Contesting Identities Through Walker Dance: Mestizo Performance in the Southern Andes of Peru

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Arts, Media Archive on 2013-10-13 23:49Z by Steven

Contesting Identities Through Walker Dance: Mestizo Performance in the Southern Andes of Peru

Repercussions: a journal dedicated to all areas of music studies
University of California, Berkeley
Fall 1994, Volume 3, No. 2
pages 50-80

Zoila Mendoza-Walker

This article analyzes an event in the city of Cusco, Peru that reverberated throughout the entire region during the late 1980s. This incident, which became known as the “events of Corpus,” generated a series of open antagonisms that pitted young members of Cusco ritual dance associations (called comparsas) who performed dances from the “Altiplano” region against a coalition of civil, religious and “cultural” authorities who opposed that performance. These confrontations, which have continued into the early 1990s, demonstrated the relevance of comparsa performance and of state and private “cultural institutions” in the definition and redefinition of local and regional identity among Cusco “mestizos.” In particular, they made evident that these dances were being used by young mestizo cusqueños (people of Cusco), especially women, to construct a new public identity that contested the gender and “ethnic” stereotypes promoted by the cultural institutions. Here I will discuss in some detail the confrontations that emerged in, the town of San Jerónimo demonstrating how a “folkloric” institution such as the comparsa can become a site for transformation rather than conservation of cultural values and roles…

Read the entire article here.

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Pelo Malo (Bad Hair)

Posted in Anthropology, Caribbean/Latin America, Media Archive, Videos on 2013-10-13 22:31Z by Steven

Pelo Malo (Bad Hair)

Sudaca Films
2013
Venezuela
93 minutes
color

Written and Directed by Mariana Rondón
Produced by Marité Ugás

Starring

Samuel Lange as Junior
Samantha Castillo as Marta

Junior is nine years old and has “bad hair.” He wants to have it straightened for his yearbook picture, like a fashionable pop singer. This puts him at odds with his mother Marta. The more Junior tries to look sharp and make his mother love him, the more she rejects him, until he is cornered, face to face with a painful decision.

Director’s Note

Bad Hair is the intimate story of a nine-year old child’s initiation to life and his difficult journey marked by intolerance.

One of the first images that came to me for this movie was a large multi-family building and the thousands of stories that take place behind those walls: heat, nudity, precariousness, fragility, sensuality, sex, violence, family, mother, child. The little, intimate stories I imagined grew more complex and so my characters were born.

They are helpless characters. Wounded and hurtful adults, and children who are learning how to hurt. Marta, the mother, focused on survival, teaches her son Junior to survive just like her, without resources, without freedom. But Junior is different, he fights with everything he’s got for his desire: to straighten his hair and to dress as a singer for a picture he wants to give his mother: a picture that would show him as he wishes to be seen.

Caracas is also hostile to them, a city of urban, political and family violence. Dreams encapsulated in multi-family buildings- the result of Le Corbusier’s “Utopian city” project in the 50s—now turned into massive vertical hells.

I want to talk about intolerance in a social context that is riddled with dogmas, which don’t embrace otherness, where public affairs extend to the private life of its’ inhabitants, highlighting their differences, be they social, political or sexual.

For more information, click here.

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Artists, Educators Laud Black Heritage In Dominican Republic

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Economics, Media Archive, Social Science on 2013-10-13 22:24Z by Steven

Artists, Educators Laud Black Heritage In Dominican Republic

The Associated Press
2013-10-11

Ezequiel Abiú López, Foreign Correspondent
The Associated Press

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — In a school auditorium filled with laughing students, actresses Luz Bautista Matos and Clara Morel threw themselves into acting out a fairy tale complete with a princess, a hero and acts of derring-do.

Morel had wrapped a white plastic sheet around her multi-colored blouse, while Bautista donned a brown paper bag over her blue tights. The two black actresses wore their hair free and natural, decorated only with single pink flowers.

“Yes, you’re a princess,” said Bautista to Morel, who fretted that she didn’t look like a traditional princess with her dark complexion and hair. Bautista then turned to a young girl sitting in the front row, who shared the same African-descended features as both actresses. “And you too,” Morel said as the child smiled back at her.

