality in the world.

Slave society was stratified into three castes: a small number of Whites, a smaller number of "free people of color" (generally mulattoes), and a huge Black slave population. White-minority rule led to the development of a "white bias": European phenotypic and cultural traits were more highly valued than their African or Creole counterparts. With Emancipation, the castes were transformed into classes, but the White bias persisted, resulting in a "color-class pyramid": a White upper class, a "Brown" middle class, and a Black lower-class majority. The addition of Chinese, East Indian, and Lebanese immigrants, who did not have a clear place in the color-class pyramid, made stratification more complex. Color and ethnicity still influence social interactions, but the White bias and the color-class pyramid have become less evident since the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Jamaica is still highly stratified by wealth; it has a very small, prosperous upper class, a small middle class, and a huge, impoverished lower class. In the mid-1960s Jamaica had the highest rate of income inequality in the world.

Slave society was stratified into three castes: a small number of Whites, a smaller number of "free people of color" (generally mulattoes), and a huge Black slave population. White-minority rule led to the development of a "white bias": European phenotypic and cultural traits were more highly valued than their African or Creole counterparts. With Emancipation, the castes were transformed into classes, but the White bias persisted, resulting in a "color-class pyramid": a White upper class, a "Brown" middle class, and a Black lower-class majority. The addition of Chinese, East Indian, and Lebanese immigrants, who did not have a clear place in the color-class pyramid, made stratification more complex. Color and ethnicity still influence social interactions, but the White bias and the color-class pyramid have become less evident since the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Jamaica is still highly stratified by wealth; it has a very small, prosperous upper class, a small middle class, and a huge, impoverished lower class. In the mid-1960s Jamaica had the highest rate of income inequality in the world.

The colonial structure affects both the colonized and the colonizer. Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the colonial relationship is the psychological fallout of the relationship. Articulated most eloquently by Fanon (1968) and Memmi (1965), and in fictionalized form by Achebe (1959), these psychological outgrowths involve myriad relations between the colonized and the colonizer. To note just a few: the colonizer's view of the colonized as "subjects"; colonial ambivalence about the colonial history; and historically evolved defenses against encroachments on one's culture; sense of dignity, and way of life. Finally, just as colonial settings produce "colonial mentalities" (i.e., the mentalities of those who acquiesce to the dominant power) (Fanon, 1968), they are also inherent breeders of "oppositional mentalities"

More recently, the application of status-attainment models to racial and ethnic stratification (Duncan and Duncan, 1968; Featherman, 1971; Cuneo and Curtis, 1975; Boyd, et al., 1985) has gained popularity. Using the basic formulation of a career cycle (Blau and Duncan, 1967), status-attainment models treat racial and ethnic stratification as resulting from the differential marketable resources, such as skills and credentials, that individuals bring to the labour market. The findings from status-attainment models largely affirm the importance of structural variables, in particular those pertaining to prior ascribed and achieved statuses, and cast doubt on the relevance of psychological or motivation attributes to status differentiation. Despite the apparent success of these models, a substantial portion of inequality remains unexplained, leading some (Jencks, et al., 1972) to speculate on luck, and others (Light and Wong, 1975) to revert to a conjoint model of both cultural and institutional factors in accounting for inequality. 3

Good highlights of Kuhn's book and the notion of Paradigm shift in science.

"This would be unfortunate, for the book offers a controversial account of the impact of Western research on an indigenous population that should urge us to think hard about our work. Even before its publication, Darkness in El Dorado became a Janusfaced text that in calling attention to methodological and ethical shortcomings of scientific research in the Amazon also brought attention to faults in its own production. This should not obscure its contribution or make us forget that the central issue in this drama, after all, should be the Yanomami" "At the books heart is a twostranded argument concerning the work among the Yanomami by the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the geneticist James Neel. One strand follows their involvement in a complex set of medical practices centering on the collection of blood samples and a measles vaccination campaign. The other traces Chagnons spectacular career as the creator of the Yanomami as anthropologys wellknown fierce people. While Tierneys focus is on individuals, his book locates them in two relevant contexts: the cold war and the Vietnam War, during which currents of evolutionary genetics, sociobiology, and cultural anthropology claiming that aggression plays a positive role in human evolution found broad support, and the Venezuelan petrostate culture of clientelism, which fostered a network of corrupt politicians and businessmen with interests in the Yanomami and their territory for reasons of profit and power. His discussion argues that the work of Chagnon, Neel, and other scientists brought the Yanomami neither empowerment nor wellbeing but fragmentation and destruction" "The first strand of the book, which occupies less than onetenth of Tierneys text but has received the most public attention, argues that Neel and Chagnon collected blood samples for the Atomic Energy Commission to compare mutation rates in populations contaminated by radiation with those in one uncontaminated by it and at the same time carried out

