Studying In: Addressing Inequities within Anthropology Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Examine the effects of White supremacy in anthropology. Give examples of how anthropologists in other subfields are working against White supremacy and colonialism. Explain what decolonizing anthropology entails. This section explores how anthropologists have looked within their own discipline to address ways in which they may be reproducing inequities through their practices and approach. Anthropologist Laura Nader uses the phrase “ studying up ” (1972) to call for more research on people and institutions with power. Following anthropologist Pamela Runestad (2017), this chapter uses the phrase “ studying in ” to address how anthropologists have looked at their own practices, training, methodologies, and assumptions and how anthropology as a discipline may in fact be contributing to inequities for students, practitioners, and the communities with which anthropologists engage. Even though the construct of race has roots in anthropology, anthropologist Leith Mullings (2005) argues that critical studies of race and racism did not originally develop in anthropology. Mullings attributes this to the fact that anthropologists still do not agree about the role of race and racism within the discipline or how the categories of race have emerged and persisted in society. In addition, Mullings argues that many cultural anthropologists have focused on ethnicity, becoming “ race avoidant ” by not even mentioning race in ethnographies. Mullings warns that “race avoidant” anthropologists consequently ignore racism (Mullings 2005, 670). In recent years, anthropologists have looked at the ways in which knowledge production and anthropological methods are rooted in White supremacy . Within the subfield of archaeology, anthropologists Maria Franklin and colleagues discuss how “archaeology has been used to justify imperialism, the displacement of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples from their lands, scientific racism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobic nationalism” throughout the world (Franklin et al. 2020, 754). However, archaeology does not exist in a vacuum, and these anthropologists also discuss ways to reimagine archaeology to do anti-racism work, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter movement. These efforts include encouraging growing numbers of members of minority groups as academic colleagues and seeking research sites that represent the lived experiences of minority populations. In 2020, Meredith Poole , a researcher for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia, began a project identifying previously unrecognized Black archaeologists and excavators who had worked for Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s. Additionally, Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists are currently working to excavate the First Baptist Church , one of the earliest Black churches in the United States. Projects such as these are critically important to the academic search for truth. Not only does this knowledge correct inaccuracies in the historical record, but it also serves to correct the course of future academic work. In recent years, Colonial Williamsburg has undertaken various projects aimed at highlighting the contributions of Black archeologists and the lived experiences of people of color in the American colonial period. Additionally, they have added interpreters representing the lives of both free and enslaved Black individuals. (credit: “Colonial Williamsburg Virginia Duke of Gloucester St.” by C Watts/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Archaeologists Kylie Quave and colleagues (2020) have written about the ways in which introductory archaeology classes taught in the United States have often been problematic and how those teaching these courses are currently using anti-colonial and decolonial theories to revise curricula to promote equity within the discipline. Quave and her colleagues found that students taking revised curricula developed more complex understandings of the benefits and harms of archeological knowledge production and were better able to articulate the inequities in the discipline. In April 2021, the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) , the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA) , and the Black in Bioanthropology Collective (BiBA) released a collective statement regarding the possession and unethical use of the remains of the children of MOVE and the Africa family. In May 1985, the city of Philadelphia dropped two bombs onto the MOVE compound, home of “a revolutionary group of Black people opposed to capitalist growth and committed to environmental justice and interspecies harmony” (ABA, SBA, and BiBA 2021). The bombs killed 11 MOVE members inside the compound, including five children, and destroyed the neighborhood, incinerating at least 61 homes. Two forensic anthropologists, Alan Mann and Janet Monge, were hired by Philadelphia officials to identify the remains. In April 2021, various news outlets revealed that either Mann or Monge kept the remains two child victims, Tree Africa and Delisha Africa, in their personal possession after the investigation, moving them between the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. In addition, the family of the deceased were never notified of the remains, nor were the remains returned to the family. In response, the ABA, SBA, and BiBA supported and republished the demands of Mike Africa Jr., who was six years old when the Philadelphia police dropped the bomb on MOVE. The collective statement acknowledged the long history of White supremacy and anti-Blackness within the discipline and called on White anthropologists to actively work to undo the violence committed against non-White communities. In Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation (2010), edited by anthropologist Faye V. Harrison , the term decolonizing anthropology is used to emphasize the responsibility of anthropologists to work for the enhancement and empowerment of those most alienated and dispossessed. While decolonization refers to different ideas in different disciplines, the principal goal of the Decolonizing Anthropology volume is “to encourage more anthropologists to accept the challenge of working to free the study of humankind from the prevailing forces of global inequality and dehumanization and to locate it firmly in the complex struggle for genuine transformation” (Harrison 2010, 10). This work to decolonize, transform, and liberate anthropology is still happening, and the discipline still has a long way to go in decolonizing each of the subfields of anthropology and decolonizing methods and pedagogy to make classroom spaces more equitable. Suggested Resources Documentaries: Adelman, Larry, prod. 2003. Race: The Power of an Illusion . https://www.racepowerofanillusion.org/. Davidson, Kief, and Pedro Kos, dirs. 2017. Bending the Arc . https://bendingthearcfilm.com/. Books/Articles: Cargle, Rachel Elizabeth. 2018. “When Feminism Is White Supremacy in Heels.” Harper’s Bazaar , August 16, 2018. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a22717725/what-is-toxic-white-feminism/. Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. 1995. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement . New York: New Press. Jenkins, Destin, and Justin Leroy, eds. 2021. Histories of Racial Capitalism . New York: Columbia University Press. Williams, Bianca C., Dian D. Squire, and Frank A. Tuitt, eds. 2021. Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions: Power, Diversity, and the Emancipatory Struggle in Higher Education . Albany: State University of New York Press. Websites/Podcasts: James, Alyssa A. L., and Brendane A. Tynes. 2020–. Zora’s Daughters . Podcast. https://zorasdaughters.com/. Smithsonian Institution. 2020. “Talking about Race.” National Museum of African American History and Culture. Last updated June 2, 2020. https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race. American Census Archive Research Browse through the US Census Bureau website ( data.census.gov ). Look at the categories from 1790, when the first US census was taken. Compare them to the 2020 census. How are these categories different? Who is being counted and how? Who is excluded? Go one step further and search through two different zip codes. Look at the demographic makeup of each area. Can you see differences in household income? Education attainment? What if you go to Google Maps? Can you correlate this information with other causes of inequities? Are there grocery stores in these areas? Bus and subway stops? What is the population density of the area? Do you know anything of the history of the zip code? Construct a visual that best explains the differences between the historical and contemporary censuses. Then, do the same with the two zip codes. Draw conclusions about social inequalities throughout history and in contemporary times. Critical Thinking Questions References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society . Oakland: University of California Press. Alper, Loretta, and Jeremy Earp, dirs. 2016. The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States . Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation. DVD. Association of Black Anthropologists, Society of Black Archaeologists, and Black in Bioanthropology Collective. 2021. “Collective Statement Concerning the Possession and Unethical Use of Remains.” Association of Black Anthropologists. April 28, 2021. https://aba.americananthro.org/collective-statement-concerning-the-possession-and-unethical-use-of-remains/. Bailey, Moya. 2021. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance . New York: New York University Press. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2017. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America . 5th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1): 139–167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/. Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner. 1941. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, Angela Y. 1981. Women, Race, and Class . New York: Random House. Davis, Angela Y. 2016. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement . Edited by Frank Barat. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Davis, Dána-Ain. 2019. Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth . New York: New York University Press. Davis, Uri. 2003. Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within . London: Zed Books. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic, eds. 2013. Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge . 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Drake, St. Clair. 1978. “Reflections on Anthropology and the Black Experience.” Anthropology & Educational Quarterly 9 (2): 85–109. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3216192. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1940) 1984. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Erakat, Noura. 2019. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Erakat, Noura, and Dia’ Azzeh, dirs. 2016. Gaza in Context . Washington, DC: Quilting Point Productions. Video, 20:24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmRPkfAN2EU. Farmer, Paul. 2003. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor . Berkeley: University of California Press. Fordham, Signithia. 2013. “Competing to Lose? (Black) Female School Success as Pyrrhic Victory.” In The Social Life of Achievement , edited by Nicholas J. Long and Henrietta L. Moore, 206–228. New York: Berghahn Books. Franklin, Maria, Justin P. Dunnavant, Ayana Omilade Flewellen, and Alicia Odewale. 2020. “The Future Is Now: Archaeology and the Eradication of Anti-Blackness.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24:753–766. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-020-00577-1. Foucault, Michel. (1978) 1990. The History of Sexuality . Translated by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1, An Introduction . New York: Vintage Books. Gans, Herbert J. 2009. “First Generation Decline: Downward Mobility among Refugees and Immigrants.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32 (9): 1658–1670. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870903204625. Goodman, Alan H., Yolanda T. Moses, and Joseph L. Jones. 2020. Race: Are We So Different? 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Green, Dan S., and Earl Smith. 1983. “W. E. B. DuBois and the Concepts of Race and Class.” Phylon 44 (4): 262–272. https://www.jstor.org/stable/274576. Harrison, Faye V. 1995. “The Persistent Power of ‘Race’ in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24:47–74. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000403. Harrison, Faye V., ed. 2010. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation . 3rd ed. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association. Harrison, Ira E., and Faye V. Harrison, eds. 1999. African-American Pioneers in Anthropology . Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route . New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hicks-Bartlett, Sharon. 2000. “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Labyrinth of Working and Parenting in a Poor Community.” In Coping with Poverty: The Social Contexts of Neighborhood, Work, and Family in the African American Community , edited by Sheldon Danziger and Ann Chih Lin, 27–53. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment . Rev. 10th anniversary ed. New York: Routledge. House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. 2013. The UK’s Relations with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain . Vol. 1, Report, Together with Formal Minutes, Oral and Written Evidence . 5th Report of Session 2013–14. London: Stationery Office Limited. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmfaff/88/88.pdf. Isacowitz, Roy. 2015. “Apartheid Policies Put Israel on Path to Becoming Failed State.” Haaretz , September 3, 2015. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-apartheid-policies-put-israel-on-path-to-failed-state-1.5394664. Kline, Nolan. 2019. Pathogenic Policing: Immigration Enforcement and Health in the US South . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11. McCall, Leslie. 2005. “The Complexity of Intersectionality.” Signs 30 (3): 1771–1800. https://doi.org/10.1086/426800. McIntosh, Peggy. 1989. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Peace and Freedom , July/August 1989, 10–12. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1984. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2 12 (3): 333–358. https://www.jstor.org/stable/302821. Mukhopadhyay, Carol C. 2008. “Getting Rid of the Word ‘Caucasian.’” In Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real about Race in School , edited by Mica Pollock, 12–16. New York: New Press. Mullings, Leith. 2002. “The Sojourner Syndrome: Race, Class, and Gender in Health and Illness.” Voices 6 (1): 32–36. https://doi.org/10.1525/vo.2002.6.1.32. Mullings, Leith. 2005. “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34:667–693. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093435. Nader, Laura. 1972. “Up the Anthropologist—Perspectives Gained from Studying Up.” In Reinventing Anthropology , edited by Dell Hymes, 284–311. New York: Pantheon Books. Nairn, Charlie, dir. (1974) 2003. Ongka’s Big Moka: The Kawelka of Papua New Guinea . Newton, NJ: Shanachie Entertainment. DVD. Newman, Katherine S. 1999. Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence . Berkeley: University of California Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Woman, Culture, and Society , edited by Michelle Zimablist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 67–88. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Painter, Nell Irvin. 2010. The History of White People . New York: W. W. Norton. Pappé, Ilan, ed. 2015. Israel and South Africa: The Many Faces of Apartheid . London: Zed Books. Quave, Kylie E., Shannon M. Fie, AmySue Qing Qing Greiff, and Drew Alis Agnew. 2020. “Centering the Margins: Knowledge Production in the Introductory Archaeology Course.” Advances in Archaeological Practice 9 (2): 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2020.43. Rivera, Lauren A. 2015. Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition . London: Zed Press. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, and Louise Lamphere, eds. 1974. Woman, Culture, and Society . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Runestad, Pamela. 2017. “Time to ‘Study In.’” Anthropology News 58 (1): e299–e302. https://doi.org/10.1111/AN.319. Sacks, Karen Brodkin. 1989. “Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race, and Gender.” American Ethnologist 16 (3): 534–550. https://www.jstor.org/stable/645273. Spencer, Herbert. 1864–1867. The Principles of Biology . 2 vols. London: William and Norgate. Weber, Max. 2010. “The Distribution of Power within the Community: Classes, Stände, Parties.” Translated by Dagmar Waters, Tony Waters, Elisabeth Hahnke, Maren Lippke, Eva Ludwig-Glück, Daniel Mai, Nina Ritzi-Messner, Christina Veldhoen, and Lucas Fassnacht. Journal of Classical Sociology 10 (2): 137–152. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X10361546. Willen, Sarah S., Colleen C. Walsh, and Abigail Fisher Williamson. 2021. “Visualizing Health Equity: Qualitative Perspectives on the Value and Limits of Equity Images.” Health Education & Behavior 48 (5): 595–603. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198121994520 Willis, William S., Jr. 1972. “Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet.” In Reinventing Anthropology , edited by Dell Hymes, 121–152. New York: Pantheon Books. decolonizing anthropology an approach to anthropology that emphasizes the responsibility of anthropologists to work for the enhancement and empowerment of those most alienated and dispossessed.

