Mestizaje and Law Making in Indigenous Identity Formation in Northeastern Brazil: “After the Conflict Came the History”

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Law, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation on 2011-01-25 03:40Z by Steven

Mestizaje and Law Making in Indigenous Identity Formation in Northeastern Brazil: “After the Conflict Came the History”

American Anthropologist
Volume 106, Issue 4 (December 2004)
pages 663–674
DOI: 10.1525/aa.2004.106.4.663

Jan Hoffman French, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Richmond

In this article, I explore issues of authenticity, legal discourse, and local requirements of belonging by considering the recent surge of indigenous recognitions in northeastern Brazil. I investigate how race and ethnicity are implicated in the recognition process in Brazil on the basis of an analysis of a successful struggle for indigenous identity and access to land by a group of mixed-race, visibly, African-descended rural workers. I propose that the debate over mestizaje (ethnoracial and cultural mixing) in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America can be reconfigured and clarified by broadening it to include such Brazilian experiences. I argue that the interaction between two processes—law making and indigenous identity formation—is crucial to understanding how the notion of “mixed heritage” is both reinforced and disentangled. As such, this article is an illustration of the role of legal discourse in the constitution of indigenous identities and it introduces northeastern Brazil into the global discussion of law, indigenous rights, and claims to citizenship.

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White Mothers, Brown Children: Ethnic Identification of Maori-European Children in New Zealand

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Oceania, Social Science on 2011-01-25 02:56Z by Steven

White Mothers, Brown Children: Ethnic Identification of Maori-European Children in New Zealand

Journal of Marriage and Family
Volume 69, Issue 5 (December 2007)
pages 1150–1161
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2007.00438.x

Tahu H. Kukutai, Senior Research Fellow
Population Studies Centre
University of Waikato

Studies of multiethnic families often assume the ethnic identification of children with the minority group results from the minority parent. This study examines an alternate view that mainstream parents also play an important role in transmitting minority ethnicity. It explores this argument using data from New Zealand on the ethnic labels mothers assign to their Māori-European children. It finds that European mothers are just as disposed as Māori mothers to designate their child as Māori, either exclusively or in combination. Two explanations, grounded in ethnic awareness and gendered inheritance, are proposed. Although neither satisfactorily predicts maternal designation decisions, the readiness of European mothers to identify their child as Maori underscores their role in diffusing Māori ethnicity.

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Brief communication: Admixture analysis with forensic microsatellites in Minas Gerais, Brazil: The ongoing evolution of the capital and of an African-derived community

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive on 2011-01-25 01:32Z by Steven

Brief communication: Admixture analysis with forensic microsatellites in Minas Gerais, Brazil: The ongoing evolution of the capital and of an African-derived community

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 139, Issue 4 (August 2009)
pages 591–595
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.21046

Marília O. Scliar
Departamento de Biologia Geral, ICB
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG, Brazil

Marco T. Vaintraub
GENETICENTER—Centro de Genética e Reprodução, Nova Lima, MG, Brazil

Patrícia M.V. Vaintraub
GENETICENTER—Centro de Genética e Reprodução, Nova Lima, MG, Brazil

Cleusa G. Fonseca
Departamento de Biologia Geral, ICB
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, MG, Brazil

We report the estimated allele frequencies for 13 and 14 microsatellite loci in two populations of Minas Gerais, Brazil as follows: Belo Horizonte (the capital) and Marinhos (an African-derived community). Analysis of the African, Amerindian, and European genetic contributions to both populations, together with historical information, revealed distinct differences between the two populations. Estimates for Belo Horizonte revealed a higher-European (66%) than African (32%) contribution, and a minimal Amerindian contribution. These results are consistent with the peopling of the city mainly by people from the Minas Gerais hinterland, a people highly admixed but with more European ancestry. Estimates for Marinhos confirmed the high-African component of the population. However, a temporal analysis of two datasets—CURRENT (representing the population living in Marinhos today) and ORIGINAL (representing families, who have lived in Marinhos since the onset of the 20th century),—identified a diminishing of the population’s African ancestry from 92% in the ORIGINAL group to 67% in the CURRENT group. This change is here interpreted as a consequence of the growing migration into the village of people with more European ancestry and subsequent admixture with the local population.

Description of the supporting document:

Supporting Table S1. Origin and size of parental sample populations used in admixture analyses. Supporting Table S2. Allele frequencies distribution of 13 STRs loci in Belo Horizonte population. Supporting Table S3. Allele frequencies distribution of 14 STRs loci in Marinhos (CURR) population. Supporting Table S4. Allele frequencies distribution of 14 STRs loci in Marinhos (ORIG) population. Supporting Table S5. Admixture proportions and 90% confidence intervals for each individual of Marinhos population obtained with the Structure 2.0 program.

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The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature

Posted in Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Passing, United States on 2011-01-24 22:53Z by Steven

The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature

Peter Lang
1998
142 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8204-4265-5

Juda Charles Bennett, Associate Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

Cover The Passing Figure

How and when does literature most effectively uncover race to be a metaphor? The passing figure, a light-skinned African-American capable and willing to pass for white, provides the thematic focus to this provocative study. In exploring the social and cultural history of this distinctly American phenomenon, Bennett moves freely between literature, film, and music, arguing that the passing figure is crucial to our understanding of past and present conceptions of race.

