I wish to begin by thanking all those who commented on my “Story in Two Parts, With an Ending Yet to be Written,” and who, by so doing, helped create what has become an incredibly rich and interdisciplinary conversation. From prior knowledge, or from what I was able to glean from their comments or the web, the commentators on this post hail from a wide range of departments and disciplines: Philosophy (Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega), History (Aron Rodrigue), Anthropology (Tanya Luhrmann, Ai Nakamura), Social and Cultural Psychology (Stephanie Fryberg, Hazel Rose Markus), Cultural Neuroscience (Shinobu Kitayama), Cognitive Neuroscience (Linda Moya), Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies (Michael Hames-García, Ernesto J. Martínez), and Literary Criticism (Ramón Saldívar, Lupe Carrillo, Andrew Goldstone, Gavin Jones, Elda María Román, Julie Avril Minich, Héctor Hoyos, Barbara Buchenau, Alex Woloch, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Lee Konstantinou, William Flesch). Bill Benzon is an independent scholar with a wide range of interests, and also a working jazz musician. Shikha Singh appears to be an undergraduate student at North Carolina State University.

A primary reason I engage in the interdisciplinary and comparative study of race and ethnicity is because it allows for a deep scholarly engagement with a number of philosophically-, psychologically- and sociologically-informed issues. Happily, many such issues have emerged in this forum through the thoughtful speculation, deep discussion and also disagreement evidenced in my interlocutors’ comments. Although there are many threads I could follow in my response, I will focus on four: 1) the power and limits of narrative for shaping and transmitting knowledge; 2) the complicated relationship between culture and race; 3) the way starting assumptions affect resulting conclusions; and 4) the dialectical relationship between the universal and the particular. Throughout, I reflect on the “doing” of race, ethnicity, and culture as projects of power and privilege.

The Power and Limits of Narrative

In crafting my two-part tale about how the pre-publication press reports for Na and Kitayama’s research illustrates the “doing” of race, I was responding to a remark made by the immediate past president of the Modern Languages Association (MLA), Sidonie Smith. The night before I began writing my post, I was at a dinner where Smith commented on the much-discussed “crisis in the humanities” by suggesting that literary critics need to tell better stories about why the humanities are crucial to the production and transmission of knowledge in contemporary society. Her remark resonated for me because I have spent the last few years exploring ways to make the scholarship on race and ethnicity more accessible to people for whom race and ethnicity are not objects of study. For the most part, the level of discourse in the public sphere about race and ethnicity is appallingly low, even though the level of scholarship about them is high. One reason for this is surely the form in which scholars of race and ethnicity share and discuss the implications of their research findings (the scholarly or research article); another is the narrative power of what I refer to in my posting as “the old familiar story of race.”

According to literary critic Peter Brooks, narrative is “a specific mode of human understanding,” while narrative genres embody “a form of thinking, a way of reasoning about a situation” (Reading for the Plot, 7–9). This conception of narrative — echoed in this forum by Gavin Jones (“Fairytales are stories that cultures tell about themselves to help understand basic aspects of their social structure”), Héctor Hoyos (“storytelling can capture what is most important in [the] movement” of racial identification), Barbara Buchenau (“our world is shaped and crafted through narrative and its concomitant patterns of interpretation”), Alex Woloch (narrative has “specific heuristic and diagnostic capacities”), and Hazel Markus (what scholars and researchers “’see’ will of course depend on the concepts, categories, metaphors and stories [theories, hypotheses] they bring with them”) — has the advantage of drawing attention to narrative as a dynamic process as well as to humans’ involvement in the making of specific narratives.

It is with a conception of narrative as a dynamic process resulting in the production of different types of stories by means of which humans interpret the world around them (and especially the situations they confront) that I understand race as a kind of story. This is the view under which race can be understood as a “social construct” that has been made “real” in the world. “Race” is a complex and world-making fiction that has emerged over time. It is told and retold, constantly changing to fit different local circumstances, as individuals and communities together strive to make sense of certain aspects of our shared world. Specifically, the story of race works to make sense of visible human difference, to explain the existence of conflict between groups of people from different cultures and regions of the world, and to legitimate inequality and exploitation in the context of a Western and modern ideology of equality. It is a story for which most people know the trajectory (inevitable conflict, as per Hoyos) and many people accept the purported ending (that is, non-European inferiority and exploitation). Race is a story that shapes all of Western society’s present-day social, political and economic institutions, while motivating people’s behavior in both conscious and unconscious ways.

What better way, then, to illustrate the doing of race than by telling a story? I wanted to highlight how the pre-publication publicity for Na and Kitayama’s research about the embrainment of culture was “doing race,” while illustrating the importance of narrative (and implicitly of the humanities). I conceived of it as a way of fighting the story with stories, if you will.

