In a previous article on Mana, I touched on the concept of contemporary ethnicity in the United States of America, trying to shed light on the social, theoretical and historical complexities that contributed to crystallizing the concept in its current form. In another article, I touched on the problems of dating ideas and tracking them over time, primarily concluding that the aura of sanctity surrounding the perception of ideas as if they transcend time and space is nothing but part of an authoritarian discourse that tends to strip them of their contexts and reduce the representative conflicts around them to specific aspects that intersect with the existing authorities. At the same time, I tried to address in a simple way the necessity of archiving ideas independently of their purely intellectual dimensions. In this article, I will attempt to combine the foundations on which the two articles are based in order to explore the complexities and problems inherent in contemporary concepts of race and attempts to trace the idea of race into the past. In other words, I will try to investigate the fallacy of applying existing perceptions today to past phenomena. This means that the article is essentially concerned with the philosophy of intellectual history as it highlights the problem of historicizing race as an idea that has its own shifts in meaning.
The main thesis of the article is based on two assumptions, which I believe are necessary to present at the beginning: First – race, like other concepts, is a social composition that must be approached historically, in other words, any concept extends across time-space and is intertwined with other contexts, concepts, and constructs. Which means that different combinations are formed through the interaction and intersection of these concepts with each other. Therefore, there is no racial thing or essence apart from these material social frameworks, and any attempt to read race – as if it were a transcendent concept of history – will fail.
Secondly, based on the non-objectivity of race and its being a social imagination with its changing implications and contexts across time and space, the article will ignore any claims made by quasi-sciences about differences between races and ethnic groups or about attempts to justify a status quo by rooting it biologically. This means that it will not give weight to attempts to root culture in nature or anything similar, and that it will not adopt any framework that would support the naturalness of race. What you will start from, in return, is the assumption that race is imaginary and that it is a social structure that has real material effects without being material in itself, and the assumption that the discourses that naturalize race are part of the problems that must be avoided.
Challenges of the Historiography of Race:
I will divide the article into three sections based on the three main challenges facing historians of race, the first challenge is a general challenge related to the use of race as a historical analytical tool. In other words, the challenge is related to the theoretical problems associated with writing the history of race as a concept that enables us to understand the phenomena under investigation. Although the article will specifically discuss race, however, these general problems are shared by other concepts. Therefore, in the first section, I will examine some approaches to the historiography of ideas.
After reviewing these approaches, in the next section I will address the second challenge, which is related to analyzing contemporary discourses on race and disentangling them from previous discourses. If historians of race want to avoid the traps of presentism, they must beware of uncritically accepting race as an intuitive, transcendent term. Therefore, separating contemporary and past concepts is a must in order to refute a priori and transcendentalism.
The third and final challenge builds on the previous ones in order to question the problems of the history of race within the shifts in its rhetorical synthesis. Every concept, no matter how historically extended, has its different combinations linked to the spatio-temporal contexts in which it exists. Therefore, trying to understand these combinations would shed light on the historical shifts in its meanings. I pose this challenge by comparing two different approaches to the history of race in order to explore the efficacy of each. As I mentioned earlier, the goal behind exploring these three challenges is to investigate the problems of historicizing the concept of race, with the aim of firstly demonstrating the shortcomings of applying the contemporary concept in understanding past phenomena, and secondly, clarifying the problems related to extrapolating ideas historically.
Challenge One – Uses of “Race”:
We can begin to review the first challenge by examining the uses of the word “race” itself. It is necessary to note that this review will be more theoretical than historical, and it is inevitable to do so in order to overcome the existing problems surrounding race. Hannaford’s observation is spot on when he notes that race is often used as if it were “a self-evident “fact,” requiring no protracted thought.” The same idea can be approached from a slightly different angle, that although race is fictitious, it is still used in literature as if it has a real essence.
This usage leads to many conceptual and factual fallacies. The idea of treating illusions, fantasies, or social constructs as if they were real and then obtaining “realistic” results is one of the foundations that Vaihinger detailed in his book The Philosophy of ‘As if’. Its basic idea can be summarized as follows: some imaginary concepts can produce material results if they are treated as if they were real. Vaihinger represents these concepts as infinity in mathematics, or ethics in everyday life. Although it does not have any physical existence, these concepts can produce real material results.
