Cover of Stigma and Culture
Stigma and Culture Last-Place Anxiety in Black America
by J. Lorand Matory, foreword by Thomas P. Gibson
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Cloth: 978-0-226-29756-9 | Paper: 978-0-226-29773-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-29787-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226297873.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Stigma and Culture, J. Lorand Matory provocatively shows how ethnic identification in the United States—and around the globe—is a competitive and hierarchical process in which populations, especially of historically stigmatized races, seek status and income by dishonoring other stigmatized populations. And there is no better place to see this than among the African American elite in academia, where he explores the emergent ethnic identities of African and Caribbean immigrants and transmigrants, Gullah/Geechees, Louisiana Creoles, and even Native Americans of partly African ancestry.  
           
Matory describes the competitive process that hierarchically structures their self-definition as ethnic groups and the similar process by which middle-class African Americans seek distinction from their impoverished compatriots. Drawing on research at universities such as Howard, Harvard, and Duke and among their alumni networks, he details how university life—while facilitating individual upward mobility, touting human equality, and regaling cultural diversity—also perpetuates the cultural standards that historically justified the dominance of some groups over others. Combining his ethnographic findings with classic theoretical insights from Frantz Fanon, Fredrik Barth, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and others—alongside stories from his own life in academia—Matory sketches the university as an institution that, particularly through the anthropological vocabulary of culture, encourages the stigmatized to stratify their own. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

J. Lorand Matory is the Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and director of the Center for African and American Research at Duke University. He is the author of two award-winning books, Sex and the Empire That Is No More and Black Atlantic Religion. 

REVIEWS

“Stigma and Culture is a sprawling, ambitious, interdisciplinary, analytically rigorous, and courageously auto-ethnographic examination of the intellectual, institutional, and interpersonal implications of ethnic differentiation. It feels like a new scholarly genre, its wide-ranging effort making it like few other books in anthropology or Africana studies.”
— John L. Jackson Jr., author of Impolite Conversations

