Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture

This thought-provoking book explores a rarely examined asymmetry in anthropology: its interest in the culture of “out-of-the way” Indians and the race of “in-the-way” Negroes, to use Lee D. Baker's terminology (pp. 9, 16). Baker argues that those preoccupations were connected; the study of American Indian culture affected the understanding of African American race. Those views—generated by anthropologists and reformers—also affected how Indian and African American intellectuals understood themselves. The “catechistic” repetition of the Boasian legacy—the critiques of social evolutionism and scientific racism—misses a central question: What connected anthropology's interest in specific cultures and its pursuit of racial equality? Baker argues that when they worked to disentangle race and culture, anthropologists depended on studies of indigenous peoples to differentiate the study of race among African Americans. Such a division of labor between culture and race marked early anthropological studies and the provenance of anthropology, producing both its “possibilities and potential” and its “limits and contradictions” (p. 31

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