In a recent definitive statement of Oirat identity, Oirat ethnogenesis is linked to original Mongols (yazguuriin Mongol) (Ochir 1993). The author redefined the term Nirun, suggesting that it means 'back' of a body (nuruun). He related it to the legend in the Secret History that, after the death of her husband, Alan Goa, the legendary ancestress of the Mongols, gave birth to three sons from her back (nuruun), claiming that she had been touched by a heavenly light. Ochir used the term butach (illegitimate children) to refer to the three sons who became the ancestry of the Chinggisid golden lineage (altan urag). Most interestingly, he pointed out that the supposed 'heavenly light' that impregnated Alan Goa was in fact a servant called Malig Bayat, who was the ancestor of the Bayat subgroup of the Oirats. It is thus established that it was an Oirat who fathered the illegitimate children of Alan Goa, who in turn became the ancestors of the Mongol aristocrats!

The family was the basic social unit through which wealth and status were transmitted in Roman society. The perpetuation of the aristocracy, the possibilities for social mobility, the distribution of landed wealth, and other matters depended fundamentally on patterns of family behavior (Garnsey, 1987: 126). The Latin terms familia and domus for family and household did not have the same semantic range of emphasis in Roman times as they are used today (2006) in referring to a father, mother, and their children. The Romans used familia to refer to all individuals under the father's power ( patria potestas), including the wife, children, the sons' children, and adopted children, all agnates (those related through the male line who derive from the same house - a lineage, but excluding a daughter's children or a mother's blood kin, all related through males to a common ancestor who shared a common name (i. e., the clan or gens, and the slave staff. The term domus in the sense of household was more frequently used in reference to the family, and generally covered a larger group than is associated with the family today (2006), encompassing husband and wife, children, slaves, and others living in the house including relatives linked through women.

A distinction must be made between, on the one hand, those activities of the general civil life which involve earning a living, carrying out political responsibilities, and engaging in the instrumental affairs of the large community, and, on the other hand, activities which create personal friendship patterns, frequent home intervisiting, communal worship and communal recreation. The first type usually develops so-called "secondary relationships" [Page 128] which tend to be relatively impersonal and segmental; the latter type leads to "primary relationships," which are warm, intimate and personal. Gordon's distinction of "primary" versus "secondary relationships" is useful in viewing the Saraguro data, but as Barth (1969: 16-17) has indicated, "plural society is a vague label" … with a variety of possible sectors of articulation and separation, and hence a variety of polyethnic systems are entailed. Like the American pattern, political and economic interactions occur in the secondary plane in Saraguro; however, "communal worship" is also a secondary relationship when conducted across ethnic boundaries.

n a comparative context, ethnic sovereignty can be seen as an important political factor in other cases of rule by a conquest group, particularly when that group is in the minority and the conquered are in the majority. Normans in England, Mongols in Russia, British in India, Turks in Byzantium, and Afrikaners in South Africa all relied on ethnic differentiation between themselves and their subject populations as a means of control. All endeavored, with varying success and through various means, to maintain those differences and thereby uphold the boundaries between ruler and ruled.

"A Family Tree in Every Gene By Armand Marie Leroi Published on: Jun 07, 2006 Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body." This Article is a fairly sensible, nuanced, defense of the race concept based on recent genetic analyses of hundreds of genetic variables at a time.   

This cite is mentioned in Kottak's text...it has a lot of good information about Race.

Thus it happens that, although the Long House has been often described, there is much disagreement as to the particulars of its construction and use. Rather curiously the variance is more serious in the dimensions and occupation of these buildings, which any one might observe, than in the details of the architecture, to record which more care is necessary. It will be seen that Morgan's specifications in the League   agree fairly well with those of Lafitau given below.

One woman of rank has been mentioned, and in the Relation for 1656 another several times appears. Teotonharason was an Onondaga woman who went with the ambassadors to Quebec, and was highly esteemed for her nobleness and wealth. She may have been the one mentioned in the Relation for 1671. "It was one of these principal persons who formerly first brought the Iroquois of Onondaga, and then the other nations, to make peace with the French. She descended to Quebec for this purpose, accompanied by some of her slaves." The influence of the Iroquois women was of great use to the missionaries. In the Relation for 1657 we read, "The women having much authority among these people, their virtue produces as much fruit as anything else, and their example finds as many more imitators."