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226297873.003.0000
[Ethnogenesis, Alterity, self-presentation, ethnicity, Native Americans, African Americans, segmented assimilation, ethnography of universities, Schadenfreude, last-place anxiety, Black middle class, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs)]
In the Introduction, Matory argues, first, that race is ultimately a local, historically specific, and culture-specific phenomenon and that the context of much ethnogenesis is the shock of racial re-classification when people move across zones with divergent local logics of hereditary difference and worth. Yet the spread of imperialism and empire-centered ideas about who has the right to rule has long had similar effects on the process of ethnogenesis. Second, the author amplifies the well-established anthropological idea that ethnicity is not primordial but contextual, oppositional, protean and performative, adding that the fear of stigma also shapes the boundaries and cultural markers of ethnic groups. Boasian conceptions of "culture" have become a popular tool in the plea for collective exemption from last place. The values and behaviors that ethnic spokespeople canonize as definitions of group membership are selected and institutionalized less on the basis of an empirical analysis of the behavioral differences between ethnic groups than on the basis of nostalgia, hope, and the effort to contrast their constituency from the constitutive other of the host society. Popular culture-making is a strategic, political and hierarchical project, in which diasporic and university populations play a major role. Hence the third point: one of the most influential contexts of ethnogenesis is the university, which is itself a world of the stigmatized. In sum, it is the upwardly mobile elites of subordinate populations--the very people who have progressively, since the mid-19th century, come to dominate university student populations--who possess the greatest incentive to reify definitions of the collective self that remedy their people's stigma. In doing so, they empower themselves as spokespeople the halls of ethno-racially unmarked power. Hence, popular culture-making is less a corruption than a fulfillment of 20th-century professional anthropology. (pages 1 - 65)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226297873.003.0001
[Black fathers, Colonialism, Segregation, race and gender, fraternities, alumni networks]
Chapter One, "Three Fathers," describes an African man, a Caribbean man, and an African-American man--all recently deceased Howard affiliates--who played paternal roles in the author's life and illustrate the cosmopolitanness of the black Atlantic elite. Their education, their professional careers and their marriages coincided with the height of black hopes for unity and defiance of both colonialism and segregation. Yet their triumphs never fully transcended the obstacles facing African-descended men in a creole world that stigmatizes their phenotype. This chapter charts the role of color, class and social background in their itinerant pursuit of manhood. In many ways, their choices made the author who he is. The intersection among their lives is presented as the social backdrop of his epistemology. As race men, they provide a temporal and ideological counterpoint to today's narratives of black ethnic distinction that are the ethnographic focus of Stigma and Culture, narratives that presuppose the cultural simplicity and inferiority of non-ethnic African Americans. (pages 66 - 115)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226297873.003.0002
[ethnography of the university, class ambition, bureaucracy, student life, black students, historically Black colleges and universities, traditionally white institutions]
Chapter Two, "The University in Black and White and Grey," argues that the university is an exemplary world of the stigmatized, who typically create what Goffman called a "literally-defined world" in answer to the national, regional, class, ethnic, racial, gender-related and disability-related stigmata under which its ambitious denizens struggle. Howard is not unique among universities, most of which were founded to prepare the bureaucratic and professional classes of previously dominated groups coming into their own as nation-states, provinces, regions, races, religions and genders. The culture and social structure of the 20th-century university explain a great deal about the shape of the "cultures" we help to articulate as the charters of ethnic groups and nations. (pages 116 - 176)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226297873.003.0003
[Gullah, Geechee, Ethnicity, roots of African-American culture, African influences on US culture, South Carolina, Basketry, Rice, Lowcountry, Low Country]
Ethnic identities refer to habits of interaction and evoke powerful emotions based upon the personal history of people who have shared these habits with others. However, ethnic identities are not primordial; they emerge and change in response to the practical purposes of the people who invoke them as structures of cooperation and badges of honor. Chapter Three, "Islands Are Not Isolated," concerns the cosmopolitan, university-based and recent genesis of Gullah/Geechee identity, which, in reaction to the stigmatization of the Gullah/Geechees' ruralness and relatively dark complexions, finds a new source of pride in university-based reports of their cultural Africanness and African-derived technological sophistication. I explore the irony that this ethnic identity is deeply indebted to the scholarly efforts of a Howard University professor but has fallen on stony ground among Howard students and alumni. This case demonstrates the cosmopolitan and inter-class process by which regional racial categories and economic classes are turned into ethnic groups. (pages 177 - 230)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226297873.003.0004
[Native Americans, African-American-Native American relations, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Native American racism , Colorism, Louisiana Creoles of color, Louisiana, New Orleans, education and Native Americans, complexion hierarchies]
Chapter Four--"A Complexion or a Culture?"--concerns American Indians of partly or possibly African descent and Louisiana Creoles of color. These populations overlap significantly with broader networks of the African-American bourgeoisie but now employ the anthropological discourse of "culture" to seek distinction and dividends from white-controlled institutions, including universities, state governments, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Though many scholars and neighbors believe them to be of partly African ancestry, the premise of black inferiority is deeply embedded in these collective identities. Among themselves, they intensely debate whether revivalist claims that they are distinct "cultures" are really just (or also) instances of anti-Black racism and colorism. The author argues that debate itself, rather than specific shared answers to this and other questions, are the chief diacritic of ethnic groups. The author's person--including his African appearance--became a provocation to several intense debates. (pages 231 - 306)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226297873.003.0005
[West Indians, Caribbeans, West Indian immigrants, Caribbean immigrants, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, segmented assimilation, restaurants, food culture, recreational drugs, colorism and complexion hierarchies in the Caribbean]
Chapter Five, "Islands of the Mind," concerns the ambivalent response of the largest of these ethnic groupings, Caribbean immigrants, to the US stigmatization of Blackness. For example, what is, in the Caribbean, called "middle-class" values are, in the US, called "Caribbean culture," in an effort to demonstrate the superiority of Caribbean immigrants and their children to the archetypal object of exclusion from US democracy and economic prosperity, native-born African Americans. Being cast in the role of a foil to the Caribbean success story by people who had known my highly successful African-American families and many others for decades was the foremost inspiration behind the theory of "ethnological Schadenfreude." The Caribbean case superbly illustrates the hierarchical premises and competitive strategies still embedded in popular and scholarly uses of the "culture" concept. Black claims to ethnic distinction (like non-ethnics' claims of being "middle-class Black") index upward class mobility and efforts to escape last place in a system of racially bifurcated assimilation. (pages 307 - 369)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226297873.003.0006
[African immigrants, race and class, self-ethnography, pan-Africanism, Yoruba, Sudan, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Nigerians, ethno-national separatism]
Despite the fact that Africans are among the highest-SES immigrants in the US, they come from the poorest and most stigmatized continent. Their image is not their own. Chapter Six, "Heaven and Hell," documents the self-presentation of Eritreans, Ethiopians, Sudanese and Nigerian scholars, restaurateurs, security guards, and students in and around Howard, including their scholarly writings, that respond indirectly to the dueling stereotypes of Africans in the US--as both prototypes of Black inferiority and symbolic heroes of politically oppositional Black identity. With special reference to the now-supra-ethnic "Yoruba" identity, this chapter illustrates the diverse settings, the ambivalent motives, and the conflicting logics of unity among the stigmatized, as well as its inherent messiness. (pages 370 - 446)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226297873.003.0007
[stigma and culture, ethnogenesis, constituent other, racism, universities, police brutality, William J. Bennett, Ronald Reagan, white working class]
In the Conclusion, the author reflects on how it feels to be a fiction, and the lessons of the stigmatized for the discipline of professional anthropology. The competitive pursuit of honor and earnings are major dynamics in ethnogenesis all over the world, and it regularly relies on the fiction of a constituent other. In the early 21st century, America's most stigmatized race is a historically specific case in point, illustrating the role of stigma and hierarchy in the genesis of ethnic groups and the "cultures" that name their boundaries. (pages 447 - 480)

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2015. Page maintained by BiblioVault.