Essay Done!!!

Mary Guida
Anthropology 113-02

The Purity of Culture and Race

In Hall’s piece “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities”, he believes that questioning identity has returned to him and the people of Britain. People are beginning to question themselves with one of the most philosophical questions in the world: Who am I? Self-identification is one of the most philosophical and psychological problem people face today. Being able to identify who you are as a person is brought up in politics and in cultures. It is the basis of many people’s belief. Hall wants to address identity in an existential reality because he believes that “the logic of the language of identity…” is how we can answer that question (Hall 145). But that question is becoming harder to answer as history goes along. Hall brings up the works of Marx and Freud, and in a way, how they made it very complicated to know who you are as a person by “knocking from sideways… [and] from underneath (Hall 145). Even language is not a form of identification, according to Saussure, because “Language was there before you” (Hall 145). According to Hall, identity is “…saying that this here is the same as that, or we are the same together…” (Hall 146). With the introduction of “the Other” we have people that do not belong with “us”. The other is the outside point of view (Hall 147). Hall then states that he is not an immigrant, but an emigrant. He never really left home. He then continues on to describe how people would try not to be racist (by not saying black) and try to guess where he was from, but he did identify himself as “black”. He started to belong to this grouping of people, and now seeing from the black community other things. He became an outsider in a different way because his point of view has changed.
In Rosaldo’s “Border Crossings” he starts this chapter by saying that each culture is unique and cannot be measured by its value in other societies. From an outsiders view, it may look dull and simple, but to the person living it, it could be lavish and full of life. Another issue that he first states in this section of his book is that people see other cultures are visible or invisible, as “rich” or “poor” (Rosaldo 197). The countries that use the terms of visibility are Mexico, the Philippians and the United States. Visibility seems to be related with full citizenship, as in “when one increases, the other decreases” (Rosaldo 198). When a person becomes a citizen, they are a “culturally blank slate” (Rosaldo 201). According to Rosaldo’s teacher, the Philippians are culturally poor. In order to have “rich” culture, it needs religion, and “ancestral high culture”. One example Rosaldo gives is in the Philippians, minorities that are citizens do not have culture where as the lowlanders do not have citizenship, but have culture. Another correlation with the amount of culture a group of people has is the status a person has on the social ladder within the minority group. For most of the countries, it seems the higher up the social ladder a person or group is, the more culture they have. However, in the Philippians, it seems that this does not “fit” into this same hypothesis. It seems that at the very bottom of the social ladder, the Negritos and Ilongots do not have “culture”. Then as you move up, the more cultured the people get, but as you get toward the top, it reverses, and the higher up it is, the less culture a person has. The reasoning behind the reversal, according to Rosaldo, is that “cultural stripping” happens and people become “incorporated into the nation state as peasants and workers” (Rosaldo 201). Rosaldo states that people that live in the “borderlands” are either very cultural in one culture, or “multi-cultural” and practice different types of customs (Rosaldo 207). People identify themselves through their culture, which can include customs, traditions and practices. They may seem strange from an outsider, but they are important to the individual in today’s society.
In Sanjek’s “The enduring inequalities of race”, he is showing how race has influenced the social order since Europe started to expand its empires. Before that, racism was based on the people’s customs, not the color of their skin (Sanjek 3). People believe that these races are due to nature and the social order that happens because of one’s race is “…based on ‘real’ differences among ‘real’ races” (Sanjek 2). Racist people have the mindset of “we’re better than them” (Sanjek 2), and that shows, through slavery, casting system, even the ability to get a job in today’s modern society. Even though racism is “better” than it was, there is still a lot of racism out there, because as long as people see color and label people, racism will remain.
In Sacks’s “How Jews became white folk”, Jewish people in the early 1900’s were not considered ‘white’ in the United States. Her parents were first generation during the 1930’s, and the anti-Semitism in the United States did not surprise them. However, the Untied States changed once World War II started because the Jewish people became “…model middle-class white suburban citizens” through “…the best affirmative action program…” (Sacks 113). Sacks then goes through a bit of history and how each wave of immigration brought out new racism because the people did not “…disperse and blend” (Sacks 113). With this lack of dispersion, the people created their own communities based on their cultures. With this brought ghettos and urban areas, which were not suitable for the ‘white’ people, thus creating inequalities and in a way, a modern cast system with the terms middle-class, upper class, and lower class (which most immigrants were).
When I ask people who they are, some answers I hear are a name, a religion, an ethnic group or political group. People associate themselves with these titles without actually answering the question. They put out their “false selves” forward by answering the question in that way (Hall 145). In Rosaldo’s piece, he says people identify with a specific culture and that other cultures can be “rich” or “poor”, and “visible” or “invisible” because of it. In order for a person to feel a sense of belonging, sometimes a culture was given up because outsiders saw ‘their’ culture as insignificant. This happened a lot back when immigration to the United States was at its peak, it was the socially acceptable thing to lose one’s own culture in order to adapt to the culture of “America”. Fortunately this did not last long, and people from the same back round would live in the same communities and in turn form their own customs and “cultural” values. This change is how the United States is referred to as a “melting pot” of cultures, because people try to hold on to them instead of becoming a blank slate like the generations before them. Hall brings up this need for a “melting pot” by saying, “It is the crucial moment of the rediscovery or the search for roots” (Hall 148). However, according to Sacks, Jewish people are loosing their culture and “…becom[ing] white folk” (Sacks 113). One thing that has really annoyed me is the constant use of the word “nigger”. Personally, I feel that if that word is slander. I do not like the use of the word, because it has history of having a negative connotation. However people in today’s society use it, and it “classifies” people, and according to Sanjek, this classification is, in a way, a form of racism.