Social Sciences


Introduction Refugees are people who have been forced out of their homelands for various reasons. This is a camp in Haiti that arose after the 2010 earthquake. An estimated 1.5 million people were displaced after this catastrophic event. (credit: “Military Relief Efforts in Haiti After Devastating” by Fred W. Baker III/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) The word migration is likely to bring to mind a stereotype familiar to American culture: people voluntarily coming into another country in search of work and other opportunities. Yet this is only one aspect of the meaning of migration as understood by anthropologists. Migration , put simply, is movement from one place to another that reestablishes a household, either permanently or temporarily. Examples of migration include seasonal movements in search of work, temporary movements due to a crisis or local challenges, transnational movements from one nation to another, and even occasional moves from one household to another over a lifetime (sometimes referred to as internal versus external migration ). Migrants , by extension, are simply people who move. Other than those relatively few people who are living in the same house they were born into, we are all migrants of one sort or another. Within this larger category of migrants, immigrants are individuals who move permanently from one country (where they are referred to as emigrants ) to another country (where they are called immigrants ). The human species, along with our ancestors, has practiced migration from our earliest origins. It is part of who we are. Most living species migrate in some way, but humans move more widely than other species and modify the landscape the most through their movements. Human migration impacts the world in innumerable ways. immigrant an individual who moves permanently from one country to another. migrant a person who moves from their place of origin to reestablish a household. migration movement from one place to another that reestablishes a household, whether temporarily or permanently.

Social Sciences


Peopling of the World Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Describe the early migration patterns of the genus Homo . Distinguish the primary controversies in the peopling of America theories. Identify major pre-Clovis sites in the United States. Early Hominin Migrations Human species were migratory from the beginning, moving as small populations of gatherers and hunters within eastern and southern Africa. By following game and the availability of seasonal vegetation from place to place, these small groups of nomads learned about their landscape, interacted with each other, and met their subsistence needs. Their daily needs came through interaction with a changing environment. With the emergence of Homo erectus around 1.89 million years BP (before the present), hominins expanded their territories and began to exhibit increasing control over their environment and an ability to adapt, evidenced by the development of new subsistence systems, including cultivation, pastoralism, and agriculture, and an upsurge in migration within Africa and, eventually, into Asia and Europe. This expansion into new geographical regions was a hallmark of the later human species. There are several theories on possible migratory sequences within and beyond the African continent. One possibility is that by 1.75 million years ago, Homo ergaster had begun migrating out of Africa, moving northward into Eurasia. Another theory argues that an earlier hominin species, either australopithecine or an early as-yet-unknown species of the genus Homo , migrated out of Africa around 2 million years ago, eventually evolving into the population of Dmanisi hominins who were settled in eastern Europe by 1.85 million years ago, possibly representing another link between H. erectus and H. ergaster . Although settlement dates are currently being retested and reexamined for precision (Matsu’ura et al. 2020), it is known that between 1.3 and 1.6 million years ago, H. erectus settled on Java, an island that is now part of Indonesia. They likely traveled there by a land route, as seas were lower during the Pleistocene Ice Age (approximately 2.588 million–11,700 years ago), allowing for more passage through interior coastal routes. (For more on early human migrations, see The Genus Homo Homo and the Emergence of Us .) Regardless of the specific time frame and migration pattern, it is well established that there was gene flow between various hominin populations, which indicates that there were migration and exchange. With the migration of these early hominin populations, cultural practices and improvements in toolmaking spread as well. Wherever humans traveled, they carried with them their traditions, intermingling and reproducing both physically and culturally. Controversies Surrounding the Peopling of the Americas Current evidence points to the emergence of the genus Homo in Africa. From these beginnings, human populations began moving toward the global north, east, and south in migratory waves. Motivations for these migrations included animal movements, overcrowding and resource scarcity, and, likely, curiosity and adventure. The movement into the Western Hemisphere, into North and South America, occurred significantly later than migrations into Europe and Asia; how much later is a question of enormous controversy today. How did the first peoples make their way to the Americas? When did they first arrive, and how did they migrate within these vast continents? The available evidence is inconclusive, leaving us with one of the biggest enigmas in human evolution. While there is some debate on whether earlier human species migrated into the Americas, the evidence we have today points to members of the species Homo sapiens being the earliest humans to do so. At this point, there is no evidence of any earlier hominin species in either North or South America. The Western Hemisphere was wholly settled by migrants coming from other continents. There are many theories regarding the first human migration into the Western Hemisphere. Because of changing global climate conditions and the retreat of glaciers toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, new lands opened to migrating animals and the humans who were likely hunting them (Wooller et al. 2018). As always, because of limited and ambiguous artifact and fossil findings, the primary pieces of evidence are open to multiple interpretations. Upon examining the range of theories, two primary arguments are apparent. Both of these arguments are backed by supporting evidence, and both rely on migratory patterns of H. sapiens in the Americas that have been definitively established. While both migration theories are valid, the question that remains open to argument is which came first, coastal or interior migration? The interior route , also called the Bering Strait theory , is the best-known and most accepted theory for the first human migration into the Americas. The foundation of this theory is the Beringia “land bridge,” which connected northeast Siberia and what is now Alaska when sea levels were lower due to glacial ice formation on the continents. This theory proposes that the earliest human habitants of the Americas crossed this marshy land on foot, most likely beginning around 15,000 years ago based on artifacts and dating sequences. The Beringia land bridge was alternately exposed and submerged multiple times over the earth’s history. According to the interior route theory, the earliest humans crossed this marshy land in pursuit of migratory herds of mammals and then proceeded to filter southward, splitting into multiple groups, some of which penetrated into the interior of North America as they continued to move east and south. The interior route theory argues that a northeastern Siberian population of hunters first entered the Americas on foot from Beringia following migrating herds, while the coastal route theory argues that the earliest migrants followed fish and sea animals by boat along the Pacific coast of the Western Hemisphere. Although the precise date for the earliest migrations is debated, it is estimated to be between 15,000 and 18,000 years ago. (credit: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY NC-SA 4.0 license) The coastal route is also based on the migration of a northeastern Siberian population into the Western Hemisphere, but by boat rather than on foot. This theory, sometimes called the kelp highway hypothesis , proposes that the earliest migratory populations followed the continental coastline southward, subsisting on kelp, fish, shellfish, birds, and sea mammals. Research by archaeologist Jon Erlandson (Erlandson et al. 2007; Ocean Wise 2017) suggests that migrants may have followed these food sources all along the continental shelf, a shallow sea area near the shore. Some believe that they eventually reached as far south as Chile, in South America, before