Of course, how successful my story in two parts is depends not only on how well I have “curated” this particular “dialogical space” (as per Ernesto Martínez) but also (as Markus rightly points out) on what individual readers bring to the conversation. As powerful as narratives can be, they also have significant limitations, primarily due to their reliance on generic conventions — conventions that dictate the form a narrative will take, and with which individual readers may not be familiar. I chose the fairytale form to tell the initial tale of Kitayama’s cultural neuroscientific research because it has a happy ending, as do all good fairytales. The familiarity of the fairytale form to most Western readers also allowed me to convey, in a foreshortened form, what is at stake for Kitayama’s overall research program. Given the familiar aspects of the fairytale form, there were spaces into which I could easily slot Kitayama (as the seeker-hero), Markus (the donor-helper), scholarly recognition (the desired object, and metaphorically, in the guise of Connie, the princess), the widely accepted belief in psychology regarding the existence of basic human processes of mind (the villain), and the theory of the mutual constitution of self and society (the magical agent) in order to vividly highlight for non-psychologists the significance of Na and Kitayama’s new research. But a limitation of the fairytale form is that it requires the storyteller to reduce the characters to types. Fairytale characters — or “dramatis personae” in V. Propp’s influential analysis of the fairytale genre — are less important for who they are than for what they do. This is why Ai Nakamura’s criticism of my tale (on the basis that I trade in stereotypes) is, from my perspective, beside the point. Certainly, stereotypes can be pernicious, but they are also very common and very powerful ways of communicating ideas succintly. My point in telling the story of Na and Kitayama’s research in fairytale form was not to tell the full and complete truth about them as real human people in the world, or even about their findings regarding the embrainment of independent and interdependent ways of being in the world. Rather, I hoped that I might inspire non-psychologists to do what Andrew Goldstone so clearly did: look up their work and read it for themselves, while considering how easily research about culture gets framed as research about race.

As Nakamura’s response makes clear, one of narrative’s essential features also forms the basis for one of its limitations for communicating ideas. In writing about Kitayama in the form of a story, I was depending on my readers to have a basic understanding of the fairytale and short story form, together with a willingness to confront a serious issue in a playful guise. The literary critic Tzvetan Todorov reminds us that a genre is “nothing other than a codification of discursive properties” such that genres are “institutions” specific to a given society (“Origin of Genres,” 17–18). It is “because genres exist as institutions that they function as ‘horizons of expectation’ for readers and as ‘models of writing’ for authors” (18). For any given story to work, the writer and her readers (or the storyteller and his listeners) must enter into an implicit compact whereby they understand and agree to the rules of that specific communicative interaction. Problems necessarily arise when not all parties to a particular communicative interaction are aware of, or willing to accept, those rules.

It was, in fact, because of the limitations of the fairytale form that I turned to a different narrative genre to discuss the way Na and Kitayama’s research was turned into a story of race. I chose to narrate that portion of the tale in the form of a short story cast as a dream — the kind of dream in which a person tries to move but finds that she has no power over her limbs, or else tries to talk but finds that he cannot be heard. As with my fairytale (and consistent with the dictates of the short story form), the characters in my dream sequence are figured again as types rather than as representations of actual individuals. So, for example, the character of Fiona serves the allegorical function of the clueless and even possibly well-meaning (yet unconsciously racist) white liberal, while the male journalist from Science Daily serves to embody (and to voice) the fear on the part of many Westerners that the era of European racial and cultural ascendancy might be finally coming to an end. Whether or not this fear was born with the opening of the Beijing Olympics — as per the comedian Stephen Colbert! — it was everywhere in evidence during the January 2011 Amy Chua “tiger mother” brouhaha.¹ Importantly, I have not invented these character types or racial attitudes; they exist in the world and so help shape the context within which actual people from different racial and cultural groups interact.

Together, the two journalists are meant to represent the press as a whole, and the way it often simplifies and distorts scientific research more generally. The reasons for this distortion are legion, and much too complicated for me to reflect on here in an exhaustive manner. Suffice it to say that with the changing ways Americans are consuming their news (cable news, opinion blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), news organizations are increasingly finding themselves short-staffed, under-resourced, and forced to rely on the wire services for stories. As fewer journalists have the time and the expertise to fully comprehend and fact-check the stories that bear their bylines, ever more distortion of complicated and difficult scientific research is bound to occur. My fictionalization of this process is thus meant to remind the reader that in the case of research that can be construed to support existing ideas about innate racial difference, the kind of distortion I point to is not just an epistemic and communicative failure, but also a social tragedy in the making. (This holds for other kinds of putative biological difference too, as the postings by Linda Martín Alcoff and Martínez about gender and sexuality make clear). Of course, the meaning of my story is itself subject to distortion — especially in those cases in which a reader like William Flesch “sees” the characters as representing actual people rather than social types.

Perceiving Human Difference

Why, how, and to what effect, humans make social distinctions are at the heart of the various comments on this posting. Shikha Singh focuses on the why when she suggests that categorizing is an essential aspect of our humanness: “It is in our blood as human beings to categorize everything we see and put some value to it.” Similarly, Tanya Luhrmann implies that there is something built-in to the human psyche (a “categorizing mind”) that causes us to seek meaning by identifying, prototyping and categorizing. She writes that “seeking a bodily explanation for difference is not just cultural arrogance: it is a cognitive default.” Other contributors focus on the mechanisms and consequences of identifying and naming difference. Lupe Carrillo notes that any mention of the biological in discussions of human social behavior usually ends up in a privileging of the biological over the social in subsequent analyses. Buchenau and Woloch both note the way my original posting highlights the “very large, ramifying consequences” of the “multiple misprisions and misreadings” that “occur as Kitayama’s research [about cultural difference] is paraphrased, reported on, and disseminated.”

Other comments emphasize the extent to which a researcher’s starting assumptions about race and culture, and the analytical tools he or she uses, shape the resulting findings. Markus calls attention to the way cultural contexts (including taken-for-granted assumptions about the meaning and importance of race) shape the questions and conclusions people formulate about what they are observing or studying. “Seeing,” Markus explains, “is a combination of what is in the observed behavior and what is in the head or tools of the perceiver.” Linda Moya provides a concrete example of how bias can be built right into a researcher’s methodology or tools. In human neuroscience, she explains, “a first step is to average across all the data in our statistical analysis (ANOVA), to get to the ‘true’ cognitive response which is presumed to be basic to all human beings.” Michael Hames-García points to the instructions for the Institutional Review Board Protocol, which, he notes, can “trigger any number of ‘stories’ about the nature and importance of racial difference — thereby eliciting bogus scientific and scholarly ‘justifications’ for race.” Luhrmann worries about the extent to which the simple act of naming a difference can serve to reify the difference that is named: “you name the difference, and inevitably, those who use the categories begin to think in terms of biological differences, a chasm between two ways of being.”

