Aesop's Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach

by John Hartigan Jr.

Racial Situations challenges perspectives on race that rely upon oft-repeated claims that race is culturally constructed and, hence, simply false and distorting. John Hartigan asserts, instead, that we need to explain how race is experienced by people as a daily reality. His starting point is the lives of white people in Detroit. As a distinct minority, whites in this city can rarely assume they are racially unmarked and normative--privileges generally associated with whiteness. Hartigan conveys their attempts to make sense of how race matters in their lives and in Detroit generally. Rather than compiling a generic sampling of white views, Hartigan develops an ethnographic account of whites in three distinct neighborhoods--an inner city, underclass area; an adjacent, debatably gentrifying community; and a working-class neighborhood bordering one of the city's wealthy suburbs. In tracking how racial tensions develop or become defused in each of these sites, Hartigan argues that whites do not articulate their racial identity strictly in relation to a symbolic figure of black Otherness. He demonstrates, instead, that intraracial class distinctions are critical in whites' determinations of when and how race matters.


In each community, the author charts a series of names--"hillbilly," "gentrifier," and "racist"--which whites use to make distinctions among themselves. He shows how these terms function in everyday discourses that reflect the racial consciousness of the communities and establish boundaries of status and privilege among whites in these areas.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction

60 pages, Paperback

Published October 30, 2014

About the author

I’m an anthropologist who just wrote a novel loosely based on my own department. The Last Cohort features a haunted archive, séances, and adventures in the Afterlife. The characters grapple with spirit-sapping technologies and “brain rot,” while they battle with supernatural forces unleashed through a séance. Here's the novel's backstory: https://hartiganj.substack.com/p/why-...
Read Chapter One: https://bit.ly/4fa23Nd (.epub) or http://bit.ly/474NuZ4 (.mobi)

Reviews

[Frobisher Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent little book of essays examining culture across species lines. Covering everything from gut bacteria to gardens to ants & to the charismatic social mammals, and moving across levels and layers of theory from the work of nigh-forgotten early sociologist Gabriel Tarde to Deleuze and of course to the father of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson, it shows new ways and lines of thought that a biological consideration of culture, and a cultural consideration of biology, can be arrived at.

Through the use of fable as heuristic, which Hartigan deftly demonstrates has been part of social science since its beginnings, and an informed and responsible consideration of the currents of sociobiology, while using domestication and cultivation as conceptual points of departure, we can begin to expand our understanding of culture into new areas. Areas, as Hartigan also shows, where culture has resided, quietly, this whole time: in species outside of the order of primate.