breaking into groups and penetrating the interior lands. Each theory presents its own probabilities and problems in relation to dating sequences and artifacts, and there were possibly multiple early routes for the peopling the Americas. Scientific research does agree on some known facts, however. Genetic sequencing shows continuity between the earliest Americans and populations in northeastern Siberia that indicates the earliest inhabitants of the Americas arrived no more than 25,000 years ago, making the Americas the most recent continental habitation (outside of Antarctica). Humans were already inhabiting Australia by the time other humans first arrived in the Americas. Archaeological sites in the Americas present fascinating evidence of early human migrations, with the dating sequences continually being retested and revised. Based on some of the early archaeological evidence, scientists had believed that the first American inhabitants were part of what is known as the Clovis culture , identified with a leaf-shaped projectile point used in hunting. As excavations have continued, though, there is growing indication of an extensive pre-Clovis culture , evidenced by a pre-Clovis technology based on gathering, hunting, and fishing, with dates extending back further than 13,200 years before present. Pre-Clovis projectile points are smaller, less standardized, and less worked (flaked), indicating a less advanced tool production. Many pre-Clovis sites are located below the Clovis period occupation. As archaeologists have continued excavations, the dates for earliest occupation continue to be pushed backward. Clovis points from the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center. Clovis points are long, leaf-shaped points that are bifacial, or flaked on both sides. (credit: “Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center Arrowheads Clovis Point Stone Tools” by C Watts/flickr, CC BY 2.0) Why so much debate about the settling of the Americas? There are various reasons for the difficulties in establishing settlement dates. The Bering land bridge was periodically exposed and submerged under water during periods of glacial growth and retreat. Using core samples obtained by drilling down into the shallow sea floor, archaeologists have found evidence of large mammals and even fluted points (hunting tools) in and around the Aleutian Islands, through which the land bridge would have crossed. Establishing and cross-checking dates, though, has been difficult because most evidence is now submerged. This is a challenge also for the coastal route theory, as coastlines have receded since the end of the Pleistocene, and encampments would have likely been small, possibly temporary sites. Many sites are likely now submerged offshore (Gruhn 2020). Among the best-known pre-Clovis sites are the following: Monte Verde Site , Chile. This is one of the most studied pre-Clovis sites. An extensive array of artifacts has been found at Monte Verde, including hearths, wooden and stone tools, animal bones, and even human footprints. The dates assigned to these artifacts, as early as 16,000 BP, put this site within the range of pre-Clovis dates seen in North America. Debra L. Friedkin Site , Texas. This pre-Clovis site has a dating sequence of 13,500 to 15,500 BP. A wide range of pre-Clovis tools have been found here, including partially flaked tools, blades, and scrapers. Cactus Hill Site , Virginia. A well-document Clovis site has been identified at Cactus Hill, but below this level of artifacts, there is evidence of pre-Clovis projectile points. Although controversial, these points have possible dating sequences of 18,000–22,000 BP. A pre-Clovis archaeological site in Sussex County, Virginia, in the United States (credit: “Nottoway Archaeological Site Entrance” by Nyttend/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) Based on this new evidence, scientists now agree that the Americas were first settled by a pre-Clovis population. How they arrived, when they arrived, what movements they made, and in what order they made them are major archaeological questions today. What we can conclude is that human populations continued to migrate after peopling the Americas.

Social Sciences


Early Global Movements and Cultural Hybridity Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain the ways that globalization connects local populations through the phenomena of flows. Describe the roles that colonialism played in shifting populations between colonizing and colonized nations. Distinguish between diaspora, transnationalism, and cultural hybridity. Explain the contemporary forces of postcolonialism and forced migration. Colonialism and Migration as Global Forces The global movement that characterizes our current period in history is not preordained. The volatile and powerful nature of multinational cultural change and economic exploitation associated with this global movement is connected with specific historical forces. One of the most consequential early global forces was colonialism , an exploitative relationship between state societies in which one has political dominance over the other, primarily for economic advantage. Colonialism did not only affect the countries enmeshed in colonial relationships; it also established world alliances and enduring social, political, and economic changes. Some scholars date the earliest emergence of colonialism to the city-states of Mesopotamia in western Asia, an area occupied today by parts of Iran , Iraq , Turkey , Kuwait , and Syria . Evidence indicates that by around 3500 BCE, the northern and southern regions were connected by exploitative trade relationships and intense and prolonged warfare. US archaeologists Guillermo Algaze and Clemens Reichel (Algaze 2013; Wilford 2007), in excavations at Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia, have unearthed trade goods that indicate a vast exchange network involving items such as pottery, jewelry, metalwork, and even wine. There is also a pattern of destruction and warfare at Uruk and, more recently, at Tell Hamoukar in modern-day Syria, which indicates the movement of populations as well as trade goods. Tell Hamoukar was a major site of obsidian tool and blade manufacture as early as 4500 BCE, with raw materials coming from as far away as modern-day Turkey, some 100 miles to the north. At Tell Hamoukar, collapsed walls and a large number of penetrating clay bullets, likely delivered by slingshots, are some of the oldest known artifacts of organized warfare. The archaeological sites indicate that there was armed conflict and that groups of people were moving between locations. The patterns of destruction across these various sites suggest that populations were most likely vying for control over resources and production sites, similar to conflicts associated with more modern colonialism, which also were primarily characterized by a drive for political control based on access to raw materials and resources. After these early beginnings, colonialism spread, including the development of European and Mediterranean settlements in northern Africa. The Phoenicians , from what is now modern-day Lebanon, established the city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia to facilitate and control trade throughout the Mediterranean area. Carthage remained an important hub for trade from its founding in the 9th century BCE until it was destroyed by the Roman Empire in 146 BCE. In what is now modern-day Egypt, the Macedonian king Alexander the Great founded the city of Alexandria in 331 BCE. Alexandria rapidly grew in economic and political influence because of its control over Mediterranean trade routes; in the Greek confederation of city-states, only Rome was more powerful. As colonizing nations consolidated their political and economic influence, they increasingly sought to expand their access to the natural resources and human labor of other societies. Colonial occupations were repeatedly marked by violence. By the end of the 15th century, when Christopher Columbus began the first of what would be four voyages (1492–1504) to the New World, many of the nations of Europe were aggressively seeking new territories, establishing what is now called the Age of Discovery (1500s–1700s). During this period, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Great Britain all funded sea and land voyages to seek out new territories in order to expand their global influence. The modern-day European world order of developed and developing nations emerged from the colonialism begun during of the Age of Discovery. Across the globe, generations of Indigenous peoples contested European colonizers. Often fighting with less effective weaponry; having little or no immunity to Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles, typhus, and cholera, which decimated their populations; and balancing efforts to defend their homelands and families with the desperate need to maintain agricultural production to fend