What all the contributors share is a recognition that consequential human difference exists, even if identifying and talking about it in ways that are adequate to its complexity are fraught with difficulties. Ramón Saldívar and Mariana Ortega, for example, resist that what they perceive as a too-clean distinction in Na and Kitayama’s work between the two ways of being (Independent and Interdependent), and the two different societies (Japan and the United States), wondering if the truth is somewhat more messy. Goldstone points out that “one of the tasks, as we strive to develop better ways to understand and explain human difference, is to find cultural categories that can help us to illuminate, rather than reify or essentialize, complex distributions of behavior.” Lurhmann wonders how we might “create a dimensional way of thinking” about culturally complex human differences. And Hames-García asks, “Can we find ways of talking about the broad, overall differences that typically exist between Interdependence and Independence without falling into discussions that assume a rigid separation between homogeneity within the two lands?”

Culture into Race²

I first came across the Na and Kitayama research referred to in my story when, as a new user of Twitter, I typed “#race” into the search engine to see what would happen. Up popped a lot of tweets about car racing, along with some tweets about the particular social formation I was looking for. One tweet was attached to the name Kitayama, a name with which I have long been familiar because he works closely with my colleague Hazel Markus. I followed the link and came across references to the Na and Kitayama article, which at that point in time had not yet been published. I was puzzled, because from what I know about Kitayama’s research agenda, he studies culture, not race. As I read through the pre-publication publicity for the article, I realized I was looking at an example of how culture becomes race. That is, I was seeing an example of how psychological research about cultural variations corresponding to social group formations could be interpreted as having been caused by innate biological differences that are widely believed to be racial in nature. I had found a beautiful example of the “doing” of race in which race is done without any particular malice or ill will on the part of any one person, but simply in the course of people going about their everyday lives.³ What was interesting about this particular instance — aside from the interest generated by the research itself — was not that it was unusual or egregious, but rather that it was so typical. Furthermore, it was happening in real time, and was taking place in a way that I would be able to document for the readers of my On the Human post.

The conflation of culture with race is a concern expressed by many of the commentators in this forum. Carrillo asks why our society so often confuses race with culture, while Elda María Román imagines the two as rivalrous siblings struggling for supremacy. Ortega sounds a cautionary note about either confounding the two concepts or falling into the trap of seeing them as dichotomous and easily separable from each other; in so doing she importantly reminds us about the complexity and multiplicity of human experience and existence in general. In this she is joined by Martínez, who compares the biologization of race with the concomitant biologization of homosexuality. Without denying the contribution scientists (including biologists) can make to more comprehensive and accurate understandings of ethnic ancestry or sexual behavior, Martínez perceptively observes that how we talk about any human difference, and the causality we attribute to it, will affect not only whether we try to change or eradicate that difference, but also where it fits into the prevailing social status hierarchies. For his part, Aron Rodrigue sagely reminds us that, “‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘culture’” each has its own distinctive genealogy, while also conceding that the meaning of each term is “slippery and in constant evolution.”

One reason race and culture are often conflated has to do with the way the three terms referred to by Rodrigue have evolved. Following the horrors of the Jewish holocaust and the shaming of militant defenders of white supremacy by non-violent resisters such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez during the American civil rights movements, openly avowed racism has gone out of style — as has the term “race” itself. However, since the social formation referenced by that term did not disappear, Americans (and others around the world) have devised a variety of ways to talk about race while avoiding the use of the term. Some use “ethnicity” as a less volatile substitute, while others turn to “culture” as a polite euphemism (Doing Race, 38–39). Thus, while the three terms refer to different concepts, they are occasionally used interchangeably. One has to listen carefully, and pay close attention to the context in which a given term is used, to figure out which meaning is being communicated.

Finally, there is another, more fundamental, reason why the concepts of culture and race are difficult to pull apart: they are mutually constituted, as Stephanie Fryberg points out. In her comment, Julie Minich asks a series of provocative questions regarding how the real-life Shinobu Kitayama might feel about seeing his research on culture being used to re-biologize race. She asks:

Does he continue to insist that his work is strictly about culture? Or does he eventually decide that in a world structured by racializing ideas and systems his work can be appropriated to do race — and, therefore, that his work is (in a certain way) about race after all? If he chooses the former path, is he failing to recognize the complex relationship between the concepts of culture and race? And if he chooses the latter, does he risk reinforcing the connection between culture and race, thereby making the two concepts even more difficult to pull apart?

I like Minich’s questions because they invoke the mutual constitution of race and culture to incisively capture the dilemma that social science researchers like Fryberg, as a Native American scholar who studies Native American culture, find impossible to avoid. Fryberg notes that, in the social sciences, race and culture are forced into distinct theoretical corners such that attempting to study them together “takes a scholar into the muckety-muk of fairytale la-la land.” As a result, the social scientific scholar who designs her research in a manner that recognizes race and culture as “highly related concepts” will be considered by mainstream social science as “less scientific,” and denounced as a purveyor of “noisy, unclean science.”

