bibliography

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What do we mean by “social construct?”

It is common, when first reading the “AAA Statement on Race,” to

conclude that race is socially constructed and, therefore, does not really matter — in

other words, to conclude that the point of the “Statement” is that race isn’t real. This

reading is understandable, reasonable, and completely wrong. From this reading, a logical

(although, as we will see below, incorrect) assumption is sometimes made that if we

simply made less of a big deal about race, it would go away. This notion — the idea that

if one doesn’t “see” race it will cease to matter — is usually referred to as

“colorblindness.”

This is a common trope in American politics, and one that Stephen Colbert poked

fun at in a recurring joke on his show, The Colbert Report. The joke followed a standard

formula: “I don’t see color. In fact, I don’t even see my own color. People tell me I’m

white, and I believe them because…” with a new reason, generally based in common

racial stereotypes, supplied each time. At 4:30 in this clip (http://www.cc.com/video-

clips/9yc4ry/the-colbert-report-toni-morrison) of his interview with Toni Morrison, for

example, Colbert says, “I don’t see race, OK? I’ve evolved beyond racism, alright? I

don’t even see my own. People tell me I’m white, and I believe them, because I haven’t

read any of your books.” The joke (because jokes are always funnier when you explain

them) is that Colbert, like all Americans, does see race. In the context of the clip above,

this statement follows a discussion of whether Morrison should be considered an African-

American author, with Colbert asking what she should be considered, if not that. The

point is that claims to “colorblindness,” particularly in American politics, exist in a

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context in which race and color do matter, often profoundly so. Colbert is not only aware

of the fact that Morrison is an African-American author, but objects to the idea that she

might wish to be considered something else.

Nonetheless, this leaves us with several questions: if the concept of “race” has no

biological reality, how can race matter? If race is “socially constructed,” why wouldn’t it

be better to simply ignore it? What, in other words, does it mean to say that race is a

“social construct”?

Is time a social construct?

In class, you discussed the question of whether time is socially constructed.

Several years ago, I taught a summer class of bright high school students who, in their

spare time, debated the same question. Several weeks into the course, some of the

students began to be frustrated by this common topic of conversation, as the argument,

they felt, didn’t really go anywhere. The students who thought time was socially

constructed continued to believe it was socially constructed, and the students who

thought it was “real” had likewise not been convinced. I pointed out to them that this was

because both groups of students were, in fact, correct. Is time socially constructed?

Absolutely, yes. But does time have a reality outside of this? Well, yes, it does.

Let’s consider this more deeply. From an objective point of view, time passes,

whether we want it to or not. The anthropologist Alfred Gell (1992: 315) pointed out,

“There is no fairyland where people experience time in a way that is markedly unlike the

way in which we do so ourselves, where there is no past, present and future, where time

stands still, or chases its own tail, or swings back and forth like a pendulum.” Time, in

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other words, is objectively real. The way we understand time is socially constructed,

however.

The length of a day is determined by the amount of time it takes the Earth to

rotate on its axis. Why, though, do we divide that into 24 segments called hours? This

division seems entirely natural to us, but it isn’t. The ancient Egyptians observed that

during the heliacal rising1 of Sirius, the brightest star (other than the Sun) in the sky — an

event that coincided more or less with the annual flooding of the Nile2 — 12

constellations known as “decans” were visible in the sky. The significance of this period

led to the division of the daily periods of darkness and light (i.e. night and day) into 12

hours each, one for each of those decans.3 You may be thinking to yourself that this

actually only works twice a year on the equinox, when day and night are the same length.

You’re right, but for the most part this didn’t bother anyone. The solution, for a long

time, was just to divide day and night into 12 segments each, and accept that the

nighttime hour and daytime hour wouldn’t be the same length, and would change over

the course of the year. It wasn’t until the development of the weighted mechanical clock

in the late 13th century AD that people started to prefer to divide the day into 24 hours of

equal length (Andrewes 2002: 76-77).

1 Heliacal rising refers to a period when a star rises and is briefly visible on the horizon just before sunrise. Incidentally, Sirius is also known as the Dog Star, and the fact that its heliacal rising usually occurred during the most unpleasant part of summer is the origin of the term “dog days.” 2 Formerly, the Nile flooded regularly every year during the summer, and this predictability was critical for 2 Formerly, the Nile flooded regularly every year during the summer, and this predictability was critical for Egyptian agriculture. Since the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970, the Nile no longer floods. 3 Perhaps surprisingly, the same thing is true for many units of time we find to be more or less common sense. Why, for example, do we have a seven-day week? This length probably originates in Judaism in the 1st millennium BC, due to the sacredness of the number 7. There are certain advantages to a seven-day week, but this isn’t a “natural” division. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had a 10-day week (Conman 2003: 37).

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This may sound surprising, but even today we do the same thing. Consider units

of distance. If you ask most Americans how far away something is, you are very unlikely

to get a response in units of distance, and will instead very likely get a response in units

of time. This seems like a strange way of measuring distance, since something will

always be the same number of miles away, regardless of traffic conditions, etc. Of course,

this is exactly why one would measure distance in units of time. For the most part,

Americans care more about how long it will take them to get somewhere than the

physical distance they are traveling. Socially, then, the amount of time it will take to get

to a destination under certain conditions is more relevant than how far away something

actually is, and it doesn’t really bother anyone that if you measure this way, Los Angeles

is twice as far from San Diego on Thanksgiving morning as it is at 2 AM on an average

Wednesday. (Actually, that might bother you a lot if you happen to be traveling to LA on

Thanksgiving, but few Californians would find the concept troubling.)

