Re: Ethnicity

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Tibor benke wrote:
>In short, when I wrote that I think that dispite over a century of study,
>we still don't get it (whatever 'it' is) I meant us, anthropologists. But
>I could have included all the fellow 'suffarahs' in Black Studies, Chicano
>Studies, Native Studies, etc. because while they may know more about the
>experience of being oppressed, even they don't know *why* oppressors
>oppress, nor *how* they are able to. Most of all, noone knows *how to stop
>it*!

But that shouldn't stop us from searching for answers. And there are a lot
of theories about oppression, esspecially within ethnic-economic frames.
But theries are not politics, which then could ake a change, whereever
these politics are coming from, i.e. who is or will be responsible for
them.
To take your argument a step further would mean to stop searching or to
question every step and to prove every consequense of what we are doing as
it might be misused for oppression or doesn't lead us anywhere important.
It gets us anthropologists where we are most vulnerable: What are we here
for?
Lets at least try to find out why people do it!

>As someone in the Mothers of Invention (I think it was Jimmy Carl Black,
>the Indian in the group) said, "I am not black, but there is a whole lot of
>times I wish I could say, 'I'm not white'".

I am along with you here.

bye
Nils

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