Fryberg’s observations comment on a key methodological aspect of “scientific” empirical procedures, and point toward what Jones describes as “the politics of alleged difficulty and intellectual distinction that increase the cultural capital attained by certain academic theories and approaches” — by which I take him to mean a politics of knowledge that valorizes empirical and “scientific” over qualitative and “humanistic” approaches. As I have indicated above, empirical studies are powerfully important for proving untested hypotheses. Even so, I recognize that what Buchenau labels “complexity reduction” is built into their methodology. In order to gather enough data to prove a claim about one causal factor, social scientists using empirical approaches generally seek to isolate that factor by controlling for variation in other factors that might contribute to how that phenomenon is expressed. And although some empirical investigators may be aware of the complexity reduction in which they are engaging, their results and discussion frequently ignore other factors in a way that conveys to the reader or hearer the impression that race and culture can be actually, and not just analytically, distinguished from one another. Furthermore, as Fryberg’s Geronimo example makes clear, the fabrics of our multiple American cultures have the story of race woven right into them. As a result, and despite their greater cultural capital in the academic marketplace, scientific approaches to knowledge production that attempt to identify discrete categories into which people or practices can be slotted will finally be inadequate for capturing the full complexity of social phenomena like culture and race.

In response to Lee Konstantinou’s very fair question regarding whether Samuel Huntington was “doing culture,” rather than “doing race,” I suggest that it is because culture and race are mutually constituted categories that Huntington could so easily do race by invoking culture. Of course, what one calls what Huntington was doing in his books The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) and Who Are We? Challenges to American’s National Identity (2004) depends, in the end, on how one defines the concepts of “race” and “culture.” In our co-authored introduction to Doing Race, Markus and I define “race” as a dynamic process that results in the denigration and exploitation of one or more ethnic groups on the basis of physical or behavioral characteristics that are assumed to be rooted deeply in the biology or culture of the targeted group (15). Specifically, we define race as a dynamic system of “historically derived and institutionalized ideas and practices that: 1) sorts people into ethnic groups according to perceived physical and behavioral human characteristics that are often imagined to be negative, innate, and shared; 2) associates differential value, power, and privilege with these characteristics, establishes a hierarchy among the different groups, and confers opportunity accordingly; and 3) emerges when groups are perceived to pose a threat (political, economic, or cultural) to each other’s worldview or way of life, and/or to justify the denigration and exploitation (past, current, or future) of other groups while exalting one’s own group to claim an innate privilege,” (21). The important thing, whatever one calls it, is to identify the negative process involved in “doing race,” and to be able to recognize when someone — even someone who holds a chaired professorship in political science at Harvard University — is involved in doing it.

This brings me to Bill Benzon’s question regarding whether Steven Elworth is “doing race” when he implies that jazz is black music, and jazz culture is black culture. Benzon makes a number of shrewd observations in his comment, and asks the right kinds of questions: Given that jazz is a routine and familiar part of Elworth’s life, why doesn’t he think of it as his culture? To answer Benzon’s question directly, I would say that, no, Elworth is not “doing race” — although race has everything to do with why Elworth is so careful about not claiming jazz as his own. There is a context here that we have to pay attention to — a context involving the systematic exploitation and appropriation of African Americans’ bodies, labor, and products by (primarily) European Americans over several centuries into the 20th century when jazz originated. Elworth clearly does not want to participate in that appropriative tradition; he appears, moreover, afraid that he might inadvertently participate in practices that others might see as “doing race.” And so he does what he claims he does not want to do, that is, he makes jazz culture into an “ineffable other” from which he is necessarily separate. Certainly, by 1995, Elworth might have been able to recognize jazz culture as a living culture that had jumped the boundaries of the African American community and seeped into American society more broadly. I have to sympathize with Elworth’s caution and evident desire not to participate in the “doing” of race, even as I hope that we can collectively develop straightforward and honest ways of dealing with our historical legacies — including those that have led to the development of new art forms like jazz — without evasion or fear.

The Universal and the Particular

As Rodrigue astutely points out in his comment, underlying the question of human difference is the existence of the human universal. Precisely what, if anything, is a basic (or universal) human psychological process is the question that Kitayama and his several colleagues have been engaged in exploring for several decades now. Importantly, that there is a human universal is assumed in the very nature of the questions they seek to answer. After all, the only way to identify a cultural difference is to specify that variation (interdependent as opposed to independent) against a background of sameness (humans as social animals).⁴ So, rather than saying that there is nothing universal or basic to human psychology, Kitayama and his colleagues work through several overlays of culture to identify a different universal — one that can be expressed only in contextually (that is, culturally) particular ways. Moreover, rather than choose between an unproductive theoretical binary which claims that humans are either biological beings hardwired to behave in particular ways or else that they are culture all the way down, Kitayama and his colleagues unearth a human universal that shows them as beings that meld the social with the biological.

In the case of the study that formed the subject of my story, Kitayama and Na were able to demonstrate, using both behavioral and neuroscientific measures, that people with significant exposure to interdependent cultural contexts — like those found in many Asian countries — do not typically engage in spontaneous trait inference. Spontaneous trait inference, a.k.a. the “fundamental attribution error,” is a practice that (Western) social psychological researchers have long claimed was fundamental to all humans. Through their studies, Na and Kitayama revealed that spontaneous trait inference, rather than being a basic human psychological process, is instead a product of the dynamic interaction between individuals and the independent cultural context within which they have been socialized. Thus, in the process of calling the “fundamentalness” of the “fundamental attribution error” into question, Na and Kitayama posit a new socio-biological universal: “psychological tendencies — including their neural substrates — are an emerging property of a person acting in a cultural context.”

