Skin colour and race as analytic concepts

• Published in: Ethnic and racial studies 2012-07, Vol.35 (7), p.1169-1173
• Main Author: Wade, Peter
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anthropology; Comparative Sociology; Gender Studies; Identity; Interethnic relations; Kinship; Race; Sex; Sex Differences; Skin; Smuggling; Social Anthropology; Social history; Social Scientists; Sociology
• ISSN: 0141-9870; 1466-4356
• DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.632428

In his article, Banton suggests that skin colour could act as an analytic device that could replace the concept of 'race' (Banton, 2011). Banton's approach is based on the idea that, as social scientists, we can identify a level of objective reality and detect patterns in that reality, patterns which can, because of their basis in reality, enjoy the status of 'culture-free constructs'. In his argument, skin colour has this kind of objective reality -- it is 'visible and measurable'. We can then trace the patterns of significance that have been attached to this objective reality and produce a comparative sociology and history of these meanings and their effects. It is a neat, not to say easy, approach. However, it depends on the idea that social scientists are able to identify what constitutes the level of objective reality, which must by definition be culture-free, if the constructs we derive from it are also culture-free. This is not so simple. Looking at attempts to do this in anthropology reveals that what we thought was culture-free turns out not to be so. The objective measurement of skulls to produce 'scientific' constructs of race is a notorious example. In kinship studies, the idea that there was a simple biological grid of human relatedness, which was universal, natural and objective, and was simply organized and conceptualized differently in different societies to produce different kinship systems, also turned out to be problematic, because the notion of natural, biological relatedness that was being used to ground the analytic work was seen to be a Western notion of kinship that was being smuggled into the analysis (Schneider 1984). In gender studies, the idea that there was a simple biological difference between 'sexes', again natural and universal, upon which different cultures constructed varying concepts of 'gender', has run into trouble in a simple way: 'sex' turns out to be not such a clear, objective and culture-free objective reality (Fausto-Sterling 1985, 2000). Adapted from the source document.