off famines, Indigenous people frequently migrated from one area to another, leaving behind land and crops. In the Andean area, forasteros , a group of Indigenous peoples, became nomadic to flee oppression. Declaring ownership and control over lands and people who had few effective means to challenge them, European nations quickly established colonies throughout North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. Politically, most colonies were beset with conflict and periodic uprisings, such as the Great Rebellion of Tupac Amaru II from 1780 to 1783 in Cuzco, Peru, during which Andean peoples came very close to toppling the Spanish government after almost 250 years of oppression. During this period, there also emerged new sociocultural institutions and rituals blending colonizing and Indigenous cultures as aspects such as food and religious beliefs became entangled (Carballo 2020). This blending is referred to as creolization . Culturally, the dismantling of Indigenous languages, religions, and other institutions continues to be devastating. Late European colonialism of the 18th to the 20th century, sometimes called classic colonialism , was a period in which the institutions of control and extraction were standardized, especially in Africa. This period of colonialism is characterized by very specific goals, policies, and attitudes. The colonial relationship was symbolically depicted as one of benevolence between the “mother country” and the colony, with people such as missionaries, colonial advisors, settlers, businesspeople, and teachers all working together to promote economic development and Europeanization in the colony. The official justification for these practices was that European Christians had a “White man’s burden” to spread their civilization worldwide. Beneath this rhetoric, however, the goals were power and control. Colonialism was an extractive and exploitative economic venture with a social structure designed to dehumanize Indigenous peoples. Raw materials were extracted from the colonies using low-paid Indigenous labor and sent to European nations, where they were transformed into goods that were then sold back to the colony and its Indigenous peoples at an enormous profit for the Europeans. Indigenous cultures were severely damaged or destroyed. Frequently, Indigenous peoples were removed from their homelands and settled on reservations or within territories that were of less use to the Europeans, freeing up large swaths of land for European immigrants. Many young Indigenous people, handpicked for their skills and aptitude, were sent to European countries to be educated and acculturated as future leaders in the colonies. The intention of this preparatory system was to disrupt the influence of Indigenous cultures and create enduring pro-European institutions within the colonies. It also served to divide the Indigenous populations, further weakening them. In other cases, Indigenous peoples were bought, sold, and traded as commodities, moving them away from their languages, cultures, and families. From the 16th to the 19th century, it is estimated that between 10 and 12 million Africans were enslaved and transported from Africa to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade . The massive scale of this forced migration changed the world ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and economically. Untold millions of Africans died in the enslavement process, fracturing families, communities, and societies. While the movement and mixing of so many different peoples resulted in expansive cultural innovation in areas such as languages, foods, religions, and rituals, the cost of this massive displacement in human lives and human potential was incalculably high, leaving scars and challenges that continue today. These policies, of removing peoples from their homelands and of sending young people far from home for schooling and enculturation, are just two examples of the ways in which colonialism forced people onto new lands and into new cultures. As colonies grew into empires, with many different nations under the control of a single European nation—such as Great Britain, which had colonies in places as far apart as Kenya, Australia, and Canada—there was a global movement of people and cultures across continents. Colonization also affected those living in European countries, influencing contemporary identities in many ways. The area of modern-day Poland was partitioned several times by neighboring nation-states and was colonized by both Germany and Russia during World War II and its aftermath. In this eastern European nation, the impacts of migration and change continue to affect the way Poland sees itself today. The various movements of peoples and cultures have left Poland uneasy with its own history and national identity. In her research on culture-focused museums in Poland, sociocultural anthropologist and curator Erica Lehrer (2020) studies the contested narratives within the legacies of collecting, categorizing, and displaying objects in postcolonial countries where prior migrations have changed the nature of national identity. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened in Warsaw, Poland, in 2005. It focuses on Jewish history in Poland, with a mission of promoting openness, tolerance, and truth. (credit: “Warszawa - Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN” by Fred Romero/flickr, CC BY 2.0) In its history, Poland has been both the colonizing nation (in regard to neighboring states in eastern Europe) and the colonized (in regard to its long history as a colony of Russia and its later occupation during World War II). Depleted by wars, out-migration, territorial shifts, and genocide, Poland’s contemporary population is far more homogeneous by race, class, and religion than it was prior to World War II. Museum depictions of Poland’s culture and national identity have created a host of what Lehrer calls “awkward objects” (2020, 290) that hark back to earlier, and sometimes darker, historical periods. These include museums objects made by non-Jewish Poles representing their memory and imagination of Jews in the pre–World War II era, some depicting ambiguous racial stereotypes , as well as hybrid objects that could have been artifacts of either Jewish or Catholic communities but are depicted by object origin and associated with only one of those communities. One example is a collection of children’s noisemakers, which were depicted in the museum as artifacts from a Catholic Polish community without noting that Jewish Polish children would have played with similar toys at that time. And how should a Polish cultural museum handle darker awkward artifacts, such as carvings of a gas chamber at Auschwitz? The roles and responsibilities that contemporary societies have in telling these parts of their history are relevant to museums and cultural institutions around the globe. Museums often house artifacts of colonialism. Think about cultural and historical museums that you have visited. How did they tell the story of the darker parts of history? Are certain historical periods overlooked or underdeveloped? Lehrer calls for pluralist contextualization , meaning that museums should not just include the cultural origins of the object but also indicate how they were obtained and how they connect with other cultural communities. Citing a need for ethical curatorial principles, she says: Strategic curatorial approaches can frame objects to function as a source of ethical inspiration and empathy, spurring people to acknowledge and address those histories that are un chosen by national or communal authorities. . . . Decolonising the museum here is not about restitution. These “awkward objects” are most valuable to us curated in ongoing, caring conversation wherever historical injuries still resonate, reminding us that we are tied together by our wounds. (307, 311) Postcolonialism, Indigenous Identities, and Forced Migration Although colonialism as a direct politico-economic policy is usually associated with earlier historical periods, it continues to have effects on the world today. The enduring politico-economic relationships established by colonialism have left behind concentrations of capital and technology, wealth and privilege in the former colonizing countries, mainly in Europe, as well as inequality, racism, and violence in the relationships between these nations and their colonies. These aftereffects of colonial relationships are referred to as postcolonialism . As independence movements began to take hold in the early 20th century, former colonies found themselves depleted of resources and competing against European countries whose growth came from their own demise. Today, postcolonialism is a significant topic for anthropologists whose research focuses on the effects of colonialism, marginalization , and intersectionality , where race, gender, and class identities come together. One of the most prominent consequences of colonialism