As both Markus and Kitayama point out in their comments, the irony is that most of the pre-publication press reports acted out precisely the phenomenon that Na and Kitayama were studying. The press reports first noted an observed behavior and then represented study participants’ engagement or lack of engagement in the practice of spontaneous trait inference as being located in the participants’ brains or racial/ethnic identity rather than in the social context in which the study participants had been socialized, or in some combination of the two. Speaking about those societies that Joseph Heinrich et. al. refer to in a 2010 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD), Markus asks, “Why are stories that explain behavior in terms of stable traits or motives inside individuals so much more compelling than stories that explain behavior in terms of relationships with others or in terms of ideas, norms or practices in the social world?” Kitayama is more direct: “most of the media blurbs Moya highlights…drew a strong trait inference from the experimental results…. They are attributing the presence or absence of spontaneous trait inference, not just to people who are showing the phenomenon (“European Americans”) or not showing it (“Asian Americans”), but also to their brains! This IS the ultimate vindication of the fundamental attribution error at work in, at least, Western media circles.”

A New Way Forward

I hoped with my posting to convey the centrality of narrative to humans’ meaning-making processes, and specifically to those processes that contribute to the doing of race. By posting a story in two parts with a short open-ended comment, I took a step toward developing what Jennifer Harford Vargas calls “a more accessible form of communicating” my understanding of how race had been done in the pre-publication publicity for Na and Kitayama’s study. I believe, as per Jones, that “narrative is the perfect medium to describe and attempt to understand [race’s] dynamic process of emergence.” Narratives, as Buchenau points out, can be wonderfully suggestive; more can be communicated in a relatively short space with a story than can be expressed in a carefully articulated critical argument. And because stories operate on us in subconscious ways, I believe they can be particularly effective for helping to illuminate and/or change, “hearts and minds.”

Together, all the comments about my posting on this forum make a case for the “ambitious interdisciplinary, comparative project” requiring a “unique and unprecedented collaboration among humanists and behavioral scientists” that Markus, Goldstone, Hames-García, L. Moya, Harford Vargas and Kitayama all explicitly call for. Additionally, the comments to my post together make the point that: 1) the object under investigation; 2) the tools brought to bear in the analysis; and, 3) the overarching cultural context(s) must each be interrogated if the goal is to arrive at a more objective and complete understanding of any social phenomenon. It is in the spirit of such collaboration — one that recognizes and appreciates the different contributions that qualitative (narratological and historical) and quantitative (statistical and empirical) approaches make to our quest for better knowledge about our most intractable and puzzling social phenomena — that I thank all the contributors to this discussion for their generosity and wisdom. From it, I anticipate a new way forward.

Works Cited

Adams, G., and H. R. Markus. “Toward a Conception of Culture Suitable for a Social Psychology of Culture.” The Psychological Foundations of Culture. Eds. M. Schaller and C. S. Crandall. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. 335–360. Print.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1984. Print.

“Colbert Report: Amy Chua. Amy Chua explains how she tried to raise her two daughters the same way her strict Chinese immigrant parents raised her.” Colbert Nation: Home of the Colbert Report. Web. 5 August 2011 .

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33.2-3 (2010): 61–83. Print.

Moya, Paula M. L., and Hazel Rose Markus. “Doing Race: An Introduction.” Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century. Eds. Hazel Rose Markus and Paula M. L. Moya, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1–102. Print.

Propp, Vladímir. Morphology of the Folktale. Ed. Louis A. Wagner. 2nd ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968. Print.

Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” Trans. Catherine Porter. Genres in Discourse. Originally published as Genres du discours by Editions de Seuil, 1978. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 13–26. Print.

Notes

1. See also the advertisement produced by Citizens Against Government Waste featuring a Chinese professor lecturing his students in the year 2030 about the hypothetical “fall” of the U.S. government due to over-taxation and over-spending. The ad attempts to exploit Americans’ fear of China’s emergence as an economic and political power to implicitly critique the policies of President Obama. If the comments on the YouTube re-postings of the advertisement can be taken at face value, the ad has been largely successful. Available on YouTube as of August 5, 2011.

2. By culture, I mean “explicit and implicit patterns of historically-derived and -selected ideas” that are embodied “in institutions, practices, and artifacts” as both “products of action and conditioning elements of further action” (Adams and Markus, 2004).

3. Because we live in a society that is organized according to race, we all “do race” simply by participating in the routines and rituals of ordinary life.

4. Or, to recur to Luhrmann’s medical example, in order to compare bi-polar disorder with schizophrenia, one needs to recognize both as manifestations of the human psyche that differ in some recognizable ways from the psyches of humans who do not suffer from either.

The Na and Kitayama paper Moya refers to in her contribution deals with a robust and persistent tendency to attribute dispositions to an actor even when the actor’s behavior is severely constrained by context. The tendency, we argued, is so strong that it occurs automatically or spontaneously — even when the social perceiver does not have to make such an inference.

In the literature of social psychology, the tendency for trait inference (or dispositional bias) is considered so robust and pervasive that it is sometimes called the “fundamental attribution error”. This term, in fact, is becoming part of the popular culture as well (at least in the place we know best). Enter the term in Google, you will get 23 million hits. If the popularization of a scientific term is any indication of its validity, the fundamental attribution error will surely be valid. It must be real, pervasive, and in fact, fundamental.

The thrust of our paper was to make a point that this may well be true in one cultural context where the term was invented, original supportive evidence for the effect was gathered, most of the researchers who studied the effect had been born and brought up, and its popularizers currently reside. The paper made this point by demonstrating that trait inference is highly spontaneous and automatic. One significant twist we made, however, was that the fundamentalness of the fundamental attribution error might not go too far outside of this particular context; for Asian Americans don’t show any evidence for spontaneous trait inference — and thus, that for the fundamental attribution error.

An irony evident in most of the media blurbs Moya highlights is that they drew a strong trait inference from the experimental results. In this case, so Moya argues, the issue is even worse. They are attributing the presence or absence of spontaneous trait inference, not just to people who are showing the phenomenon (“European Americans”) or not showing it (“Asian Americans”), but also to their brains! This IS the ultimate vindication of the fundamental attribution error at work in, at least, Western media circles.

