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Cultural Identity - Solution or Problem?

Peter Wade

Notions of what constitutes 'culture' and 'identity' have changed over the course of this century, both in popular and academic usage. Anthropologists have shifted away from an understanding of these as stable, unproblematic things towards a view of them as flexibly constituted in shifting relationships. Meanwhile, older anthropological (and common sense) notions of culture and identity have begun to inform the politics of cultural representation in which groups use culture and identity as tools in political and social struggles. In sum, anthropologists have attempted to solve a problem which was both academic (what is culture? what is identity?) and political (how to address racism, ethnocentrism, discrimination), without fully realising that they were part of the problem to begin with. This is illustrated in various contexts such as Amazonian Indians, Maoris in New Zealand and black people in Colombia.

Dr. Peter Wade did a PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, focusing on the black population of Colombia. He was a Research Fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge before becoming a Lecturer in Geography and Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His published work includes Blackness and Race Mixture: the Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (1993) and Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (1997).

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