is the inequality between the so-called developed countries and the developing or underdeveloped ones. Following World War II and the rise of a new world order, many political and economic theories began to distinguish between “first world” countries, which had the highest GDPs (gross domestic products) based on the total value of all goods and services produced in a country, and those with the lowest GDPs, referred to as “third world” countries. The “second world” tier was typically reserved for those countries with a socialist or communist government. In this tiered and hierarchical system, the former colonizers were always within the top tier and their former colonies in the lowest ranks. Much of this inequality was due to the exploitation of resources and the brain drain migration of Indigenous peoples, in which the wealthiest and most educated members of Indigenous societies relocated to the former colonizing nation for education and employment, many leaving their homelands permanently. This out-migration devastated many Indigenous families and enhanced the productive capacities of richer nations. Many former colonizing countries thus continued to exert influence over their former dependencies even after independence. This relationship of unequal influence is referred to as neocolonialism . Many Indigenous societies are involved in neocolonial relationships (meaning relationships that are structured to make one country dependent on another) with the nation-states in which they live, a situation sometimes referred to as second colonialism (Gandhi 2001). Indigenous groups continue to be uprooted, and sometimes forcibly removed, from their homelands and moved onto reservations, into “model villages,” or simply into urban areas. This type of forced migration , an involuntary or coerced removal from a people’s homeland, can result in poverty, alienation, and loss of cultural identity . Native peoples in the United States have been subjected to repeated waves of forced migration since the arrival of Europeans. Many societies were forced to move multiple times as White settlers pushed them onto more western and less fertile lands. All of this forced dislocation has had significant cultural and economic consequences. As Native Americans Richard Meyers (Oglala Lakota) and Ernest Weston Jr. (Oglala Sioux) write: Tragedies of many kinds are often all too common for many people who reside on our reservation. Endemic poverty creates endless problems for community members, from violent dog packs to pervasive alcoholism and diabetes. Dismal statistics paint our reservation as the “Third World” right here in the United States. The numbers are hard to pin down but always dreary: Unemployment is sometimes listed as being as high as 85–95 percent, and more than 90 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line. (Meyers and Weston 2020) While many Indigenous peoples in Western nations face unique problems of Western historical paralysis , in which the nation-state extols the virtues of Indigenous people at a specific time in its history with little or no regard for contemporary Indigenous identities, some Indigenous peoples are adapting their cultural traditions to urban areas where they have been forced to migrate. In her study of Indigenous Manchineri youth in the Brazilian state of Acre, Finnish anthropologist Pirjo Virtanen (2006) found a cultural revival of traditional puberty rituals for young Manchineri adults. The Manchineri are a lowland Amazonian people who traditionally practiced slash-and-burn cultivation. Over the past century, their access to farmland has become increasingly limited, leaving them unable to make a living in the forest. Many young Manchineri have migrated from their traditional homelands to live in urban areas among other lowland Amazonian Indigenous peoples. These Manchineri sought to strengthen their cultural identity by reviving and adapting certain traditional rituals, such as the ayahuasca ceremony , in which pubescent boys ingest a hallucinogenic substance as a spiritual experience, and a menstruation ceremony in which girls are instructed by their elders on their new status as adults. Few Manchineri remain on their ancestral homelands, and many of these cultural traditions were in danger of dying out. In Acre, the urban Manchineri found that being an “Indigenous person” had social value with Westerners who appreciated traditional Indigenous cultures. Much of this growth in appreciation came as a result of the rapid decline of Indigenous cultures and populations and the increasing urbanization and alienation of people from rural environments. The younger generation of Manchineri began to appreciate their traditional cultural roots and see the value of maintaining their specific cultural identity, rather than being “lumped” into a broad category of Indigenous persons, while living in an urban environment. By marking themselves as Manchineri, they were able to leverage a higher social standing. This process of using identity as a way to gain status is an example of symbolic capital , or the use of nonmonetary resources to gain social prestige. Maintaining a specific Indigenous identity within Western nation-states is challenging, as the numbers of Indigenous peoples continue to decline and migration into urban areas creates a mixture of cultures that frequently results in the loss of traditional identities. Indigenous identity is complex and not monolithic, as specific cultural groups have distinct identities; no single spokesperson can realistically represent all Indigenous people. Recently, pan-Indigenous activist movements have developed worldwide to increase the visibility and strengthen the voices of Indigenous peoples. These global movements of people and ideas make it possible for Indigenous people to form alliances for change. Globalization in Motion As the connections and interactions between communities, states, countries, and continents have intensified, a global network of linked forces and institutions known as globalization has emerged. Unlike earlier worldwide movements, globalization tends to be decentered, meaning it is not controlled by any particular nation-state or cultural group. Emerging from earlier worldwide historical movements pertaining to exploration, colonialism, and capitalism, globalization has exceeded them with its reach and has created a worldwide interdependence far more intense and transformative on a global scale than anything ever before seen in human history. It involves all aspects of our lives (e.g., political, economic, social, and religious), and it has no center or origin point. Changes and interactions occur within a dynamic and seemingly arbitrary field of connections among people, ideas, countries, and technologies. Globalization causes the movement of people, resources, and ideas in various ways. Not only do people migrate for work and travel, but they also share ideas and technology, resulting in cultures and populations that are no longer restricted and contained by geographical boundaries. These globalized cultures and networks have changed the way that anthropologists think about culture. Culture is no longer solely attached to a local place and community; rather, it is diffuse and possibly widespread, due to the complicating forces of globalization. One of the early scholars of globalization is Indian American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai . His research is grounded in the idea of a new global cultural economy that traffics in multiple simultaneous flows of material goods, ideas, images, and people, reminding us that global movements and transformations affect every one, whether or not we actually change the nation or community in which we live. Within globalization, local and global communities are deeply intertwined in fluid and dynamic relationships of mutual influence. These interconnections sometimes lead to unpredictable outcomes. Appadurai (1990) identifies five different global cultural flows, tagging each with the suffix - scapes to call attention to the fluidity and multiple ways of viewing these flows: Ethnoscapes : the flow of new ideas and new ways of living created by the ongoing migration of people—whether tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, or other groups—across cultures and borders. As just one example, the descendants of the Zainichi Koreans who immigrated to Japan following World War II have established Korean schools and a Korean university in Japan. Technoscapes : the worldwide movement of technology, both equipment and information, as well as the multinational origins and manufacturing process of technology along a global assembly line. One example is an iPhone, which has component parts and a manufacturing process that involves many different places. Financescapes : the movement of money and capital through currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations. The funds of even the most local investors are intermingled and