Cultural Anthropology

Race is one of the most bedeviling of anthropological characteristics. The concept, with the barest tips of its roots in biological realities and the rest of the plant firmly grafted to cultural and sociological constructs, is one of the first concepts that anthropologists dealt with vigorously in terms of the history of the profession. Ideas about race both helped establish anthropology as a discipline in its own right (distinct from history, political economy, philosophy, comparative religion and ethics) and kept it from being entirely assimilated into the post-colonial mindset.

Like the poor for the rest of humanity, the idea of race - for both good and ill - seems always to be with the anthropologist. Thus it is hardly surprising that Roger Lancaster should become fascinated with the concept of race during his fieldwork in Nicaragua. For the milieu in which he is working provides a fascinating swirl of ideas about race.

It would seem to be impossible (at least from the information we have about Nicaraguan society) to write accurately about contemporary Nicaraguan society and culture without an examination of the role that race plays within the society. And yet, while race - and especially ideas about "blackness" - is central to Nicaraguan conceptions of self-identity, Lancaster makes it clear that these are not the only concerns for his "natives," and so it would not be fair to discuss his ethnographic work without at least some mention of them.

So while this paper focuses on ideas about race in Nicaragua - and in particular about ideas of "blackness" or "negroness," it is essential to remember that claims about negroness are for Nicaraguans always mediated by other claims about gender and class. That negroness should be such an important social category in Nicaragua is hardly surprising given that over 75% of the people of Nicaragua are mestizos, or the descendants of both Europeans (mostly Spanish) and the native peoples of the place.

There is very little actually "blackness" in any of these people if we were to use that term as it is understood in the United States. Instead, as Lancaster explicates, negroness as a social category must be seen as the negation of "whiteness" or European-ness. Thus we might expect that people who are darkest in skin color and are therefore more closely genetically related to the Spanish colonizers of Nicaragua than to the native people.

But in fact negroness has relatively little to do with genetics and less to do with skin color. While someone with red hair, very pale skin and green eyes would be unlikely to be called "negro," almost anyone else might be because the term is used as a way of designating power relationships between and among people more than it is as a way of saying anything about a person's ancestry. Of course, it might be argued that there is a similar usage of the term "black" in English.

Certainly American use racial designations and racial epithets in the United States to establish hierarchies amongst people.

A white American might try to pull rank on someone who is black by reminding that person that his/her race delegates him/her to a lower status, but this is far less often done in the United States than it is in Nicaragua, and very rarely in the absence of at least some physical cues about race.) Ironically, Lancaster argues that those who are the most clearly non-negro in some sense - those who are most purely indigenous looking in appearance - are generally not considered to be "negro." This makes sense to an American, because Indian and black are not the same categories in the United States, but this adds an additional complex dimension to the use of negroness in Nicaragua where the term generally equates to non-white and poor.

Indians are both non-white and poor, and yet do not usually possess negroness. Negroness can therefore be seen as (at least in the way that it is not applied to the Indians) as a designation of non-whiteness but also of the inclusion of some whiteness - in fact of mestizo-ness.

Those who are clearly white (like that redhead) or clearly (in their physiognomy, culture and dress) native are not mestizo and so are not subject to designations of negroness most of the time unless such a label is applied in irony or joking or as a unmitigated attempt to designate power. Both of these, from what Lancaster tells us, are relatively rare in contrast to the ways in which negroness is applied to those of mestizo descent.

It should be noted that there are some people in Nicaragua that Americans might consider to be "real" blacks, the Creoles who for the most part live the Caribbean lowland and who are the descendants of African slaves brought to the New World. However, many of these people have negotiated their own statuses to emphasize the European elements of their Creoleness rather than their black ancestors.

The Creoles seem, according to Lancaster, to have been better able at constructing their identity to avoid the category of "negroness" than those mestizos of European and Indian heritage. Constructed identity" is perhaps the most important phrase in coming to understand Nicaraguan society as Lancaster presents it to us, for the world of Nicaraguan cultural norms that he reveals is one in which identity is immensely fluid, changing far more rapidly over time.