The theater group Wonderful Tree has visited schools all over Santo Domingo and some in the countryside to spread the word among black children that their features and heritage should be a source of pride. That message, though simple, has been nothing less than startling in this Caribbean country, where 80 percent of people are classified as mulattos, meaning they have mixed black-white ancestry, but where many still consider being labeled black an offense.

Wonderful Tree represents a larger cultural movement that’s working to combat the country’s historic bias through arts and education. The Dominican choreographer Awilda Polanco runs a contemporary dance company that’s trying to rescue Afro-Caribbean traditions, while the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo has been training primary school teachers to respect and celebrate their students’ African heritage, including through skits that young children can more easily understand.

It’s a bid to transform a color-obsessed society where a majority of the country’s 10 million people choose to identify themselves as “Indio” — or “Indian” — on government documents despite their black roots, and many reject afros in favor of closely cropped hair or sleek blowouts. Public schools for decades even prohibited students from attending classes with their hair loose or in a natural frizz.

Such hair, in fact, is called “bad hair” in the local Spanish lexicon while straightened hair is “good hair.”…

…Women in the Dominican Republic spend an estimated 12 percent of their household budgets on hair salons and treatments, according to “Good Hair, Bad Hair,” which included an economic and anthropological study of Dominican beauty salons.

Dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who oversaw the killing of some 17,000 Haitians in 1937 in an effort to expel them from the Dominican Republic, was himself a mulatto who used makeup to make his face lighter.

Trujillo was the first to include the term “Indio” in official documents, said historian Emilio Cordero Michel

Read the entire article here.

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Despite Options on Census, Many to Check ‘Black’ Only

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-10-13 22:07Z by Steven

Despite Options on Census, Many to Check ‘Black’ Only

The New York Times
2000-02-12

Diana Jean Schemo

This year’s new, racially inclusive census might have seemed tailor made for Michael Gelobter.

The son of a white Jewish father and an African-Bermudan mother, Mr. Gelobter lives in Harlem with his wife, Sharron Williams, a black woman whose Caribbean background melds African and Indian influences. Creating their own cultural road map as they go, the couple embrace the range of their heritages and those of friends, marking Passover, for example, with an African-American Latino seder.

But when the census invites Mr. Gelobter, for the first time, to name all the races that describe him, he will do what he has always done, and claim just one: black. Checking more than one race, he contends, would undermine the influence of blacks by reducing their number as a distinct group and so most likely diluting public policies addressing their concerns.

The census forms that will be mailed to most Americans in April—the count began last month in Alaska, where the winter chill tends to keep people at home and easier to tally —offers a nod to the nation’s increasing diversity. No longer will the Census Bureau instruct respondents to ”select one” race to describe themselves. Instead, it will tell them to mark one or more of 14 boxes representing 6 races (and subcategories) that apply—white, black, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian Indian, other Asian and Pacific Islander—or to check ”some other race.”

But like Mr. Gelobter, many people, indeed most, who could claim more than one race are not expected to do so, demographers and census officials say.

Part of the reason, according to demographers, is habit: Americans are simply unaccustomed to the option. More profoundly, however, the change is fueling a weighty debate about the meaning of race, in which interpretations of history, politics and experience frequently overshadow the simpler matter of parentage.

Thirty years after Loving v. Virginia struck down the last laws barring interracial marriage, the new change in the census and the ensuing controversy have become a barometer of the complexity of American attitudes toward race, and their contradictions. With the 6 racial categories offering 63 possible combinations of racial identity, which government demographers will tabulate as distinct groups, the census could provide a remarkably meticulous racial profile of American society.

On one side of the debate stand those who see the revision as a tactic to divide blacks at a time when affirmative action and other remedies to discrimination are under attack. Opposing them are multiracial Americans who resent having to identify with just one part of their heritage.

Apart from his perception that the change could diminish blacks’ influence, Mr. Gelobter, a 38-year-old professor of environmental policy at Rutgers University, said that claiming a multiracial identity would link him to a bitter, freighted history of privilege for blacks who could cite some white lineage.

