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Book
Author Hirschfeld, Lawrence A.

Title Race in the making : cognition, culture, and the child's construction of human kinds / Lawrence A. Hirschfeld
Published Cambridge, Mass. ; London, England : MIT Press, [1996]
©1996

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Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  155.82 Hir/Rit  AVAILABLE
Description xvi, 225 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Series Learning, development and conceptual change
Learning, development, and conceptual change
MIT Press series in learning, development, and conceptual change.
Learning, development, and conceptual change.
Contents Ch. 1. Representing Race: Universal and Comparative Perspectives -- Ch. 2. Mining History for Psychological Wisdom: Rethinking Racial Thinking -- Ch. 3. Domain Specificity and the Study of Race -- Ch. 4. Do Children Have a Theory of Race? -- Ch. 5. Race, Language, and Collective Inference -- Ch. 6. The Appearance of Race: Perception in the Construction of Racial Categories -- Ch. 7. The Cultural Biology of Race
Summary In Race in the Making Lawrence Hirschfeld provides a new understanding of how people conceptualize social categories and shows why this knowledge is so readily recruited to create and maintain systems of unequal power. Hirschfeld argues that knowledge of race is not derived from observations of physical difference, nor does it develop in the same way as knowledge of other social categories. Instead, his central claim is that racial thinking is the product of a special-purpose cognitive competence for understanding and representing human kinds. By demonstrating that a common set of abstract principles underlies all systems of racial thinking, whatever other historical and cultural specificities may be associated with them, he challenges the conventional notion that race is purely a social construction
After surveying the literature on the development of a cultural psychology of race. Hirschfeld presents original studies that examine children's (and occasionally adults') representations of race. He sketches how a jointly cultural and psychological approach to race might proceed, showing how this approach yields new insights into the emergence and the elaboration of racial thinking
Analysis Ethnopsychology
Notes "A Bradford book."
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages [201]-217) and index
Subject Cognition and culture.
Racism.
Ethnopsychology.
Cognition in children.
Child psychology.
Prejudices in children.
LC no. 95040230
ISBN 0262082470 (hard : alk. paper)
0262581728
0585003092 (electronic bk.)
9780585003092 (electronic bk.)