Cultural Anthropology Term Paper

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Race is one of the most bedeviling of anthropological characteristics. The concept, with the barest tips of its roots in biological realities and the rest of the plant firmly grafted to cultural and sociological constructs, is one of the first concepts that anthropologists dealt with vigorously in terms of the history of the profession. Ideas about race both helped establish anthropology as a discipline in its own right (distinct from history, political economy, philosophy, comparative religion and ethics) and kept it from being entirely assimilated into the post-colonial mindset. Like the poor for the rest of humanity, the idea of race - for both good and ill - seems always to be with the anthropologist.

Thus it is hardly surprising that Roger Lancaster should become fascinated with the concept of race during his fieldwork in Nicaragua. For the milieu in which he is working provides a fascinating swirl of ideas about race. It would seem to be impossible (at least from the information we have about Nicaraguan society) to write accurately about contemporary Nicaraguan society and culture without an examination of the role that race plays within the society.

And yet, while race - and especially ideas about "blackness" - is central to Nicaraguan conceptions of self-identity, Lancaster makes it clear that these are not the only concerns for his "natives," and so it would not be fair to discuss his ethnographic work without at least some mention of them. So while this paper focuses on ideas about race in Nicaragua - and in particular about ideas of "blackness" or "negroness," it is essential to remember that claims about negroness are for Nicaraguans always mediated by other claims about gender and class.

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That negroness should be such an important social category in Nicaragua is hardly surprising given that over 75% of the people of Nicaragua are mestizos, or the descendants of both Europeans (mostly Spanish) and the native peoples of the place. There is very little actually "blackness" in any of these people if we were to use that term as it is understood in the United States.

Instead, as Lancaster explicates, negroness as a social category must be seen as the negation of "whiteness" or European-ness. Thus we might expect that people who are darkest in skin color and are therefore more closely genetically related to the Spanish colonizers of Nicaragua than to the native people.

But in fact negroness has relatively little to do with genetics and less to do with skin color. While someone with red hair, very pale skin and green eyes would be unlikely to be called "negro," almost anyone else might be because the term is used as a way of designating power relationships between and among people more than it is as a way of saying anything about a person's ancestry.

Of course, it might be argued that there is a similar usage of the term "black" in English. Certainly American use racial designations and racial epithets in the United States to establish hierarchies amongst people. A white American might try to pull rank on someone who is black by reminding that person that his/her race delegates him/her to a lower status, but this is far less often done in the United States than it is in Nicaragua, and very rarely in the absence of at least some physical cues about race.)

Ironically, Lancaster argues….....

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