“Should Frederick Douglass have checked white and black?” Mr. Gelobter said. ”Should W. E. B. Du Bois have checked white and black? He practically looked white.”…

…Kerry Ann Rockquemore, a sociologist at Pepperdine University, polled 250 college students who had one black parent and one white, and found that those reared in middle-class or affluent white neighborhoods tended to identify as biracial, while those who had grown up in black communities generally considered themselves black.

How will nonblacks of mixed race answer the census? There is little more than anecdotal evidence. But some experts note that checking options like Asian and white, or American Indian and Pacific Islander, does not carry the same historical baggage that mixed-race blacks confront in deciding whether to say they are part white.

Scott Wasmuth, who is white and has a Filipino wife, said that when he filled out the census in 1990, he ignored the one-race-only rule that then prevailed and checked both white and Asian to describe his daughters. This year he will do the same. ”People are beginning to say, ‘I’m a mixture, and I don’t have to choose one or the other,’ ” he said.

Bertrand Wade, a 34-year-old industrial electronics technician from Brooklyn, wishes he could avoid descriptions altogether. His father is half-black and half-white, and his mother is East Indian and white.

When applications ask his race and none of the boxes fit, Mr. Wade said, ”the first thing I feel is excluded; then sometimes I feel that I should not be in a position where I have to state my race.” He said that on the census, he would check all the boxes that describe his heritage.

Charles Byrd, who runs a Web site called Inter Racial Voice, said, ”What we need to do as a country is get rid of these stupid boxes altogether.”

On the 1990 census, about 10 million Americans seemed to agree. They did not identify themselves as members of any race, said Margo J. Anderson, author of ”The American Census: A Social History” (Yale University Press, 1988). Another quarter-million, ignoring the instructions, identified themselves as belonging to more than one race.

Ms. Anderson said that ever since the first head count, in 1790, the census had played an important if subtle role in reflecting preoccupations and shaping social thought. It is only in the last century, though, that the government has devised questions to identify the country’s ethnic makeup. In the 1910 census, for instance, the government asked people their mother tongue, looking for Yiddish as the answer in order to tally the number of Jewish immigrants.

”The changes in questions always come about because of the social issues of the day,” Ms. Anderson said.

Susan Graham, head of Project RACE, a civic group that unsuccessfully pushed for a separate ”multiracial” box for the census, said she wanted a single category that would accurately define her children.

”Think of when you open a newspaper and see pie charts,” she said. ”We wanted a slice of the pie that says ‘multiracial.’ ”…

Read the entire article here.

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A Fresh Face On Race

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-10-13 19:00Z by Steven

A Fresh Face On Race

The Hartford Courant
Hartford, Connecticut
2001-03-13

Mike Swift, Courant Staff Writer

The U.S. Census Bureau’s New Approach And The Latest Population Figures Could Mark ‘The Beginning Of The End Of Racial Classification In America.’

The federal government Monday pegged the number of Americans who are of multiple races at 6.8 million—about twice the size of Connecticut’s population—as for the first time ever the U.S. Census identified people who belong to more than one racial category.

Although their share of the U.S. population was a relatively small 2.4 percent, the population of people who claimed a multiple racial identity could have significance beyond their numbers in a society that diversified rapidly during the 1990s.

“It’s really a major step,” said Kerry Rockquemore, a University of Connecticut professor who is writing a book called, “Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America.”

“In the past, we’ve thought of race as being these mutually exclusive, biologically real categories that people fit into,” said Rockquemore, who is biracial herself. “And when you insert that option of `check all that apply,’ that blows that out of the water.”

“Today,” said Charles Byrd, editor and publisher of The Interracial Voice, an Internet magazine for multiracial people, “was the beginning of the end of racial classification in America.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Race and ancestry in biomedical research: exploring the challenges

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy on 2013-10-13 18:43Z by Steven

Race and ancestry in biomedical research: exploring the challenges

Genome Medicine 2009
Volume 1, Number 8 (2009-01-21)
DOI: 10.1186/gm8

Timothy Caulfield
Faculty of Law and School of Public Health Research, Health Law Institute
University of Alberta

Stephanie M Fullerton
Department of Medical History and Ethics and Department of Genome Sciences
University of Washington School of Medicine

Sarah E Ali-Khan
Program on Life Sciences Ethics and Policy, McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, University Health Network
University of Toronto