If there was the single most significant message cultural neuroscientists need to glean from Moya’s story, as well as all spirited commentaries made on it, it would be this: Psychological tendencies — including their neural substrates — are an emerging property of a person acting in a cultural context. The cultural context for European Americans, including the media coverage noted by Moya, facilitates the psychological effect at issue, which in turn creates bits and pieces of the context itself (remember blurb writers are themselves the products of this cultural context).

At the present moment, the field as well as the popular culture in which it is embedded has failed to find an effective way to discuss the dynamic mutual interaction between person (or brain) and context. It fails to recognize, in large part, that the interaction between the two (or three) could be so dense and intense that the original dichotomy (person vs. context) or trichotomy (person vs. brain vs. context) might eventually be dissolved or, some could even argue, that it should be suspended for, at least, some critical analytic moment.

In any event, to get the notion right, and place it in the current scientific discourse of cultural neuroscience is a big challenge that many of us face. It is evident to me that only through an extensive collaborative effort by both scientists and humanists could one hope that this thorny issue be addressed in any satisfactory fashion.

Race, for example, is a powerful story used to make sense of some perceived characteristics or behavior. It is a story that essentializes and naturalizes difference and simultaneously justifies a particular hierarchy and arrangement of power. Paula Moya’s fairy tale and dream ingeniously reveals the significance of the story in the explanation of observed behavior. It also highlights the need to further elevate the study of stories–their sources, functions, and consequences—as behavioral scientists proceed with the analysis and explanation of behavior. Why are stories that explain behavior in terms of stable traits or motives inside individuals seemingly so much more compelling than stories that explain behavior in terms of relationships with others or in term of ideas, norms or practices in the social world? (Or, are these stories just more compelling for the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic among us or for those who share particular histories or philosophical and religious groundings?) What makes a story compelling and how do competing stories develop and take root? What other highly compelling stories exist in the world? Moya’s contribution based on the findings of Kitayama and colleagues also succeeds in suggesting an ambitious interdisciplinary, comparative project that will require a unique and unprecedented collaboration among humanists and behavioral scientists.

At first I thought Professor Moya’s story was a mildly Swiftian parody, meant to show how narrative depends on just the propensity to attribute traits spontaneously that Kitayama in the story and Professor Kitayama in real life are in part considering. In that case, the universal existence of narrative would be evidence for the universal existence of such a propensity, even if its manifestation was affected, even strongly affected, by culture. But I believe I was wrong: the story is not the interesting and subtle parody I first credited it with being.

(My own disclaimer: I mentioned my worries about this story elsewhere, in terms somewhat whose passion I regret, so my point was pretty much ignored. Herewith a couple of (I hope) more temperately formulated observations, but you should be aware that Professor Moya and I have had one heated exchange already. As I say, this was my fault and I regret it.)

Anyhow:

Professor Moya refers to Fiona (a footnote refers us to “Fiona MacRae”) as racist.

Racist? Yes: since the fairy-tale Fiona believes that “Race is in our DNA, after all” and that race accounts for cultural differences (here a difference in the propensity to attribute behavior to fundamental traits of character). Fiona’s conjunction (her simultaneous assertion) of these two propositions is racist.

Professor Moya has placed a disclaimer above her story: everyone in it is “thoroughly fictionalized.” More thoroughly than you might think perhaps. Fiona MacRae, on whom the laughing, clueless, blue-eyed, complacently self-appreciative villain of the fictional Kitayama’s telling and prophetic dream is based, did not write anything like the sentiment attributed to her: that “Race is in our DNA, after all,” a fact you can verify by checking Professor Moya’s footnoted reference to Ms. MacRae’s article.

Now it’s worth repeating that Professor Moya’s striking description of Fiona includes mention of her “bright blue eyes.” Why? At least one commentator sees her as representative of a “blue-eyed, Eurocentric conspiracy.” I don’t think Professor Moya’s story implies such a conspiracy, but one sees why Professor Jones might interpret the story that way in his comment. I don’t read it that way: I think we’re just meant to see how someone who would benefit from a certain way of “doing race,” would therefore do race in the racist way that Fiona does (and would contribute to the general diffusion of this noxious ideology among science reporters over patio lunches).

Please note that I am not saying that noticing eye-color is racist. I am saying eye-color in any fairy tale clearly has a function in the narrative, and the fact that Professor Moya underscores Fiona’s eye color does warrants some such interpretation as Professor Jones’s: at least that Fiona self-identifies as part of a Eurocentric elite. Really, why else is her eye color mentioned?

And since Fiona is based, however loosely, and with whatever disclaimers, on the author of the footnoted article, Fiona MacRae, there’s a deniable but fairly strong implication here that the real Fiona MacRae is not only symptomatic of a general cultural project of doing race, but is an actual racist. (Professor Moya has informed me in the exchange I’ve alluded to that she believes the real Fiona MacRae does not have blue eyes. I think that makes the fictional Fiona’s blue eyes even more of an issue.)

The real Fiona MacRae. Show of hands: how many people reading the story thought that the real Fiona MacRae said or implied that “Race is in our DNA, after all”?

She didn’t and the record should reflect that.

Or maybe you thought that at least the nameless male headline writer, the other villain in Kitayama’s dream, had no warrant for heading his article “Cultural Differences are Evident Deep in the Brains of Caucasian and Asian People”? I agree that this is an awful headline, but I note, at least for the sake of accuracy, that Kitayama’s dream has betrayed him a little: the headline is picking up from the press release (which Professor Moya footnotes) put out by the Association for Psychological Science to promote Professors Kitayama and Na’s forthcoming article in its journal Psychological Science. The first paragraph of that press release says: “The researchers studied the brain waves of people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds and found that cultural differences in how we think about other people are embedded deep in our minds.”

