Lee D Baker All Books: Anthropology and Race sku-13244342

Lee D Baker's Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture is a hardcover in All Books, SKU sku-13244342. Baker examines how American anthropologists developed theories of race and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

He describes how ethnologists preserved and exhibited Native American languages, practices and objects while often treating African American culture as something to leave behind. He argues that concepts of culture developed through the study of American Indian languages and customs became part of the anthropological concept of race used to address "the Negro problem" in the twentieth century.

The book discusses James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton and Franz Boas. It also considers scientific societies, journals, museums, universities, the development of U.S. sociology, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Supreme Court.

Baker traces how anthropology responded to and shaped U.S. ideas about race and culture, and how those ideas were later used and misused.