Laura Arbour
Faculty of Medicine, Island Medical Program
University of British Columbia

Esteban G. Burchard
Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences and Department of Medicine, Divisions of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacogenetics, Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, and Clinical Pharmacology
University of California, San Francisco

Richard S. Cooper
Department of Epidemiology & Preventive Medicine, Stritch School of Medicine
Loyola University

Billie-Jo Hardy
Program on Life Sciences Ethics and Policy, McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, University Health Network
University of Toronto

Simrat Harry
Faculty of Law and School of Public Health Research, Health Law Institute
University of Alberta

Robyn Hyde-Lay
Genome Alberta, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Jonathan Kahn
Hamline University School of Law

Rick Kittles
Department of Medicine, Section of Genetic Medicine, Department of Human Genetics
University of Chicago

Barbara A. Koenig
Program in Professionalism & Bioethics
Mayo College of Medicine

Sandra S. J. Lee
Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
Stanford University Medical School

Michael Malinowski
Paul M Hebert Law Center
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Vardit Ravitsky
Department of Medical Ethics and Center for Bioethics
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Pamela Sankar
Department of Medical Ethics and Center for Bioethics
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Stephen W. Scherer
for Applied Genomics, The Hospital for Sick Children, and Department of Molecular Genetics
University of Toronto

Béatrice Séguin
Leslie Dan School of Pharmacy; Program on Life Sciences Ethics and Policy, McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, University Health Network
University of Toronto

Darren Shickle
Leeds Institute of Health Sciences,
University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Guilherme Suarez-Kurtz
Pharmacology Division
Instituto Nacional de Câncer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Abdallah S. Daar
Program on Life Sciences Ethics and Policy, McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, University Health Network; Department of Public Health Sciences and of Surgery; McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine; Department of Medicine
University of Toronto

The use of race in biomedical research has, for decades, been a source of social controversy. However, recent events, such as the adoption of racially targeted pharmaceuticals, have raised the profile of the race issue. In addition, we are entering an era in which genomic research is increasingly focused on the nature and extent of human genetic variation, often examined by population, which leads to heightened potential for misunderstandings or misuse of terms concerning genetic variation and race. Here, we draw together the perspectives of participants in a recent interdisciplinary workshop on ancestry and health in medicine in order to explore the use of race in research issue from the vantage point of a variety of disciplines. We review the nature of the race controversy in the context of biomedical research and highlight several challenges to policy action, including restrictions resulting from commercial or regulatory considerations, the difficulty in presenting precise terminology in the media, and drifting or ambiguous definitions of key terms.

Correspondence

Recent advances in biomedical research promise increasing insights into complex contributions to traits and diseases, and there is hope that these will lead to global health benefits [1,2] . Analytical and social-justice considerations both recommend thoughtful assessment of the role of social identity, particularly racial or ethnic identity, in the design, conduct and dissemination of clinical and basic science research. Controversies ranging from James Watson’s comments on racial differences in intelligence [3] to the adoption of racially targeted pharmaceuticals, such as the African-American heart-failure drug BiDil [4-7] , remind us that use of the concept of race in biomedical research can have far-reaching, often unanticipated social consequences.

The problem of race in scientific research is not a new one, and the issue seems to perpetually reappear and remain fundamentally unresolved [8] . We are, however, entering a new era in which the fruits of initiatives, such as the Human Genome Project [9,10] , the International Haplotype Map Project [11] , and the recently proposed 1000 Genomes Project [12] , promise to elaborate more fully than ever before the nature and extent of human genetic variation and its relation to social identity. A recent interdisciplinary workshop, ‘Ancestry in health and medicine; expanding the debate’, hosted by the Alberta Health Law Institute and the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health, in Toronto, Canada, sought to debate the current status and concerns surrounding these new scientific data, how we relate genetic variation to individual and population-level differences in observable traits, and what this might mean for the effective addressing of significant disparities in health status and disease. A central motivating consideration was how best to secure the anticipated benefits of genetic and related forms of biomedical research in the face of inevitable misunderstandings or misuse concerning genetic variation and race.