Yes, the headline is somewhat worse (“Caucasian and Asian People” rather than “people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds”). But it’s a headline, and the mild inartfulness of its summary of the lightly rewritten press-release it heads is hardly as telling as Professor Moya’s fairy tale makes it.

If I can criticize a fictional character’s choice of dream, I think that Kitayama ought to have dreamt about Arpel the press officer for the Association for Psychological Science. Arpel, a footnote would tell us, is a thoroughly fictionalized version of Arpel Witherspoon, who is the contact person for the press release (I’ve edited this comment after drafting it to change her first and last name, which you can find on the press release: it just seemed too icky to fictionalize a real person by using her real name).

And I think how such a dream would go might depend on whether Ms. Witherspoon had in fact vetted the press release with Professors Kitayama and Na or not. It seems to me that it is fairly common practice to do so — I’ve vetted press releases concerning my work — but I don’t know. Kitayama’s dream about Arpel might allow us to infer the back story of how the press release got written. It is a back story. Arpel might in fact rightly be regarded as symptomatic of how some people do race, at least how the Association for Psychological Science, the publisher of the article, does race. But that would lead to a troubling irony.

For we might have to wonder why the Association for Psychological Science was publishing the article in the first place, if the way they promoted the article is part of the problem, not part of the solution. The more accurate fairy-tale (to use an oxymoron germane to Professor Moya’s remark that “the issues under discussion…are very real”) — the more accurate fairy-tale I’ve suggested might, through some characterization of Arpel’s eye color (blue like Fiona’s or brown?) or her preferred dining venues (a patio restaurant, like Fiona’s and the “man”‘s, or McDonald’s) or her credit status (is she a credit card holder, like Fiona, or does she rely on debit cards or even cash?), give us some clue as to how to interpret Kitayama’s dream.

I must say that I feel uncomfortable even mentioning this hypothetical dream-version of Arpel, so I am going to go back and change her name here — I first drafted this, on Professor Moya’s principles, using her real name. But it seemed wrong to do so when it occurred to me she might read this.

I think it seems likely that some readers of this post have been misled about what the real Fiona MacRae said and did, misled by techniques that are all the more effective for being couched in the knowing tone fiction affords.

So I would like to post this comment for the record.

Coda: I’ll add that Professor Moya, elsewhere, concedes that Ms. MacRae might be upset by her characterization of Fiona: “Sure, McCrae could be upset with me, but she’d be missing the point of my story.” So I’ll just offer, for what it’s worth, the anecdotal observation that a coupe of years ago I somehow got to be a fictional character in a parable generically similar to Professor Moya’s, on a stranger’s blog, on the basis of his reading of something I wrote. The way I came off on his blog was innocuous – he wasn’t making my fictional counterpart racist or self-satisfied or thoughtlessly affluent. But I still found it unnerving and obscurely hurtful. I can’t imagine what Ms. MacRae might feel at the way Fiona is characterized, in Professor Moya’s original tale or in Professor Jones’s comment, whether or not feeling that way was missing the point of the story.

She stereotypes Japan as a country of “very attentive to one another’s needs and desires; they sought to engage in behavior that would minimize conflict while maximizing empathy, filial piety, and mutual understanding.” If Dr. Moya were to study Japan, she will find that these cultural traits are matters of great complication. To take just one example, she says the “interdependence” land of Kitayama engages in behavior to minimize conflict. This claim reduces a complex dynamic of social mediation of conflict to a one-dimensional caricature. Does Dr. Moya know that she will find great variation in levels and types of social conflict in Ch?goku and Kansai regions as compared to Tokyo?

Kitayama’s meek and helpless behavior in the “fairy tale” denotes him as a “model minority.” Kitayama is polite and honors his parents. As well, Professor Moya makes him a cuckold, another stereotype of the sexual inadequacy of East Asians. Is Dr. Moya aware that these stereotypes are not related to “interdependence”? Why are they in her “fairy tale”?

I agree with Dr. Moya’s point about confusion of race and culture. I object to her stereotypes in stating this point.

I mention Huntington because his claims regarding different “core cultures” seems to bear quite directly on Kitayama’s research. Technically, the “doing” of race Moya refers to is quite independent of the content of Kitayama’s research, in the sense that the press release and journalistic accounts she cites are misreading the real (culture-focused) content of Kitayama’s fascinating research. Yet, I would add that we should not automatically assume the salubrious effect of arguments grounded in cultural difference, that the “deepness” of cultural dispositions in the brain can be deployed as easily to argue for exclusion and discrimination as understanding and reconciliation.

As an example I want to use a passage from an article in Krin Gabbard’s anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses (1995), one of a pair of anthologies arguing that “jazz has entered the mainstreams of the American academy” (p. 1). One Steven Elworth contributed a paper examining the critical transformation of jazz into an art music: “Jazz in Crisis, 1948-1958: Ideology and Representation.”

In the course of his argument, Elworth offers this observation (p. 65):

The major paradox of all writing about culture is how to take seriously a culture not one’s own without reducing it to an ineffable Other. I do not wish to argue, of course, that one can only write of one’s own culture. In the contemporary moment of constant cultural transformation and commodification, even the definition of one’s own culture is exceedingly contradictory and problematic.

When I first read that sentence my reaction was something like “Right On, Brother!” Then I began thinking, and the more I thought, the stranger those sentences became.

What I’m wondering is whether or not, in that passage, Elworth is doing race, though perhaps not in the sense the Moya means the term. The culture Elworth is talking about is not someone else’s culture, not in any analytically useful sense of the term. It’s his own culture he’s talking about, and he’s Othering it. If he’s not ‘doing culture,’ then he must be doing race, as that’s all there’s left to ‘do’ in this case.

