These ethnic insurrections and crime merging with war in urban zones are the result not of absolute scarcity of resources as Mr. Kaplan implies but rather they are the result of the control over resources by elites and the denial of access to various populations described in racial, ethnic or caste-related labels. In this course we will first build-on and discuss an anthropological model for social stratification that will subsume race, caste, ethnicity and the colonial other . Social inequality evolved through the early period of societal evolution and finally emerged full blown at the time of the first centralized states. As Jean Jacques Rousseau noted in The Origin of Inequality Among Man , inequality isn t intrinsic to humans, but rather, had to be invented. All forms of social stratification involve some symbolic scheme for attributing intrinsic or innate deficiency to individuals in the lower social ranks.
Race invokes skin color and supposedly inferior biological attributes and intelligence.
Caste and ethnic stratification do the same thing. That we are seeing more of this today has to do, with the collapse of repressive police state colonial and neo-colonial regimes, but such uprisings also happened in the past under conditions of extreme social stratification and inequality. We will read about and discuss several cases of ethnic, racial and caste-based insurrection. We will begin with the classic example, the Algerian uprising in the decade of the 1950s. The French colonization of Algeria began in the 1840s and eventually resulted in the annexation of Algeria to France and to the permanent sequestration of the native Algerian population which came to be defined in patently racist terms and as lesser species of humanity.