From Boas to Black Power investigates how U.S. cultural anthropologists wrote about race, racism, and ‘America’ in the 20th century as a window into the greater project of U.S. anti-racist liberalism. Anthropology as a discipline and the American project share a common origin: their very foundations are built upon white supremacy, and both are still reckoning with their racist legacies. In this groundbreaking intellectual history of anti-racism within twentieth-century cultural anthropology, Mark Anderson starts with the legacy of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict and continues through the post-war and Black Power movement to the birth of the Black Studies discipline, exploring the problem ‘America’ represents for liberal anti-racism.
Anderson shows how cultural anthropology contributed to liberal American discourses on race that simultaneously bolstered and denied white domination. From Boas to Black Power provides a major rethinking of anthropological anti-racism as a project that, in step with the American racial liberalism it helped create, paradoxically maintained white American hegemony. Anthropologists influenced by radical political movements of the 1960s offered the first sustained challenge to that project, calling attention to the racial contradictions of American liberalism reflected in anthropology. Their critiques remain relevant for the discipline and the nation.
Table of Content
Prologue: The Custom of the Country
Introduction
1. The Anti-Racist Liberal Americanism of Boasian Anthropology
2. Franz Boas, Miscegenation, and the White Problem
3. Ruth Benedict, ‘American’ Culture, and the Color Line
4. Post–World War II Anthropology and the Social Life of Race and Racism
5. Charles Wagley, Marvin Harris, and the Comparative Study of Race
6. Black Studies and the Reinvention of Anthropology
Conclusion: Anti-Racism, Liberalism, and Anthropology in the Age of Trump
About the author
Mark Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of
Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (2009).
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