What is important for the purpose of this article is this relationship between intellectual constructs and the logical “results” that flow from them: the results that come from considering the imagination real contribute to its continued objectification. In other words, as long as the results are associated with the assumption of the reality of race, this reality becomes more objectified, and interpretations tend to ignore any other factors that might lead to the manufacture of these results.
Both points (the race axiom and its consequences) can be represented by what the anthropologist Grant puts forward in The Passing of the Great Race, a book presented as a scientific history of race. At the beginning of the book, the reality of race is placed next to other imaginaries such as nationality and language, that is, as if race exists at the same level as these imaginaries. In subsequent chapters, the author proposes an explanatory model for moral, intellectual, and spiritual differences by taking race as the basis for this explanation. In other words, inequalities between groups are attributed to race as an underlying entity that determines the limits and capabilities of individuals belonging to it. By naturalizing such superiority/inferiority, any other explanatory models are justified in talking about ideas of civilization, progress, and the like. Perhaps the clearest example of the dangers that adopting these perspectives lead to is what Stefan Kohl reports about Hitler’s admiration for Grant’s book to the point of considering it his own Bible.
It is clear, then, that the uncritical use of race as a historical analytical tool is not without serious risks. I argue that it is possible to reduce the damage by positioning the history of race between two hypotheses that extricate the concept from the traps of its objectification: First, similar to Joan Scott’s critique of the traditional history of gender, it can be pointed out that the history of race must go beyond the confines of traditional social science frameworks. In other words, the history of race must make its way out of descriptive analyzes content to merely demarcate racial phenomena, or narratives that draw on race primarily to explain or account for social changes. One of the major problems with descriptive racial histories such as Grant’s book or Blumenbach’s classic treatises on natural races is their reconstruction of the past as a narrative by racialized actors. That is, various historical events become a mere extension of natural laws that do not change. This reconstruction is what gives false credibility to historical narratives that differentiate between peoples on the basis of natures, essences, etc., regardless of the topics of these histories.
This objectification is not limited to descriptive histories only, but it also applies to causal histories. I find myself forced to differentiate between descriptive and causal histories, at least theoretically. The main and most important difference between the two types for the purpose of this article is that descriptive histories consider race a reality without necessarily taking it as a main reason for explaining what is happening, while causal histories take it as a basis for investigating the motives of historical processes. The objectification of causal histories can be represented by narratives of decadence that attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to the mixing of races and cultures between civilized people and barbarians.
Through these two approaches, in principle, race can be extricated from the clutches of its objectification in the descriptive or causal narratives inherent in many theses in the social sciences. It now remains to review the second hypothesis in order to reduce the damage: the formation of race as a tool of analysis that can be historicized in the first place. This hypothesis builds on extensive theorizing about the history of ideas, especially as advanced by Lovejoy, Skinner, LaCapra, and others. For Lovejoy, for example, there is what can be called “ideational unity,” which are the basic components through which intellectual systems and the like are formed. Depending on the combination of idea units, the resulting intellectual systems vary. The matter can be likened to the ingredients that go into cooking recipes, different dishes may share the same ingredients, but the resulting recipe varies depending on the mixing of these ingredients with each other.
In contrast to Lovejoy, we find Skinner rejecting any kind of universality of ideas or units of thought (whether this universality is temporal or spatial), and emphasizing the necessity of placing even these so-called units of thought in their contexts in order to understand their connection to each other and their connection to other social forces. His claim involves the assumption that ideas do not exist independently of agents capable of articulating them in the first place, therefore, the first step is to root the idea in the contexts of the moment of its disclosure. Skinner then concludes that it is difficult for the vertical history of ideas to avoid the dangers of reification of concepts, and that any approach to the history of thought requires a horizontal extension capable of recognizing the concept in its spatio-temporal connection.
LaCapra approaches the topic from a different angle than Lovejoy and Skinner. In his book History and Criticism, we find him mainly addressing historians’ shortcomings in approaching intellectual works in general, and LaCapra puts historians’ documentary obsession into question. He goes on to discuss the crises that this obsession can cause when reading literary, philosophical, and other texts, in which the form of the text is mixed with its contents. In the context of the idea of race, for example, the historian must try to read intellectual texts from their intellectual aspect alongside their historical aspects, in order to understand the meanings of the historical word as it appeared in the texts.