So, just what “culture not one’s own” is Elworth talking about? Since this article is about jazz I assume that jazz culture is what he’s talking about. While the jazz genealogy has strands extending variously to West Africa and Europe, has been and continues to be performed by Blacks and Whites, before audiences both Black and White – though, in the past, these have often been segmented into different venues, or different sections of the same venue – the music is conventionally considered to be Black. That convention is justified by the fact the music’s major creators have been overwhelmingly Black. Thus it follows that jazz culture is, as these conventions go, Black culture.

That convention leads me to infer that Elworth is White. I do not have any hard evidence for this assumption; I’ve never met the man, I’ve seen no photographs, and the contributor’s blurb certainly doesn’t indicate race. But the same set of conventions that dictate that jazz is Black music also make it unlikely that any Black scholar would refer to jazz culture as “a culture not one’s own.” It follows that Elworth is White, or, at any rate, not-Black.

I don’t know anything about Elworth beyond this article and a note indicating that, at the time of publication (1995), he was completing a doctorate at NYU. The fact that he is writing about jazz suggests that he likes it a great deal and knows more than a little about it. It is quite possible that he grew up in a house where folks listened to jazz on a regular basis. If not that, perhaps he discovered jazz while among friends or relatives and came to love it. He may also attend live performances, perhaps he is a weekend warrior, jamming with friends either privately or in public. He may well have been to weddings where a jazz band played the reception. He is comfortable with jazz; it is not exotic music. That is to say, it is unlikely that Elworth discovered jazz in some foreign land where no one speaks English, nor eats and dresses American style, nor knows anything of Mozart or Patsy Cline, among many others. Jazz is a routine and familiar part of Elworth’s life.

So why doesn’t he think of it as his culture? Why must he caution himself (and us) against “reducing it to an ineffable Other.” On both counts the answer is the same: convention. The same set of conventions would require that Leontyne Price think of Puccini’s music as belonging to someone else’s culture, though she sings the music superbly, and may also require that a Black physicist – such as, currently president of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – think of Newton and Einstein as belonging to someone else’s culture. On the other hand, I may claim both physicists for my culture despite the fact that I’ve not studied physics since high school and make no use of it in my professional life.

Except that no one in fact asks Leontyne Price to think of Puccini’s music as someone else’s, at least I don’t think they do. Nor does anyone ask Shirley Jackson to think of physics as someone else’s culture. So why is it utterly conventional, if not demanded, that Steven Elworth think of jazz as someone else’s culture? Why does he Other his own cultural practice? One might venture that this convention is a way of acknowledging the history of jazz. But why does such acknowledgment seem to require this Othering? Why does convention deny Elworth permission to own his own culture?

Ernesto Martínez’s attempt to develop a mathematical equation to understand tolerance vis-à-vis violence and freedom and Linda Martín Alcoff’s reminder that there are multiple metaphors for the source of the self (such as the heart in the Mayan tradition) got me thinking about other ways to imagine and represent our theories of culture and race. I submit that we need to develop many stories, pictures, performances, artwork, graphs, etc. to represent the complexity of race and culture because the more different kinds of representations we create the more likely people will be able to grasp how race and culture are doings and in turn share this with others. I am reminded of how difficult it is for academics to appear on news programs because we do not think let alone talk in short sound bites; moreover, humanities scholars rely especially heavily on the written word. Yet, we need to develop more accessible means of communicating if we hope to change the hegemonic and erroneous conceptions of culture, race, and biology people have. In their “Introduction” to Doing Race Moya and Markus offer two diagrams to represent how race is, as Moya puts it in this post, “a dynamic and ongoing system of historically-derived and institutionalized ideas and practices.” The first diagram (page 18) depicts a series of people surrounded by and inter-connected through different shapes; instead of having these shapes within them as biological or essential characteristics, the diagram effectively shows how they are doing and having done to them these characteristics. The second diagram (page 33), which depicts a “racial iceberg,” strikingly represents in easy-to-grasp visual form how much of what we do not automatically see about race—such as institutionalized and legalized inequality, social movements, world-historical events, foundational narratives—is below the surface of the iceberg tip that we do see in a manner that recalls Ernest Hemingway’s iceberg theory of writing that 7/8ths of a story’s meaning exists below the surface of what is written on the page. When Moya and Markus present their work in public, they use everything from the Broadway musical Avenue Q to pictures of tshirts to make their theories accessible and thereby easy to disseminate. I have always appreciated how the Norton Anthology of African American Literature comes with two CDs of spirituals, music, and poetry and have yearned for more multi-media anthologies, especially academic ones. How can we collaborate or engage in dialogue with different creative producers— performance artists, creative writers, musicians, visual artists, material artists, etc.—to make our scholarship not only more inter-disciplinary but more inter-media?

Take the recent operation to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The linking of the operation to kill Public Enemy #1 with Geronimo, one of the most famous Native American figures in history, is an excellent example of race and culture “making each other up.” First, the stereotyping and prejudice literature tells us that creating a mental link between Geronimo and Osama bin Laden is likely to influence attitudes toward Native Americans in this country. While many will decry racism or at least racial insensitivity, the fact remains that the practice of using Native American images and stereotypes runs deep in the American cultural imagination. Americans have a long history of “playing Indian” that supports and fosters the ongoing oppression of Native people in this country.

Of course, as the story goes, Kitayama can choose to study culture and not race, but can a Native American scholar make the same choice and successfully study the cognitions, emotions, and motivations of Native Americans in this country? Another ending yet to be written…