invested on the global market. Mediascapes : the various types of media representations that influence the way we experience our world. These are “image-centered, narrative-based . . . strips of reality” (Appadurai 1990, 299) diffused through digital media, magazines, television, and film, introducing characters and plots across cultural settings and meanings. Ideoscapes : the flow and interaction of ideas and ideologies. Appadurai describes ideoscapes as “terminological kaleidoscopes” (1990, 301) in which words and ideas carrying political and ideological meanings are trafficked across cultures. In this process, their meanings become increasingly amorphous and obscured. One example is the political change that resulted from a reawakening of democratic movements in the Middle East in the 2010s, inspiring the Arab Spring, a series of anti-government protests and rebellions. Anti-government protests in Tunisia spilled over into Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, toppling government leaders and triggering social violence. Appadurai speaks of these -scapes as primary agencies and intersections within the global cultural economy; in other words, each of these -scapes creates change through interactions with others. In this fluid exchange of ideas, material goods, and persons, the -scapes interact, overlap, and contradict one another as cultures themselves come to be commodities produced and consumed by the global community. Semiconductor chips are currently made in only a few countries. The United States imports these chips for use in automobiles, medical technology, and computers. In 2021, facing a worldwide shortage of computer chips, President Joe Biden pledged funding to support the creation of chip manufacturers in the United States. (credit: “EPROM-EPLD ALTERA EP910” by yellowcloud/flickr, CC BY 2.0) There are multiple perspectives for understanding globalization. It can be interpreted as an imperial force in which certain countries and cultures have dominance over others, with their images, capital, and ideas predominating in the global marketplace. Indian anthropologist Sekh Mondal aptly says, “The people earlier had been the creators and creatures of culture, but today the corporate bodies and media have emerged as the creators and carriers of cultural attributes” (2007, 94). Globalization can also be viewed as an open-access community in which governments and corporations have lost the ability to control and isolate populations, ultimately allowing for more cultural diversity and equality. Globalization today transforms virtually everything about anthropology—its subject matter, the locales for research, its understanding of the concept of culture, and the goals that anthropologists bring to their work. Within this context of great change, anthropology is uniquely capable of making sense of this new global community and its rapidly shifting beliefs and behaviors. Diaspora, Transnationalism, and Cultural Hybridity Migration impacts individuals and cultures in diverse ways. It prompts the dissemination and diffusion of cultural ideas and artifacts from one cultural context to another, the development of new cultural forms and practices, and hybridity, in which cultures intermingle in unpredictable ways. Cultural hybridity refers to the exchange and innovation of ideas and artifacts between cultures as a product of migration and globalization. It is a commingling of different cultural elements resulting from the interactions of people and their ideas. While individuals and small groups convey their cultures as they migrate, the movement and dispersal of large ethnic groups can bring about far more rapid structural changes. This large-scale movement, which might be caused by warfare, institutionalized violence, or opportunities (most commonly education and employment), is called diaspora . Related to diaspora is transnationalism , the construction of social, economic, and political networks that originate in one country and then cross or transcend nation-state boundaries. While diaspora and transnationalism can both be related to large-scale migration, transnationalism also refers to the cultural and political projects of a nation-state as it spreads globally (Kearney 1995). One example of this is transnational corporations, which are anchored in one country with satellites and subsidiaries in others. Diasporic communities typically have a sense of identity that has been shaped or transformed by the migration experience. They are characterized by cultural hybridity and often take these new cultural forms with them into their new homelands, generating cultural revival. The African diaspora resulting from the transatlantic slave trade brought a wide array of cultural elements to the United States, including new foods (such as okra and yams), new instruments and musical forms (such as the drums, the banjo, and the development of African slave spirituals), and new language (words such as jazz , gumbo , and tilapia ). Besides the common experience of being formed through migration, diasporic communities share other characteristics. These include a collective memory about the ancestral homeland; a social connection to the country of origin, typically through family still living there; a strong identity as a distinct group; and fictive kinship with diasporic members in other countries (“Migration Data Relevant” 2021). Diasporic communities are inherently political (Werbner 2001), as their movements connect nation-states in a variety of ways—economically, socially, religiously, and politically. Some of the best-known diasporas are the African diaspora that was driven by the transatlantic slave trade from the 15th to the 19th century, the Irish diaspora during Ireland’s Great Famine of the mid-1800s, and the Jewish diaspora , which began under the Roman Empire and continued through the establishment of Israel as a Jewish homeland in 1948. Today, India is the source of the largest diaspora in history, with some 18 million Indians living outside of their country of origin. These mass movements, which are becoming more common as a result of globalization, affect cultures worldwide. An immigrant solidarity rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2017. About 3,000 people gathered to protest against President Trump’s immigration ban and the increasing militarization of the U.S-Mexico border. (credit: “Solidarity March with Immigrants & Refugees” by Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0) American anthropologist and South Asian scholar Ritty Lukose has done fieldwork in India and in U.S. immigrant communities exploring diaspora and postcolonial identities. In her research with Indian diasporic communities in the United States (2007), she focused on ways in which education could better connect with immigrant families, thus strengthening both. The percentage of children in the United States population who are immigrant children, defined as those who have at least one foreign-born parent, increased by 51 percent between 1994 and 2017 (Child Trends 2018). Immigrant families constitute a significant portion of the population within American schools today. Based on her research, Lukose argues that there needs to be a realignment in American education that better acknowledges immigrant identities. As an example of the urgency of this need, she cites the 2005–2006 California textbook controversy , in which the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) sued the California State Board of Education for using sixth-grade social studies textbooks that contained what the HAF and many Indian parents deemed to be biased and discriminatory views of Hinduism. Lukose advises that instead of presenting the migrant experience as fractured between voluntary and involuntary immigrants or focusing on conflict between immigrants and other minorities (such as racial minorities), American educational pedagogy, curricula, and practices should present identity formation itself as one of the richest experiences of being a citizen. An educational approach that emphasizes immigrant identity, not as a hybrid of pieces and parts, but as a legitimate and practical way of functioning within a globalized world could better prepare all students in the United States for a future in which we focus on what links us together rather than what divides us. cultural hybridity the exchange and innovation within cultures that is a product of migration and globalization. diaspora the movement and dispersal of large ethnic groups from their homelands because of warfare, institutionalized violence, or opportunity (usually education or employment). postcolonialism enduring politico-economic relationships between former colonizers and their former colonies that continue to have negative effects on the former colonies after independence. transnationalism the construction of social, economic, and political networks that originate in one country and then cross or transcend nation-state boundaries.