The evidence of bringing these different approaches to the history of thought is the question of how race can be historicized without falling into the traps of objectifying the idea or making it transcendent to history. These approaches are not without their problems. For example, both Lovejoy and Skinner approach the intellectual concept through its manifestation in explicit intellectual texts, without truly exposing what is outside the boundaries of these texts. In other words, despite their attempt to understand ideas historically, their thesis remains linked to what was essentially defined as an idea, to what was often the subject of theoretical discussion, and this problem leads to a history of ideas that is aware of their ideation, so to speak, to a history of ideas that were presented essentially as having a specific intellectual essence. Their approach is therefore limited in relation to the topic of the article.
What I’m getting at here is a little different. First of all, race must be seen as a term with its own history. Meaning that it must be placed in its historical contexts; But at the same time, it must be realized that the word did not always have the same discursive components, nor are its components related in the same way. Thus, we stand before a limit that must be crossed if we want Lovejoy’s intellectual unity to be useful, and I believe that it is possible to begin to overcome it whenever we place the intellectual unity at the level of the concept of discourse itself according to Foucault or combinations according to Dumont: each concept is formed through a specific system of elements that are always shifting and transforming first, and elements that at the same time belong to other systems and discourses second. In other words, as long as we start from the historicism of the components of the intellectual units as well, the concept can be dated within its previous possible meanings.
The Historicism of Race Outside Presentist Approaches:
This idea brings to mind the second challenge facing historians of race, which is deconstructing contemporary discourses on race in order to avoid the traps of presentism. The purpose of this deconstruction is to enable us to trace different shifts and possible alternatives through understanding the elements that make up contemporary systems of race. Deconstruction will follow a Foucauldian methodology, as he puts it, for example, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, race in its current form is not the product of a linear, progressive process, rather, it is the result of what can be considered an authoritarian struggle in which other discourses, with their elements involved in their formation, play a major role, and the concept is essentially formed within these conflicts. This is one factor that makes studying race in isolation from other concepts such as gender and class misleading. In fact, the fallacy of the theoretical separation between them was the subject of criticism by Joan Scott and criticism by Crenshaw and Tapili as well. Their theses all agree that the contemporary conception of race was not formed independently of other forces, therefore, reading it requires careful interaction with it.
Therefore, understanding race requires situating it within a power struggle alongside other discourses that share the same discursive elements. The interaction of different discourses is not a zero-sum conflict – there are always historically viable alternatives. Despite the dominance of a particular conceptual framework, the historian should try to reframe the process of dominance in order to grasp the complex historical contexts of the constituent elements of race.
I have dwelled on the need to understand the complexity of the elements that make up race in its contemporary sense, but what are these elements basically? What distinguishes the current concept of race from parallel or similar concepts that preceded it? There is a fundamental turning point related to the contemporary concept, it crystallizes it within the frameworks of capitalist colonialism. This colonial framework has a major role in formulating and forming the concept. The extent or full dimensions of this impact are beyond the scope of this article. What is important here is to point out the role played by the relations of power and production in paving the way for the reformulation of old concepts within new systems and foundations. In other words, what matters is how the discursive elements are reconfigured, so that the modern concept of race was crystallized through it, and these elements include, but are not limited to: slavery, class, property relations, beliefs of superiority/inferiority, cultural systems, and even what might be called “non-white” with regard to defining identity.
Attempts to reformulate this shift in the system of elements can be represented by Kopytoff’s anthropological analysis of the institution of slavery. He tried to investigate the changes that slavery underwent from an economic angle. By comparing different possible perceptions of slavery, Kopytoff was able to review the shortcomings of traditional anthropological frameworks in explaining the historical changes that the institution has undergone. He was also able to demonstrate its clash with race and ethnicity, and this matter is extremely important because it places slavery between capitalism in its inception, property relations, and production relations.
However, we must be careful not to perpetuate the common misconception of the historical conflation of slavery and race, even if understanding slavery is necessary to grasp contemporary perceptions. The point is that slavery was not always predicated on the concept of race or similar notions; it could take entirely different forms and foundations. This also means that the constituent elements of the concepts of slavery and race did not always overlap – slavery did not invariably signify racial inferiority, nor was race always the basis for enslavement. Madden’s article on slavery in the Roman Empire is a good example of this separation, as it indicates, slaves can present from within the empire itself, that is, from the free “race” itself. It can also be represented on the extent of Fields’s historical launch on employment in the beginnings of American settlements, where the workers at the time were in fact slaves despite their affiliation with what was later called white race, and this indicates that the slavery was preceded by the classification of the working class in the United States.
This brief digression was necessary to illustrate how certain elements (such as slavery in this case) that contributed to shaping the contemporary notion of race were not always integral to its conceptual discourse. The same can be said of the other elements mentioned earlier – they were all part of historical processes of reformulation. Even when discussing the contemporary concept of race itself, it is crucial to recognize the interplay of three distinct yet interconnected notions: race, ethnicity, and racialization. Despite the launch of these concepts of similar formative elements, concepts interact in a way that requires a separate theoretical analysis of each of them, at least within the limits of their operations and their nature. The following analysis was based on sociological research by virtue of my belief that it was able to diagnose the limits of basic concepts well.
I start with the concept of race. Tanya identifies that “The idea of “race” includes the socially constructed belief that the human race can be divided into biologically discrete and exclusive groups based on physical and cultural traits.” The concept can be formulated differently while keeping the idea itself, race is the entity (or entities) caused by “superficial assessments and value judgments of phenotypic and behavioral variations.” Race, then, for a start, is a category based on linking the apparent characteristics to natural essences inherent in groups. As I mentioned above, it is necessary to note that race has real and material consequences despite being an imagination and a social composition.
In light of all this, the concept of ethnicity in general can be conceptualized as an ideology that perpetuates the illusion of ethnicity in theoretical and practical matters. I will quote Mosse here at length to illustrate the point:
Ethnicity as it developed in Western society was not simply a statement of prejudice, nor was it merely a metaphor for oppression. Rather, it was a complete intellectual system, an ideology… with its own structure and style of discourse.
The point can be rephrased as follows: If race is a classificatory category, this means that ethnicity is also a categorical ideology, which means that it is primarily a political tool, so to speak. Being political does not only mean that it is associated with authorities or systems, but it is also part of the fabric of resource sharing and distribution.
But such perceptions are not without their flaws. For example, this focus on the ideology of ethnicity is what led Bonilla-Silva to criticize the prevailing perceptions that limit ethnicity to this ideological state only. In other words, by emphasizing its ideology, it may appear that it is fundamentally part of individuals’ beliefs. Therefore, Bonilla-Silva proposes an alternative definition of ethnicity as “segment of the ideological structure of a social system that crystallizes racial notions and stereotypes.” In other words, the ideological dimensions of ethnicity are inseparable from the actual practices that perpetuate it. Rather, ethnicity is necessarily structural and governs the space in which meanings are imbued into these practices.
The underlying link between the two concepts is the third concept that requires introduction: the concept of racialization. Rather, in my opinion, racialization is what unites all the previous dimensions in a process that makes the contemporary concept of race different from its predecessors. Here, I adopt the definition of racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group.” In other words, racialization is a process of redefinition that introduces racial foundations into the mechanism of action of what was not previously understood within perceptions of race. This process, of course, is not something that individuals work with, that is, it does not exist as a direct result of the actions of individuals. Rather, it is practiced at the level of societies and institutions, this is what makes it possible to describe ethnicity as primarily structural, meaning that it is linked to racialized social systems that “allocate differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines; lines that are socially constructed.” Within these systems, ethnicity (and thus racialization) operates in a way that seems “objective,” as Žižek puts it, that is, it appears as a process that lacks clear acting subjects. This enables it to embed itself in the fabric of everyday life without being visible.
In addition, when talking about racialization and its role in formulating the contemporary concept of race, it is necessary to point out its intertwining with European colonialism in order to understand its systemic aspect. On the one hand, and as Mosse once again put it, the preoccupation with the place of human beings in this universe and the processes of rationalizing societies were main motives behind attempts to classify human beings within scientific frameworks, attempts that caused this racial discourse to emerge. On the other hand, by employing them in these scientific contexts, these attempts were normalized and made as if they were universal. In other words, these attempts were considered universal categories valid for different places and times, and were used as eternal ones capable of explaining the present and the past.
It is clear from this review that contemporary concepts of race are not necessarily suitable as useful analytical tools, therefore, shifts in meaning must be taken into consideration before beginning to chronicle race if historians want to overcome the problems of uncritical use of discourses. In the third and final section of this article, I will address Hannaford and Heng’s approaches to race in order to confront such challenges and problems.
