Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-lrblm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-12T13:44:09.848Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Do We Need a Device to Acquire Ethnic Concepts?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Adam Hochman
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Francisco Gil-White argues that the ubiquity of racialism—the view that so-called races have biological essences—can be explained as a by-product of a shared mental module dedicated to ethnic cognition. Gil-White’s theory has been endorsed, with some revisions, by Edouard Machery and Luc Faucher. In this skeptical response I argue that our developmental environments contain a wealth, rather than a poverty of racialist stimulus, rendering a nativist explanation of racialism redundant. I also argue that we should not theorize racialism in isolation from racism, as value judgments may play a role in essentialist thinking about the ‘other’.

Type
General Philosophy of Science
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 80 , Issue 5 , December 2013 , pp. 994 - 1005
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Paul Griffiths and Pierrick Bourrat for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme DP0878650 and an Australian Postgraduate Award through the University of Sydney.

References

Astuti, Rita. 1995. “‘The Vezo Are Not a Kind of People’: Identity, Difference, and ‘Ethnicity’ among a Fishing People of Western Madagascar.” American Ethnologist 22:464–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atran, Scott. 1998. “Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural Particulars.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21:547–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bettinger, Robert L. 1991. Hunter-Gatherers: Archaeological and Evolutionary Theory. New York: Plenum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloch, Maurice. 1993. “Zafimaniry Birth and Kinship Theory.” Social Anthropology 1:119–32.Google Scholar
Carsten, Janet. 1995. “The Politics of Forgetting: Migration, Kinship, and Memory on the Periphery of the Southeast Asian State.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1:317–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coley, John, Medin, Douglas, and Atran, Scott. 1997. “Does Rank Have Its Privilege? Inductive Inferences in Folkbiological Taxonomies.” Cognition 63:77–112.Google Scholar
Conkey, Margaret W. 1980. “The Identification of Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherer Aggregation Sites: The Case of Altamira.” Current Anthropology 21:609–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, James. 1987. “The House as a Type of Social Organization on the Island of Roti.” In De la hutte au palais: Sociétés “àmaison” en Asie du sud-est insulaire, ed. Macdonald, Charles, 109–31. Paris: CNRS.Google Scholar
Frosh, Stephen. 2002. “The Other.” American Imago 59:389–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, Susan A. 1992. “Children’s Conception of Personality Traits—Commentary.” Human Development 35:280–85.Google Scholar
Gelman, Susan A., and Hirschfeld, Lawrence A.. 1999. “How Biological Is Essentialism.” In Folkbiology, ed. Medin, Douglas and Atran, Scott, 403–46. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Gil-White, Francisco (with comments by Ingold, Tim, Laitin, David D., Rong, Ma, et al.). 2001. “Are Ethnic Groups Biological ‘Species’ to the Human Brain?” Current Anthropology 42:515–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gray, Russell D., Greenhill, Simon J., and Ross, Robert M.. 2007. “The Pleasures and Perils of Darwinizing Culture (with Phylogenies).” Biological Theory 2:360–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacking, Ian. 2005. “Why Race Still Matters.” Daedalus 134:102–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 1998. Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochman, Adam. 2013. “Racial Discrimination: How Not to Do It.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44:278–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Johnson, Douglas H. 1982. “Tribal Boundaries and Border Wars: Nuer-Dinka Relations in the Sobat and Zaraf Valleys, c. 1860–1976.” Journal of African History 23:183–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kurzban, Robert, Tooby, John, and Cosmides, Leda. 2001. “Can Race Be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98:15387–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Machery, Edouard, and Faucher, Luc. 2005a. “Social Construction and the Concept of Race.” Philosophy of Science 72:1208–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Machery, Edouard, and Faucher, Luc 2005b. “Why Do We Think Racially? A Critical Journey in Culture and Evolution.” In Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science, ed. Cohen, Henri and Lefebvre, Claire, 1009–33. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Maffie, James. 1998. “Atran’s Evolutionary Psychology: ‘Say It Ain’t Just-So, Joe.’” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21:583–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richerson, Peter, Boyd, Robert, and Henrich, Joseph. 2003. “Human Cooperation.” In Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, ed. Hammerstein, Peter, 357–88. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Saunders, Barbara. 1998. “What’s Empirical about Atran’s Taxonomies?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21:587–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sterelny, Kim. 1995. “The Adapted Mind.” Biology and Philosophy 10:365–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Marianne G. 1996. “The Development of Children’s Beliefs about Social and Biological Aspects of Gender Differences.” Child Development 67:1555–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
West, Cornel. 1982. Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. Philadelphia: Westminster.Google Scholar
White, Randall. 1982. “Rethinking the Middle/Upper Paleolithic Transition.” Current Anthropology 23:85–108.Google Scholar
Yzerbyt, Vincent, Rocher, Steve, and Schadron, Georges. 1997. “Stereotypes as Explanations: A Subjective Essentialistic View of Group Perception.” In The Social Psychology of Stereotyping and Group Life, ed. Spears, Russell, Oakes, Penelope, Ellemers, Naomi, and Haslam, S. Alexander, 20–50. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar