Among anthropology’s most important and enduring contributions to academic and popular culture is the field’s analysis of race. Anthropologists have long been at the forefront of forging a critical understanding of this contentious concept, one that understands race as historically contingent, culturally inflected and socially constructed. Emory faculty are concerned with a broad range of forces—cultural and biological—that contribute to distinctive formations and experiences of race and racism. These range from population movements to political economy, from gene frequencies to constructions of gender, from nationalism to religion.
The anthropology faculty at Emory has conducted research on race in a range of world areas—from Africa to Latin America and the Caribbean, from the US to Southeast Asia, from the South Pacific to the Far East. In addition to being concerned with manifestations of race that are distinctive to particular regions, our research is also sensitive to the relationships between area-specific patterns and the transnational dimensions of race and racism.