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Multiple Passings and the Double Death of Langston Hughes

Posted in Articles, Biography, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2011-01-24 22:44Z by Steven

Multiple Passings and the Double Death of Langston Hughes

Biography
Volume 23, Number 4 (Fall 2000)
pages 670-693
E-ISSN: 1529-1456 Print ISSN: 0162-4962
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2000.0043

Juda Charles Bennett, Associate Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

Desire to us
Was like a double death,
Swift dying
Of our mingled breath,
Evaporation
Of an unknown strange perfume
Between us quickly
In a naked
Room.

Langston Hughes, “Desire”

At the very beginning of his career and throughout most of his forty years of writing, Langston Hughes repeatedly returned to the theme of racial passing, exploring the subject in two autobiographies, several poems and short stories, a brief scene in his first novel, and at least one play. More than those writers who could easily pass for white—Jean Toomer and Walter White—and more than those writers who have become central to the growing study of passing literature—Nella Larsen and William Faulkner—Langston Hughes examines this figure through all the major genres, and more importantly, with an incredible range and inventiveness. In surveying the work, however, it becomes apparent that Hughes began to abandon the theme of racial passing just as he was beginning to explore the interrelated themes of homosexuality and homophobia. As Hughes moves to this “new” material, he can be found structuring it, perhaps as many authors do, upon his early work, with the more familiar drama of racial passing informing his approach to homosexuality. Perhaps less obvious are the ways that the early representations of racial passing, including…

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A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2011-01-24 22:17Z by Steven

A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Journal of American Folklore
Volume 124, Number 491 (Winter 2011)
pages 120-121
E-ISSN: 1535-1882 Print ISSN: 0021-8715

Sharon Downey Varner
Department of English
University of South Alabama

Hodes, Martha. A Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2007.

This meticulously researched historical narrative is reconstructed from letters written by the subject and her family members. In A Sea Captain’s Wife, historian Martha Hodes brings to life the story of an obscure New England woman who marries a black man after the Civil War and takes up residence in the Cayman Islands. Hodes is a professor of history at New York University and the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South.

Eunice Richardson, the subject of this book, was born a white, working-class woman in New England in 1831. She was first married to William Stone, a fellow New Englander, with whom she moved to Mobile, Alabama, for a period of time. Hodes speculates that it was in Mobile that Eunice first became acquainted with Smiley Connolly, an African American who would become her second husband.

Hodes leaves no stone unturned and no document undogged. Her storyteller’s bent, her understanding of the complex racial climate of the late 1800s, and her extensive historical knowledge combine to produce an engaging historical document that reads like a novel…

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Notes on physical anthropology of Australian aborigines and black-white hybrids

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Media Archive, Oceania on 2011-01-24 01:28Z by Steven

Notes on physical anthropology of Australian aborigines and black-white hybrids

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 8, Issue 1 (January/March 1925)
pages 73–94
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330080105

Charles B. Davenport, Director
Department of Experimental Evolution
(Carnegie Institution of Washington)
Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York

Introduction

In September 1914, after the meetings of the British Association in Australia, I was given transportation by the Government of New South Wales, enabling me to go to the government reservation for aborigines at Brewarrina on the Burke division of the State railroad. This reservation is on the Barwon fork of the Darling River, about 60 miles south of the Queensland boundary.  The purpose of the visit was to observe near by a number of  individuals of the fast disappearing race.

While at Brewarrina, during about six days, I enjoyed the hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold’s tact and good judgment that I was enabled to see as many of the inhabitants of the Station as time permitted and to make some simple measurements upon them…

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The Catholic Church and the Formation of Metis Identity

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Canada, History, Media Archive, Religion on 2011-01-23 22:22Z by Steven

The Catholic Church and the Formation of Metis Identity

Past Imperfect
Volume 9 (2001)
pages 65-87

Jacinthe Duval

This essay explores the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Metis in the Red River colony in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how missionaries, via their intellectual artifacts, have been responsible for shaping popular contemporary images of Metis culture. In analyzing the writings of missionaries, this paper also notes the ambiguity with which these individuals viewed Metis society. Priests steeped in European ecclesiastical and national values who hoped the Metis might form the basis of a new Francophone prairie society viewed some mixed-blood cultural practices as inimical to this end. From the perspective of the missionaries, the tantalizing familiarity of the French, Catholic aspect of the Metis contrasted jarringly with their ‘alien’ indigenous cultural and economic traits. As such, the Metis represented both a promise and a threat to the nation-building project. Although Metis identity has been stamped with the official seal of the church, the contradictions missionaries saw in this culture offer a promising avenue for the exploration of the complex processes of identity formation.

