Humanities Homework Help

Help me study for my Anthropology class. I’m stuck and don’t understand.

It is often a challenge for people in the US to accept this mentality…. because the dominant culture here values biological determinism. In the US, we often turn to neurology, genetics, brain-based psychology, nutrition, and so on to explain differences between people. If people have different personalities or academic abilities, we explain that by looking to their different biologies. If someone has an addiction, we explain that biologically based on their genes or diet. Gender roles? Oh we say that they are biological and evolved. Males are supposed to naturally do xyz and females abc. Autism? Caused by vaccines. And so on and so on. Where is culture in all this? It’s like the dominant explanations for all we experience rest in the biological…. but that is really just not true. It’s overly simplistic and it denies the role and the power of culture in shaping our knowledge and experience.

Remember that culture tells us what to pay attention to, what to value. From the anthropological view, dominant US culture values biology…. as an explanation of its racial formation, racism, gender formation, sexism, and the privilege historically given to white, Christian, English-speaking, able-bodied, heterosexual cismen. There is nothing biological about the superiority assumed or the inequity assigned to that group of people. Races, genders, groups…. are culturally created. If they were simply biological, they would be the same categories in every society. They aren’t. They are culturally determined in such a way to seem biological or natural.

Now does each group have a culture? No. Remember that in anthropology there is not a one-to-one correlation assumed between group and culture. Does a certain racial group have a culture? Let’s say that is culture in and through all of this. White culture? Yes. Black culture? Yes. But not in any way tied to a biological group or population. Culture exists in networks. A Black woman may marry an Asian man and have children with him. This family may share in and participate in aspects of Asian culture and aspects of Black culture. The children don’t biologically belong to just one of these “cultures.” There is no correlation between biology and culture. The problem is that our dominant US culture often tells us the opposite. What do you think?

One of the concepts I think is really helpful here is racial formation. Look back at the reading for a good explanation of this idea. When a person says someone is “acting Black” or “acting White” … what do they mean? When a person who identifies as Nicaraguan is never recognized as that but called and expected to identify instead as Hispanic/Latinx, how does that feel? When a person who immigrates from Palestine to the US is treated in a racist fashion in our country and experiences racism of a personal and structural nature, but then is legally told they are considered “White” in the US Census and legal documents, how does that feel? Racial formation is the practices of forming and reforming and reenacting and remaking our racial categories. They aren’t biological. Racial formation takes people’s complex experiences and understandings and pushes them into just a few boxes. It makes no logical sense to assume all the people in one of these racial categories then shares something biological. I mean, not beyond what we all share biologically as humans.

However, racial identities are deep within us. They are important in shaping our lives and experiences. They are real in our social and cultural lives. To really understand and interrogate race, sex, gender, and ethnicity and the inequities of our society, we must stop using the biologically determinist mindset.