Moving back to time, if we take a 24-hour division of the day for granted, we also

take a 60-minute division of each of those hours for granted. From that perspective, it

may be surprising to learn that nobody thought to put a minute hand on a clock until the

end of the 17th century AD (Thompson 1967: 64). Indeed, one could argue, as Thompson

did, that measuring time to the minute (or second) developed alongside industrial

capitalism. Your chickens don’t care if you show up 10 minutes later one day than you

did the day before; a factory owner paying you by the hour would, though.

It is somewhat strange, for those of us aware of the Apple Watch, to consider that

until fairly recently, clocks were seen as a symbol of modernity, and more specifically

modern notions of time. To take one example, in 1907, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid

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II had a 40-foot-tall clock tower built at Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate.4 The clock tower was

meant to show that Jerusalem was a modern city, and the Ottoman Empire a modern

state. When the British took control of the city after World War I, most of the colonial

administrators and soldiers tended to feel that the clock tower was inappropriate in

Jerusalem, which should look the part of a holy and, more importantly, ancient city, and

it was demolished in 1934 as part of efforts to make the Old City look, well, old (Baram

2012). An ancient city, in other words, should not advertise that it moves to a modern,

industrial rhythm.

Moving back briefly to time as a measure of distance, we might also consider one

particularly important unit of measurement in astronomy: the light-year, or the distance

that light travels in about 365 days, which comes out to about 9.5 trillion km. This

number is constant, as light always travels at the same speed in a vacuum. In that sense,

the light-year is an objective measurement. It will always be the same distance. There’s

nothing natural about this number, though. Light doesn’t care how far it travels in one

year on Earth, and if we were to meet intelligent life from some other planet, it’s unlikely

that they would have come to the conclusion that this was an important unit (the same is

true for other astronomical units of measurement, e.g. the astronomical unit [AU], the

parsec, etc.).

All of these examples have (hopefully) demonstrated that, although time is real

and its passage is universal, ways of thinking about time are culturally specific and

socially constructed. This doesn’t, however, detract from the reality of these concepts. I

recognize that hours are not a “natural” unit of time, but at the same time I am bound to

4 The Jaffa Gate is the western entrance to the walled Old City of Jerusalem. It gets its English and Hebrew name from the fact that it faces west, toward Tel Aviv (i.e. Jaffa).

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take up only 1.5 of those units in each lecture. If I were to go over time and tell you all

that time is merely a social construct and can therefore be ignored, you would disagree.

Likewise, if you show up to section 45 minutes late, your TA is unlikely to accept your

excuse if you say, “Time is just a social construct, so who are you to say that I’m ‘late’?”

Time may be socially constructed, but it is very much real.

What is a continent?

Without belaboring the point too much (too late, Dr. Jones, too late…), let’s look

at another example. How are the continents divided? The short answer is that continents

are socially constructed. It is the case, of course, that the idea of continents bears some

resemblance to the underlying geological reality of tectonic plates, but the two concepts

don’t really map onto one another. For one thing, we’ve only known about tectonic plates

since the mid-20th century, whereas the idea of continents has been around in one form or

another for millennia. Beyond that, the continents as we conceive of them don’t actually

correspond to tectonic boundaries, unless you think of Europe and Asia as being a single

continent (Eurasia) that excludes the Arabian peninsula, India, eastern Siberia, and half of

Japan (maybe you do; I’m not here to judge). The actual divisions between continents are

somewhat arbitrary, though. The boundary between Europe and Asia, for example, is

generally taken to be the Ural Mountains, whose highest point is a bit lower than 2,000

m. Why, then, are the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada range, which both reach

heights of more than 4,400 m, not continental boundaries? For that matter, why are the

Americas divided into northern and southern continents, rather than eastern and western

ones divided by the American Cordillera, the long series of mountain ranges running

from the Alaska Range in the north to the Andes and Antarctic Peninsula in the south?

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Well, because we don’t divide them that way. Actually, according to some models they

aren’t divided at all. One of the members of my doctoral committee was fond of telling

students that, growing up in Iran, he had learned that there were six continents, one of

which was just America, with no divisions into north or south.

That isn’t to say that the continental divisions don’t mean anything, though.

Continental divisions have political and economic meanings in the real world (think of

the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement), as well as social,

cultural, and academic ones (you can, for example, take courses on European history and

Asian art, whatever those things might be — while academics might admit that the

division between Europe and Asia is artificial, a course on “Eurasian art” would, almost

without exception, focus on the Central Asian steppe, not the whole of Eurasia, oddly

enough).

Back to race

Race is, in this same way, real. Yes, it is the case, as you have already learned,

that race doesn’t work as a biological concept. In other words, humans are not neatly

separated into discrete, bounded groups, as the biological concept of race would suggest.

Race is, however, an important folk taxonomic5 concept that has real social

consequences. As much as we might like to pretend we don’t “see” race — indeed, as

much as we might wish we didn’t — the concept is pervasive in Euro-American culture.

It is there, regardless of whether we want to notice it, and pretending to ignore it cannot

make it any less real — hence, this course exists.

5 Folk taxonomy refers to the non-scientific classification systems that people tend to use in daily life. Folk taxonomy, for example, would consider the tomato a vegetable, even though we know, scientifically, that it is a fruit. We can understand, on one hand, that the tomato is technically a fruit, and also be disappointed, on the other, if we find it in fruit salad, to misquote Miles Kington.

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Works Cited

Andrewes, William J. H. 2002. “A Chronicle of Timekeeping.” Scientific American 287 (3):76-85.

Baram, Uzi. 2012. “Out of Time: Erasing Modernity in an Antique City.” Archaeologies 8(3):330-348.

Conman, Joanne. 2003. “It’s about Time: Ancient Egyptian Cosmology.” Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 31: 33-71.

Gell, Alfred. 1992. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and Images. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38: 56-97.