Toward a Global Idea of Race by Denise Ferreira da Silva

Author:Denise Ferreira da Silva [Silva, Denise Ferreira da]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2010-09-20T17:32:00+00:00

MUNDUS SCIENTIFICUS

In "Race and History," Claude Levi-Strauss (T96T) recalls: "The original sin of anthropology [the science of man] ... consists in its confusion of the idea of race, in the purely biological sense[,) ... with the sociological and psychological products of human civilization." What anthropology had finally realized, he explains, is that the diverse "cultural contributions of Asia or Europe, Africa or America" derive not from the fact that these continents are "inhabited by peoples of different racial stocks" but from "geographical, historical and sociological circumstances" (zzo). Unfortunately, LeviStrauss notes, such acknowledgement had yet to reach "the man in the street." Before anthropology could eliminate the public's tendency to attribute "intellectual and moral relevance" to "black and white skin," it needed to answer a nagging question, which had survived the demise of the science of man. "If there are not innate racial aptitudes," he says the public might ask the anthropologist, "how can we explain the fact that the white man's civilization had made the tremendous advances with which we are all familiar while the civilizations of the coloured peoples have lagged behind?" To settle this question, he argues, anthropology should engage the "problem of the inequality-or diversity-of human cultures, which is in fact-however unjustifiably-closely associated with [the inequality of human races] in the public mind" (zzr, italics in the original).

His own answer is that the "diversity of cultures" does not so much result from geographic isolation as it is an effect of a "natural [psychologicali phenomenon," "the ethnocentric attitude," which is the tendency "to reject out of hand the Cultural institutionsethical, religious, social or aesthetic-which are furthest removed from those with which we identify ourselves" (zz4). Ironically, he notes, this universal "attitude of mind," which pervades "Western civilization," where it sustains statements that exclude "`savages' .. . from human kind, is precisely the attitude most strikingly characteristic of those same savages" (z24-z5). By repeating Herder's account of "prejudice," Levi-Strauss seems to suggest that the "original sin" of the science of man was not so much to map the exterior determinants of human difference, "diversity and inequality." The greatest sin was to do so through an evolutionary logic that writes the cultures of yesterday's "`natives"' as instances of "stages of development" already superseded by "western civilization," which hides the fact that "progress" has always resulted from a "coalition of cultures," as is demonstrated by the fact that the cultures that had come into contact had "improved," while isolated cultures had remained "stationary" (2z5). Ethnocentric or not, the goodness of "progress" remains in the eyes of the European beholder.

Almost fifty years after Levi-Strauss's statement, many of the postmodern critiques of modern thought lament the fact that "the ethnocentric attitude" still operating in twenty-first-century social scientific accounts of the "diversity of cultures" prevents the expansion of universality with the inclusion of females, homosexuals, and the others of Europe, which would entail a social configuration that would look like a "coalition of cultures." Faithful to Herder's thesis of the universality of differentiation, in

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