The Conceptual Politics of Racial Ideologies

1
The Conceptual Politics of Racial Ideologies

• Japinder Dhesi
• SPRRaM
• Social Psychology
• London School of Economics

2
Cognition and Ideology

• Conventional social scientific accounts of
  ideology fail to consider the psychological
  component of ideologies (Van Dijk, 2005)
• Increasingly, social scientists are acknowledging
  the role played by cognitive factors in
  maintaining social systems.
• Key Question To what extent do psychological
  predispositions lend racial ideologies their
  conceptual fluency?

3
The Functions of Ideologies

• A key function of ideology to legitimate social
  hierarchies such as race by naturalizing status
  and power inequalities between social groups
• The naturalization of race is a major factor
  underlying the political potency of race to
  organize power and authority
• Stuart Hall observes race discovers what other
  ideologies have to construct an apparently
  natural and universal basis in nature itself
  (1980 342)
• Where does a naturalized notion of race come
  from?

4
A Cognition and Culture Approach

• A widespread assumption in the social sciences
  has been that human cognitive abilities are
  domain-general i.e. they can be applied to any
  empirical domain.
• The Cognition and Culture perspective posits that
  the human cognitive architecture contains a
  number of innate cognitive structures which guide
  the acquisition of information about certain
  phenomena from our environment.
• The Cognition and Culture perspective adopts an
  epidemiology of representations approach to
  culture (Sperber, 1994)
• Cultural representations which trigger our
  evolved cognitive architecture are more likely to
  be acquired and transmitted than others.

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Ideology A Cognition and Culture Approach

• In standard social scientific accounts
  essentialism is described as a by-product of
  certain philosophical and cultural traditions
  (Fuss, 1989).
• Cognition and Culture theorists have suggested
  that essentialism is a property of the mind.
• Psychological essentialism is an innate cognitive
  predisposition which leads people to believe that
  members of a category share a deep underlying
  causal essence which confers their identity and
  is responsible for many of their observable
  features (perceptual and behavioural) (Medin
  Ortony, 1989).

6
Ideology A Cognition and Culture Approach

• A distinction is made between metaphysical
  essentialism, the view that things have essences,
  and psychological essentialism, the view that
  peoples representations of these things might
  reflect such a belief (as erroneous as it may be)
  (Medin Ortony, 1989).
• However, this predisposition does not determine
  which social categories are essentialized.
  Psychological essentialism is an innate cognitive
  mechanism triggered by the salience of social
  categories in the cultural environment.
• In relation to gender, Gelman (2003) has noted
  how cultural factors such as stereotyping and
  gender-typed practices can serve to heighten an
  essentializing tendency.

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Ideology A Cognition and Culture Approach

• There is support from experimental studies of
  childrens concepts for essentialist beliefs
  about natural kind categories emerging as early
  as two and a half years, and across different
  cultures (Astuti et al., 2004).
• In recent years evidence has emerged which
  suggests that humans also essentialise social
  categories, including age-grades (Fagan, 1972)
  caste (Mahalingham, 2003) gender (Taylor, 1996)
  kinship (Hirschfeld, 1986) race (Hirschfeld,
  1996) and ethnicity (Gil-White, 2001).

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Ideology A Cognition and Culture Approach

• Hirschfeld (1997) suggests that humans have an
  innate tendency to classify human groups in
  essentialist terms.
• 2 caveats
• Race is not a natural category of the mind but
  the way we think about race may be result of a
  psychological predisposition
• This does not discount the need for a study of
  the particular social, political and economic
  factors which lead to the essentialization of
  race.

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The Conceptual Politics of Racial Ideologies a
re-reading of Foucault

• In his 1976 lectures on the history of racisms
  and racial discourse Foucault speaks of the
  reinscription, re-encasement and recovery
  of older racial discourses as they are shaped
  into new ones.
• He describes the tactile and polyvalent mobility
  of racism i.e. how it serves various different
  functions at different times and places.
• He highlights the resilience and enduring nature
  of racial discourses.
• The success and resilience of racial ideologies
  is a function not simply of the politics of
  inequality but of conceptual politics as well
  (Hirschfeld, 1997)

10
Final Thought

• to what extent and in what ways might it be
  that certain categories of power acquire the
  weight and relevance they do in social life
  because of the ways in which they feed off and
  build upon categories of the mind? (Stoler,
  1997 101)