i don’t think johnpi will get far below trying to convince the racism === colonialism crowd that it’s a little more complicated than they’re trying to present. i think there’s a particular type of institutionalized, formalized and scientized racism which the european-style nation-state perfected in the late 19th and 20th century. i say european-style because it was exportable, it flourishes in japan and korea to this day, and hindutva theorists in india are obviously influenced by it. but in the more general sense groupishness and racially insensitive sentiments and expressions are rather common throughout much of human history. it’s especially evidence in travel and diplomatic literature.
but in any case the whole argument gets confused because i don’t think racism is a clear & distinct idea. i also don’t think religion, nation or ideology are clear & distinct ideas. i get into trouble all the time because i use the words in somewhat idiosyncratic ways and miscommunicate. obviously this happens when i talk about religion on this weblog, but i’ve had dictionary-nerds school me on what a nation really is. well, actually, i don’t think a nation is any one thing, it is a set of definitions which explore a parameter space. that is, there’s a distribution of opinions. the same with religion. or racism.
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razib, murtad fitri
Conrad Barwa 6:58 am on May 29, 2009 Permalink |
Well biological racism seems to be a European invention and 19th century European colonialism relied on it to varying degrees. But cultural racism and ethnocentrism have been around for ages; the difference in the pre-colonial period was that boundaries were less rigidly enforced over large periods of time because of regular upheavals and the fact that the state wasn’t identified with a national identity of citizens. After the arrival of the nation-state (pretty much a European idea) this of course changes.
Modern ways of thinking on race, though are heavily influenced by Western concepts, particularly attempts to cast them in a ’scientific’ light. This is very clear when you look at thinkers as diverse as Savarkar or Lee Kuan Yew, who clearly ackowledged the impact of Western thinkers on their own racialised concepts of nationalism.
razib 1:48 pm on May 29, 2009 Permalink |
yes.