Social Sciences


Peasantry and Urbanization Learning Outcomes By the end of this section, you will be able to: Explain how industrialization and internal migration are connected to the creation of a peasant class. Articulate the characteristics of peasantry from an anthropological perspective. Describe cultural changes associated with internal migration. Peasantry in Anthropology Peasants , a rural, subsistence-based agricultural class with limited landholdings, are the product of both urban development and rural–urban migration. Prior to the emergence of capitalism and the industrial state, agriculturalists were the most populous class within state societies. The development of the industrial economy prompted an ongoing process of internal migration , the domestic movement of people from rural to urban areas for economic opportunities, education, and employment. For many peasants, internal migration was used to meet immediate family needs, whether taking agricultural goods to urban markets—which may be weekly, monthly, or seasonal—or temporarily moving to work for cash at agricultural tasks for larger farms and companies. The coffee, sugar, and fruit industries, for example, absorbed many small, rural agriculturalists whose families needed money. Cultural anthropologist Robert Redfield (1956) was one of the first anthropologists to identify peasants as a distinct social group, referring to their local identity and culture as a “little tradition” (70), meaning a culture that is less unified and involves a changing mixture of customs based on oral traditions. He identified the primary characteristics of peasant cultures as attachment to the land from which they make a living, dependence on urban areas that control the value of their small surplus, and traditionalism in regard to social practices. Later studies built on these earlier ideas about peasantry. Eric Wolf (1966) referred to peasant groups as “ closed corporate communities ” (86), meaning communities that are more detached from urban centers and less prone to cultural changes as a result of migration. He also saw them as distinct from farmers in that they produce a more limited surplus and are involved in more asymmetrical (i.e., exploitative) market transactions. Instead of being simple subsistence farmers, peasants are aware of the wider capital markets and are directly affected by the fluctuating value of their products, even though they have no power over these forces or control over the profit they earn. Sometimes, frustration over this sense of powerlessness leads to attempts to affect political change. In 1994, on the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA , came into effect between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the Zapatista rebellion broke out in Chiapas, Mexico. This movement was led by Indigenous peasants who implicitly understood that the treaty, which made it possible for agricultural products to move among the United States, Mexico, and Canada without tariffs, meant that they could no longer sell their small agricultural surpluses for a living wage. Now, they would be competing with giant corporations that were able to flood local markets with cheaper products. As the reach of globalization continues to expand, connecting local communities ever more tightly with global forces, some scholars now speak of a post-peasant class. This term is used to refer to rural cultivators who migrate to urban areas but retain many of the cultural attributes of their ancestral traditions. These might include a patriarchal family structure, a tendency to favor local traditions over global innovations, or a more conservative political outlook (see Buzalka 2008). Internal Migration: Rural-Urban Continuum Indian anthropologist Tame Ramya (2017) studied the push and pull factors—a phrase used to describe circumstances and forces that push migrants away from their homeland and pull them toward a new location—affecting the internal migration of different hill tribes of Kurung Kumey, a district in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, India, to the foothills region of the neighboring district of Papum Pare. Although there were several ethnic groups involved in this study, the majority of migrants to Papum Pare are ethnically Nyishi . The Nyishi, the largest ethnic group in their district, are rural cultivators who raise paddy rice, supplemented with cucumbers and maize. Traditionally, they practiced polygyny and had large families with many children. Ramya’s study shows that the primary motivation for voluntary internal migration in this region is to access new economic opportunities, prompting people to move from more peripheral geographical areas to urban centers. Although the motivation for migration is primarily economic, these relocations result in a series of cultural changes. On tribal lands in the hill country of Kurung Kumey, the most common form of subsistence is jhum . This is a form of slash-and-burn cultivation that requires families to practice a semi-sedentary settlement pattern, moving occasionally when land resources are depleted. Ramya argues that this experience with periodic movement makes voluntary migration somewhat less disruptive to their lives. These are people who are accustomed to occasional relocations. Recent internal migration to the urban area of Papum Pare is motivated by various factors. A rise in local political instability, increasing intra-ethnic conflicts, and a lack of employment opportunities for those seeking hard cash “push” many people, particularly young people, to migrate to the nearby urban area of Papum Pare. People are also “pulled” by a range of employment opportunities in urban industries that are unavailable in Kurung Kumey, by relatives who have already migrated, and by increased access to educational and health facilities in the city. A Nyishi man in Arunachal Pradesh, India. The Nyishi are one of many people whose society has been deeply affected by migration from rural areas into urban centers. (credit: “Nishi Tribal Man Arunachal Pradesh – India” by Diganta Talukdar/flickr, CC BY 2.0) As with any form of migration, culture change and adaptation have been a part of the migrant experience of the people of Kurung Kumey. Among the migrants, Ramya found a set of specific cultural shifts that are common in rural–urban migration across cultures. One is an imbalance of generations, with older family members remaining in the rural hills while younger family members migrate to the city. Also evident is a change in family structure. Migrants establish urban households consisting of just the nuclear family instead of the larger extended family common in rural households, as larger families are now considered too costly to house and feed. Also typical of urban–rural migration are myriad changes in regard to food, dress, language, and alcohol consumption. Traditional curry is cooked in bamboo tubes in the hills region, but migrants in the city no longer use bamboo and do not consume as much boiled food as their rural relatives. Instead, the urban diet is marked by fast food and the use of larger quantities of cooking oil. In addition, Ramya found higher alcohol consumption and addiction among the migrants. Migrants have also begun to abandon the traditional dress that marks them as a tribal and non-urban people and to use their own tribal languages less frequently, preferring the more commonly spoken Hindi and official language of English. All of these changes are typical as individuals and groups move from rural to urban areas. Internal migration is the primary cause of the diminishment of cultural and linguistic diversity worldwide. internal migration the domestic movement of people from rural to urban areas. peasants a rural, subsistence-based agricultural class with limited landholdings.

Social Sciences