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An Exploration of the Experiences of Inter-racial Couples

Posted in Canada, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Social Science on 2011-01-23 20:55Z by Steven

An Exploration of the Experiences of Inter-racial Couples

Canadian Journal of Family and Youth (Le Journal Canadien de Famille et de la Jeunesse)
Volume 1, Number 2 (2008)
pages 75-111
ISSN: 1718-9748

Temitope Oriola
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada

This study utilizes in-depth interviews of five interracial heterosexual couples to explore how couples live, and re/de/construct their everyday lives within a multiethnic society. I examine how couples experience public spaces, negotiate their identities, raise biracial children and confront cultural differences. The study also investigates the process of acceptance of partners by couples’ respective families and the media representation of interracial relationships. This paper demonstrates that minority families are more likely to raise strong objections or resistance to their children marrying Whites. Another major finding of this study is that subjects experience gradual shifts in their identities and changes in their worldviews as a result of their relationships with their spouses regardless of whether they adopt a ‘colourblind’ or ‘colour-conscious’ approach. Subjects’ narratives are also laced with intermingling discourse of race and culture.

Introduction

More than most concepts, ‘race’ and its concomitant outcomes like racism, racialization and racial profiling have been subjects of intense debate by the academia and laity. Amid widespread issues of marginalization and inequality, it is easy to dismiss the ties that bind some members of the various groups—dominant or dominated—together. One of these is interracial intimacy like common-law heterosexual unions and marriages. Why do some individuals in spite of the ‘one drop of blood’ rule, widespread stereotypes, social (mis)construction of the Other, potential loss of privilege and historically entrenched and societally enforced boundaries cross the colour line when it comes to love and/or marriage? How do interracial couples negotiate their way in public spaces and raise biracial kids? What influence does their relationship have on their worldview and identities? How does society encompassing significant others like family, friends, neighbours, and the sea of unknown faces they encounter daily relate with them? How do interracial couples assess the representation of interracial unions on Canadian television? These are the questions this study attempted to explore through in-depth interviews conducted with five interracial couples in Canada between February and March, 2008.

Integration and Social Construction of Interracial Unions

Most studies done on interracial unions are American or British in origin, even though Canada, compared to the United States, has a higher proportion of interracial couples (Milan and Hamm, 2004). There are, however, some Canadian studies on the unease over mixed race offspring from heterosexual relations between First Nations’ women and White men in British Colombia by Mawani (2002) and the experiences of White women involved with Black men by Deliovsky (2002). From issues such as the media representations of interracial relationships as aberration, events and/or spectacles Perry and Sutton, 2006) to the contestedness of the identity of children of interracial ouples (Barn and Harman, 2006), to why young, upwardly mobile and career-driven lack men ostensibly prefer White women regardless of class (Craig-Henderson, 2006) to short (melo-dramatic) autobiographical accounts of interracially-involved young eople (Alderman, 2007) to the making of ‘multiracials’ and the problematic of the intersticial space of mixedness (DaCosta, 2007), to the ironic and paradoxical contradiction of ‘talking Black, sleeping White’ among some activists in post-bellum United States (Romano, 2003); interracial relationships have come to stay as evidenced in the ‘proliferation’ of those called a myriad of names like ‘coloured’, ‘mulattoes,’ ‘halfcaste’ and ‘mixed race’ (Barn and Harman, 2006: 1314) but are still largely seen as problematic. There is an urgent need to fill the intriguing lacuna in the Canadian literature on the experiences of interracial couples…

…Data Analysis—Interviews

In this section, findings from the interviews with all five couples are presented under thematic issues. These include reaction of subjects’ families to their choice of spouses, experiences in public spaces, shifts in identities and changes in the worldview of subjects, concerns about the identities of their biracial children, experiences in public spaces and media representation. The results show how divergent subjects’ experiences were when they introduced their partners to their families, how they began to learn, adopt and adapt to otherwise ‘alien’ cultures, and what impact these have had on their identities. The results indicate that except in one case, minority families are generally reluctant to accept their children’s White partners. Subjects also opine that the medium of television and movies seldom cast couples that look like them preferring to depict more ‘conventional’ couples…

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Moya `Tipimsook (“The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses”): Racialization and the Misrecognition of “Métis” in Upper Great Lakes

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Canada, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2011-01-23 20:18Z by Steven

Moya `Tipimsook (“The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses”): Racialization and the Misrecognition of “Métis” in Upper Great Lakes

Ethnohistory
Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 37-63
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-063

Chris Andersen, Associate Professor of Native Studies
University of Alberta

Scholars have long noted the central place of racialization in the last five centuries of colonial rule and likewise the crossracial encounters and eventual colonial intimacies regulated in its shadow. In the conceptual terrain posted by these demarcations, this article explores how, in the absence of extensive documentation on historical self-ascriptions, contemporary ethnohistorians examining upper Great Lakes fur trade settlements have attempted to come to terms with the historical social ontologies that long preceded official attempts to regulate them. Specifically, we examine the racialized logics governing the retrofitting of these settlements as “métis” and “Métis” and, secondarily, the recent creep of juridical logics into ethnohistorical conversations. Rather than challenging ethnohistorical conclusions that these settlements were/are Métis, this article challenges how they are ethnohistorically imagined as such, and in doing so it appeals for a Métis “counter-ethnohistory” alternatively anchored in an analytics of peoplehood.

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