Product Description
This text examines changing perspectives on black and Indian populations in Latin America, tracing similarities and differences in the way these peoples have been seen by academics and national elites. Beginning with a brief analysis of historical debates about the emergence of mixed societies in the colonial and republican era, the author traces understandings of race and ethnicity from early functional approaches, through Marxist and interactionist perspectives to more recent concerns with the politics of culture and identity in nation states that exist in increasingly globalized networks. Throughout, reference is made to concrete contexts to illustrate the theoretical debates. Brief contrasts are made with North American and Caribbean contexts. Race and ethnicity as analytical concepts are re-examined in order to demonstrate their embeddedness in the history of Western social science and to assess their continuing usefulness.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 1 review)

A useful resource for the study of race in Latin America

This is an excellent short book. I recommend it to all my students as it is cheap, readable and relatively well-argued. Wade discusses the ways in which racial and ethnic systems of classification have developed and work currently in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Guatemala. Brazil and Colombia are treated most thoroughly, although there are useful sections on Mexico as well. The material on the other countries is pretty skimpy however, so be warned. In addition, Wade's discussion is primarily centered on African-descended groups and Native American groups. There is little discussion of the interior dimensions of whiteness in Latin America (although he does discuss class to some extent) except in his (nicely-presented) discussion of mestizaje in Brazil and Mexico. That (and my other reservations discussed below) aside, I thoroughly recommend this book as a general introduction to the ways in which race is used and understood in Latin America. It does an excellent job in this regard.

Theoretically Wade presents a very satisfying argument that race and ethnicity (while grading into one another) are opposite ends of a spectrum where race is articulated in terms of phenotype while ethnicity is articulated in terms of place. In both cases, these categories are malleable, open to challenge or re-definition and historically constituted. His introductory chapter is one of the best summary introductions to theoretical questions of race and ethnicity that I know of.

Wade problematizes the way in which black and Indian populations have been separated analytically from one another by means of the disciplinary division between sociology and anthropology and this is also one of the more important contributions of his book. Unfortunately, he does not provide a clearly articulated vision of the way in which a more integrated understanding of black and indian groups would add more to social analysis.

The main weakness of this book lies in the absence of integration of Wade's ideas with specific examples in depth. Having made an argument for more contextual understandings of race and ethnicity, Wade abandons context for simple illustration. This is probably a fucntion of the length of the book rather than any specific intent on Wade's part: His other books do seem far more tightly focussed and contextualized. However, an absence of specific coverage makes the last two chapters of the book rather disappointing and the final chapter is far too thin on key details to make anything like a coherent case for the stance that Wade advocates.

Wade's discussion of the role of gender in Latin American views of race and ethnicity is also disappointingly cursory. This is a field in which a great deal of good literature has been produced (M.J. Weismantel's wonderful book on gender, food and ethnicity: "Food Gender and Poverty in Ecuador", and Lynn Stephen's "Zapotec Women" and France Winndance Twine's "Racism in a Racial Democracy). And while it is always nice to see people citing bell hooks in an anthropology text, the section on gender is much too limited in both discussion of previous work and in theorizing from his own analysis especially when compared with the sections on history, nationalism and disciplinarity.

Overall, however, this book is a very useful and worthwhile book to have in one's collection.
January 26, 2001

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