An Introduction to Intercultural Communication. Fred E. Jandt
diet. Jablonski and Chaplin (2000) took global ultraviolet measurements from NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer and compared them with published data on skin color in indigenous populations from more than 50 countries. There was an unmistakable correlation: The weaker the ultraviolet light, the fairer the skin. Most scientists today have abandoned the concept of biological race as a meaningful scientific concept (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, & Piazza, 1994; Owens & King, 1999; Paabo, 2001).
A second way to define race, then, is as a sociohistorical concept, which explains how racial categories have varied over time and between cultures. Worldwide, skin color alone does not define race. The meaning of race has been debated in societies, and as a consequence, new categories have been formed and others transformed. Dark-skinned natives of India have been classified as Caucasian. People with moderately dark skin in Egypt are identified as White. Brazil has a history of intermarriage among native peoples, descendants of African slaves, and immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, but no history of explicit segregation policies. So in Brazil, with the world’s largest Black population after Nigeria, and where half of the population is Black, there are hundreds of words for skin colors (Robinson, 1999), including a census category pardo for mixed ancestry.
The biologically based definition establishes race as something fixed; the sociohistorically based definition sees race as unstable and socially determined through constant debate (Omi & Winant, 1986). While race is associated with physical appearance, when people speak of Ethnicity they generally refer to shared heritage, family names, geography, customs, and language passed on through generations (Zenner, 1996). For some, tribe would be a more understood term. In Afghanistan, for example, people identify by tribes—Tajiks and Pashtuns. According to some estimates, there are 5,000 ethnic groups in the world (Stavenhagen, 1986). In Chapter 2, you’ll read more about race and ethnic groups.
As discussed in Focus on Culture 1.2, the U.S. Census Bureau establishes categories of identity.
Focus on Culture 1.1 Does Your DNA Reveal Your Culture?
Ads for genetic ancestry tests have shown a man trading his lederhosen for a kilt and a woman upon learning of her ancestry to be the Akan people of Ghana to say, “When I found you in my DNA, I learned where my strength comes from.” Sandy Banks, senior fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, who self-identifies as a Black American, discovered that her DNA was 54% European and 24% Nigerian. She reported “excitement, wonder, pain, and pride” on learning of her Nigerian ancestry. But later she reported a “comedown” feeling when a reevaluation of her non-European DNA identified her ancestry as Benin/Togo, Cameroon, Congo and South Bantu, Mali, and Ivory Coast/Ghana. She concluded that “identity is more than ancestry” (Banks, 2019). Communication professor Anita Foeman conducts the DNA Discussion Project, which records stories people tell of their family history and then their reactions when presented with their DNA results (Foeman, Lawton, & Rieger, 2015). A 2014 study (Phelan, Link, & Zelner, 2014) revealed that when people read an article about genetic-ancestry tests, their beliefs in racial differences increase.
1 If you don't speak French, don't eat French food, and don't celebrate any French traditions, but your DNA test reveals French ancestry, are you French?
2 How would you react if you were told that your DNA test results contradicted what you had been told of your family history?
Civilization and Identity
Cannadine’s (2013) final form of identity is civilization. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee believed civilizations to be the most significant determinant of identity but also believed that civilizations were largely self-sufficient and sealed off from one another.
In the 19th century, the term culture was commonly used as a synonym for Western civilization. The British anthropologist Sir Edward B. Tylor (1871) popularized the idea that all societies pass through developmental stages, beginning with “savagery,” progressing to “barbarism,” and culminating in Western “civilization.” It’s easy to see that such a definition assumes that Western nations were considered superior. Both Western nations, beginning with ancient Greece, and Eastern nations, most notably imperial China, believed that their own way of life was superior.
In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington continued the position that civilizations were the most important form of human identity. In general, Huntington identified the world’s civilizations as Western, Latin American, sub-Saharan African, Eastern Orthodox (including the former Soviet Union), Islamic, Confucian, Hindu, and Japanese.
Focus on Culture 1.2 U.S. Census Bureau Definitions of Race
Racial categories on the U.S. census have varied over the years. These questions are proposed for the 2020 census.
U.S. Census Bureau
Information on race has been collected in every U.S. census, beginning with the first in 1790, but what the U.S. Census Bureau considers as a racial category has changed in almost every census.
For example, according to Gibson and Jung (2002), from 1790 to 1850, the only categories used were “White and Black (Negro), with Black designated as free and slave.” In 1890, categories included mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, Chinese, and Japanese. The 2010 survey raised some concerns in that it included the term Negro in addition to Black and African-American.
During decades of high immigration, Irish, Italians, and many central European ethnic groups were considered distinct races. “Armenians were classified as white in some decades, but not in others” (Hotz, 1995, p. A14).
In the 1930 census, there was a separate race category for Mexican; people of Mexican ancestry were classified later as White and today as Hispanic but could be of any race.
Immigrants from India have gone from Hindu, a religious designation used as a racial category, to Caucasian, to non-White, to White, to Asian Indian.
Michael Omi, an ethnic studies expert at the University of California, Berkeley, described the resulting confusion: “You can be born one race and die another” (quoted in Hotz, 1995, p. A14).
A recent study showed that 9.8 million people in the United States changed their race or ethnicity identity response from the 2000 census to the 2010 census (Lieblier, Rastogi, Fernandez, Noon, & Ennis, 2014).
Huntington predicts that future conflicts will be among civilizations, especially between the West and Islam. There are many critics of Huntington’s thesis, including Paul Berman (2003), who argues that distinct civilization boundaries do not exist today—that is, that national identities have become more important than any civilization identities.
Culture
Can each of these sources of identity be considered a “culture”?
Traditionally, the term Culture was used to refer to the following:
A community or population sufficiently large enough to be self-sustaining—that is, large enough to produce new generations of members without relying on outside people.
The totality of that group’s thought, experiences, and patterns of behavior and its concepts, values, and assumptions about life that guide behavior and how those evolve with contact with other cultures. Hofstede (1994) classified these elements of culture into four categories: symbols, rituals, values, and heroes. Symbols refer to verbal and nonverbal language. Rituals are the socially essential collective activities within a culture. Values are the feelings not open for discussion within a culture about what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, normal or abnormal, which are present in a majority of the members of a culture, or at least in those who occupy pivotal positions.