Two Approaches to the Historicism of the Concept of Race:
The first book I would like to highlight is Hannaford’s History of Race: The History of an Idea in the West. As the title of the book indicates, the author is limited in defining the scope of the idea to Western society. One of the first points he makes is related to the leakage of contemporary concepts about race into attempts to historicize it in the past, stressing that the purpose of his presentation is to remove some of this damage in examining the concept historically. In order to do this, Hannaford divides his history into two parts: the first part covers the period extending from the ancient world Until the era of the Reformation, a period in which he says that the concept of race is linked to civilization/barbarism and then Christianity/disbelief, with a marginal role played by physical characteristics. The second period extends from the seventeenth century until today, during which race takes on a natural-scientific character that still exists today.
I think this division is an acceptable starting point, especially since Hannaford provides an excellent theoretical analysis of how the boundaries of conceptions of race are always contested. In other words, although starting from a general concept of race, Hannaford shows the fluidity of the limits of even this general concept. An example of the first concept is the idea of “purity of blood” as a means of discrimination, so to speak. The matter can also be represented by his analysis of the idea of race among the ancient Greeks and Romans. Hannaford tried to place the concept within the frameworks of those times. Such analyzes may seem self-evident at first, but when we take into account that Popper, for example, fell into the traps of these present-day perceptions when he presented his reading of Plato’s race and his racial beliefs, perhaps the importance of addressing these analyzes becomes clear before starting. Indeed, analyzing the contexts of Greece and Rome through their intellectual texts is a critical step even for the approaches of Lovejoy and Skinner mentioned above. Hannaford traces the combinations of the contents of the idea and traces its reformulations without necessarily adopting the intellectualism of the concept.
The second historical work that I would like to highlight is Heng’s essay “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages.” In the first part of the article, Heng builds on Goldberg’s idea that race is a “chameleon” concept capable of concealing its exclusionary dimensions by asserting that race is a structural relationship to express and manage human differences, and it is not an entity-based concept. There are two dimensions that must be emphasized in Heng’s definition, first, her conception is general enough to attempt to explain historical changes within the concept of race, and second, the conceptualization focuses on the structural and political consequences of race. In other words, Heng’s conception is based on race as a functional tool in the hands of power, which provides an analytical input, so to speak.
The importance of this assertion becomes clear when Heng contextualizes the contemporary concept of race within other “hierarchical systems, such as class, gender, and sexuality.” For her, it is inevitable to place race in this context in order to approach the concepts that precede it. In other words, by emphasizing the importance of race as an analytical tool, Heng attempts to confront the cognitive-theoretical gap that obscures other possibilities for understanding race in the past. What Heng wants to convey is that different understandings of race may be based on essentializing human differences, “in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.”
Therefore, histories of race and ethnicity should not be mixed with ideologies based on skin color, ethnicity, or other grounds of distinction. As Heng points out, if a historian wants to approach a phenomenon racially, it must include a kind of strategic essentialization, so to speak, that is, there must be specific employment for the purpose of managing differences, and the mere coincidence of racial characteristics is not enough for the phenomenon to be analyzed within a racial framework.
Heng’s own historical research into the situation of Jews in thirteenth-century Britain is an excellent example. Jews were surveilled by the authorities, they were discriminated against according to their “religious and sociocultural practices, language, dress, and, occasionally, physical appearance,” and this surveillance had blatant economic and political aims. Its consequences were manifested in ghettos, racial segregation, and the forced appearance of Jews in the public sphere. Because this example presents the idea of managing a group through differences that are considered essential, it is possible to approach it racially, therefore, based on this hypothesis, it is possible to provide an ethnic reading of a phenomenon such as the case of the Turks in Samarra of the Abbasid Empire, that is, a reading based on the political and economic purposes associated with the management of a specific group. Thus, Heng asserts that it is possible to use race as a historical analytical tool despite shifts in meaning as long as the phenomenon to be historicized contains this political dimension.
I don’t bring up Hannaford and Heng’s approaches because they’re flawless or anything, rather, I bring them up in order to demonstrate the existence of different trends in criticizing attempts to historicize race, and it is necessary to build on the theoretical proposition made by each of them in order to complicate historical phenomena and avoid reducing them to specific dimensions. There is still much work to be done in deconstructing contemporary notions of race in the process of understanding the past. If we want race to be a historical analytical tool, it is necessary to overcome the problems of discursive objectification of its elements and make them transcend the specificity of the circumstances in which they are manifested.
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