Here, we draw together the perspectives of the scholars who participated in the workshop, who have considered the race issue from the vantage point of a variety of disciplines: anthropology, bioethics, clinical medicine, ethical, social, cultural studies, genetic epidemiology, genome sciences, global heath research, law and the social sciences. We review the nature of the race controversy in the context of biomedical research and highlight several challenges to policy action…

Read the entire correspondence here.

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Prematurity and Low Birth Weight as Potential Mediators of Higher Stillbirth Risk in Mixed Black/White Race Couples

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2013-10-13 18:42Z by Steven

Prematurity and Low Birth Weight as Potential Mediators of Higher Stillbirth Risk in Mixed Black/White Race Couples

Journal of Women’s Health
Volume 19, Issue 4 (2010-04-26)
pages 767–773.
DOI:  10.1089/jwh.2009.1561

Katherine J. Gold, M.D., M.S.W., M.S.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Sonya M. DeMonner, M.P.H.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Paula M. Lantz, Ph.D.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Rodney A. Hayward, M.D.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Objective: Although births of multiracial and multiethnic infants are becoming more common in the United States, little is known about birth outcomes and risks for adverse events. We evaluated risk of fetal death for mixed race couples compared with same race couples and examined the role of prematurity and low birth weight as potential mediating risk factors.

Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort analysis using data from the 1998–2002 California Birth Cohort to evaluate the odds of fetal death, low birth weight, and prematurity for couples with a mother and father who were categorized as either being of same or different racial groups. Risk of prematurity (birth prior to 37 weeks gestation) and low birth weight (<2500 g) were also tested to see if the model could explain variations among groups.

Results: The analysis included approximately 1.6 million live births and 1749 stillbirths. In the unadjusted model, compared with two white parents, black/black and black/white couples had a significantly higher risk of fetal death. When all demographic, social, biological, genetic, congenital, and procedural risk factors except gestational age and birth weight were included, the odds ratios (OR) were all still significant. Black/black couples had the highest level of risk (OR 2.11, CI 1.77-2.51), followed by black mother/white father couples (OR 2.01, CI 1.16-3.48), and white mother/black father couples (OR 1.84, CI 1.33-2.54). Virtually all of the higher risk of fetal death was explainable by higher rates of low birth weight and prematurity.

Conclusions: Mixed race black and white couples face higher odds of prematurity and low birth weight, which appear to contribute to the substantially higher demonstrated risk for stillbirth. There are likely additional unmeasured factors that influence birth outcomes for mixed race couples.

Read the entire article here.

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Racial Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2013-10-13 02:34Z by Steven

Racial Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

A Vertentes
Universidade Federal de São João del Rei
Volume 19, Number 2
13 pages

Maria Luiza Cardoso de Aguiar
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

The so-called racial passing is defined, mainly, as a phenomenon through which black people who are light-skinned pass for whites, in order to achieve social and economic advantages which are usually more easily available to white people. Based on problematizations around the concepts of passing, the present article intends to analyze, comparatively, two important works from the 20th century: The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912/1989), written by James Weldon Johnson, and The Human Stain (2000), written by Philip Roth. The analysis of these works aims at investigating how the issue of passing is portrayed in each of the novels, in order to highlight the fact that, although the protagonists at stake share many similarities, such as the desire to free themselves from the decisiveness of pre-established categories like race, the experience of passing is heterogeneous and it is differently constructed and operated in each of the novels.

O chamado passing racial trata, principalmente, do fenômeno no qual negros de pele mais clara e de traços mestiços se passam por pessoas brancas, a fim de, mais comumente, conseguirem vantagens sociais e econômicas, frequentemente mais acessíveis aos brancos do que aos negros. A partir de problematizações em torno dos conceitos de passing, o presente trabalho visa a analisar comparativamente duas importantes obras da literatura norte-americana do século XX: The autobiography of an ex-colored man (1912/1989), de James Weldon Johnson, e The human stain (2000), de Philip Roth. Pretende-se investigar como a questão do passing é retratada em cada uma das obras, a fim de se destacar que, apesar de os protagonistas em questão apresentarem muitas similaridades e desejarem que categorias pré-estabelecidas não sejam decisivas em suas trajetórias, a experiência do passing é heterogênea, sendo construída e operada diferentemente em cada um dos romances.

Read the entire article here.

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