Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (review)

In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker presents four case studies tied together as "stories" addressing questions about the complex politics of culture and race in Americanist anthropology from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Baker's aims of examining the concepts of race and culture as they took shape through the formative years of Americanist anthropology are pursued by looking closely at how folklorists', anthropologists', and others' ideas and uses of race and culture meshed in intellectual, institutional and public spheres. By painstakingly sorting out the often overly synonymous and intertwining meanings of culture and race, Baker presents a refined understanding of what these concepts meant in alternating and overlapping contexts, including their more popular and political usages over a crucially formative period of anthropological history. These narratives simultaneously demonstrate the interplay between the concepts of race and culture and the people and institutions that sought out and utilized them politically. This work furnishes the reader with new insights into professional anthropology and individual anthropologists—including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas.

One of Baker's principal preoccupations throughout the book is how "the role anthropology played in shaping popular conceptions of culture for Native Americans was significantly different from the role it played in shaping popular conceptions of culture for African Americans" and how "the role anthropology played in articulating notions of race had different implications from the role it played articulating notions of culture" (3). Yet in noting these profound differences, he also "suggest[s] the anthropological concept of race that was eventually used to address the Negro problem in the twentieth century emerged from the anthropological concept of culture that was used to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century" (3). Baker's argument is pursued through several interrelated questions that, consistently maintained, are the integrity of the book as a whole. These include scholarly inquisitions into political motivations, key debates around racism and inequalities, and the differences in response to anthropology's gaze by "self-identified Negro elites" compared with those of "self-identified Indian elites," to point out a few.

The first chapter, "Research, Reform, and Racial Uplift," focuses on how black educators and white reformers utilized anthropology in mobilizing an uplift narrative for African Americans. It emphasizes the emergence of folklore studies in connection with movements of racial uplift in fostering the maturation of Negroes into a state of civilization amidst this peculiar age of American empire. Charting contributions to the development of the American Folk-Lore Society through key patrons, proponents, and organizations—such as Andrew W. C. Bassettle, Elsie Clews Parsons, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, William Wells Newell, and Franz Boas—the author notes how "few historians of anthropology have specifically explored the role of the field in the late nineteenth-century club and racial uplift movements within African American communities" (35). A key factor is how "[T]he ethnology of Negro culture was used in diverse ways to play a small but significant part in the complex and ever-changing racial politics of culture" (35).

Chapter 2, "Fabricating the Authentic and the Politics of the Real," presents the political and collaborative work of James Mooney who challenged both the Christian civilization movement and the assimilationist programs of the government. It focuses also on the contributions of Mooney, Putnam, and Boas to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Here Baker emphasizes the marginalization of Mooney due to his advocacy for Indian rights. The major theme of this chapter is how anthropologists neglected the study of African American cultures, while they worked energetically in the study of American Indian cultures. This phenomenon constitutes a racial politics driven by a higher scientific value assigned to Indian cultures over African American ones. This is essentially a lens through which Baker eloquently exposes the complexity of power relations and the "intimate connections between...