party or family, you are a woman” (p. 11). Cannadine (2013), however, contends it is difficult to substantiate that there is a unifying identity solidarity among all women.
For at least the past half-century, various scholars have attempted to demonstrate fundamental differences among the genders. Rather than review that research and argue for separate gender identities, Chapter 9 in this text is devoted to how nations treat genders differently. Chapter 9 also considers nonbinary gender identities worldwide. How a nation deals with gender reveals much about that nation’s values. Gender identity may be influenced more by one’s national identity and other factors than by one’s biology alone.
Additionally, in Chapter 12, you’ll read about sexual orientation as a source of identity.
Race, Skin Color, Ethnicity, and Identity
While class and gender may not have the same strength of regulation of human life and identity creation as national identity, some will argue that race and skin color do. When people speak about Race, they usually refer to visible physical features such as skin color.
Why are we more aware of skin color than of other variables that distinguish each of us? For example, how aware are you of having detached or attached earlobes?
iStockphoto.com/Soulbrette
From this popular biological perspective, race refers to a large body of people characterized by similarity of descent (Campbell, 1976). From this biologically based definition, your race is the result of the mating behavior of your ancestors. The biologically based definition is said to derive from Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, physician, and taxonomist, who said in 1735 that humans are classified into four types: Africanus, Americanus, Asiaticus, and Europaeus. Race became seen as biologically natural and based on visible physical characteristics such as skin color and other facial and bodily features. In the 19th century, the “racial sciences” rank ordered distinct races from the most advanced to the most primitive. Such science became the basis for hospitals segregating blood supplies, Hitler’s genocidal Germany, and South Africa’s apartheid state.
While some physical traits and genes do occur more frequently in certain human populations than in others, such as some skull and dental features, differences in the processing of alcohol, and inherited diseases such as sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis, 20th-century scientists studying genetics found no single race-defining gene. (Focus on Culture 1.1 considers whether one’s DNA reveals anything about one’s cultural identity.) Popular indicators of race, such as skin color and hair texture, were caused by recent adaptations to climate and diet. Jablonski and Chaplin (2000) took global ultraviolet measurements from NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer and compared them with published data on skin color in indigenous populations from more than 50 countries. There was an unmistakable correlation: The weaker the ultraviolet light, the fairer the skin. Most scientists today have abandoned the concept of biological race as a meaningful scientific concept (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, & Piazza, 1994; Owens & King, 1999; Paabo, 2001).
A second way to define race, then, is as a sociohistorical concept, which explains how racial categories have varied over time and between cultures. Worldwide, skin color alone does not define race. The meaning of race has been debated in societies, and as a consequence, new categories have been formed and others transformed. Dark-skinned natives of India have been classified as Caucasian. People with moderately dark skin in Egypt are identified as White. Brazil has a history of intermarriage among native peoples, descendants of African slaves, and immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, but no history of explicit segregation policies. So in Brazil, with the world’s largest Black population after Nigeria, and where half of the population is Black, there are hundreds of words for skin colors (Robinson, 1999), including a census category pardo for mixed ancestry.
The biologically based definition establishes race as something fixed; the sociohistorically based definition sees race as unstable and socially determined through constant debate (Omi & Winant, 1986). While race is associated with physical appearance, when people speak of Ethnicity they generally refer to shared heritage, family names, geography, customs, and language passed on through generations (Zenner, 1996). For some, tribe would be a more understood term. In Afghanistan, for example, people identify by tribes—Tajiks and Pashtuns. According to some estimates, there are 5,000 ethnic groups in the world (Stavenhagen, 1986). In Chapter 2, you’ll read more about race and ethnic groups.
As discussed in Focus on Culture 1.2, the U.S. Census Bureau establishes categories of identity.
Focus on Culture 1.1 Does Your DNA Reveal Your Culture?
Ads for genetic ancestry tests have shown a man trading his lederhosen for a kilt and a woman upon learning of her ancestry to be the Akan people of Ghana to say, “When I found you in my DNA, I learned where my strength comes from.” Sandy Banks, senior fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, who self-identifies as a Black American, discovered that her DNA was 54% European and 24% Nigerian. She reported “excitement, wonder, pain, and pride” on learning of her Nigerian ancestry. But later she reported a “comedown” feeling when a reevaluation of her non-European DNA identified her ancestry as Benin/Togo, Cameroon, Congo and South Bantu, Mali, and Ivory Coast/Ghana. She concluded that “identity is more than ancestry” (Banks, 2019). Communication professor Anita Foeman conducts the DNA Discussion Project, which records stories people tell of their family history and then their reactions when presented with their DNA results (Foeman, Lawton, & Rieger, 2015). A 2014 study (Phelan, Link, & Zelner, 2014) revealed that when people read an article about genetic-ancestry tests, their beliefs in racial differences increase.
1 If you don't speak French, don't eat French food, and don't celebrate any French traditions, but your DNA test reveals French ancestry, are you French?
2 How would you react if you were told that your DNA test results contradicted what you had been told of your family history?
Civilization and Identity
Cannadine’s (2013) final form of identity is civilization. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee believed civilizations to be the most significant determinant of identity but also believed that civilizations were largely self-sufficient and sealed off from one another.
In the 19th century, the term culture was commonly used as a synonym for Western civilization. The British anthropologist Sir Edward B. Tylor (1871) popularized the idea that all societies pass through developmental stages, beginning with “savagery,” progressing to “barbarism,” and culminating in Western “civilization.” It’s easy to see that such a definition assumes that Western nations were considered superior. Both Western nations, beginning with ancient Greece, and Eastern nations, most notably imperial China, believed that their own way of life was superior.
In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington continued the position that civilizations were the most important form of human identity. In general, Huntington identified the world’s civilizations as Western, Latin American, sub-Saharan African, Eastern Orthodox (including the former Soviet Union), Islamic, Confucian, Hindu, and Japanese.
Focus on Culture 1.2 U.S. Census Bureau Definitions of Race
