Ideas about race, culture, and peoplehood or ethnicity have long served to orient anthropology’s inquiries and justify its existence. As both offspring and critic of the human condition, anthropology bears a special responsibility to examine the commonplaces of its thought and the fighting words of its speech and to subject them to resolute analysis. The present contribution to this task suggests that we must remind ourselves of the importance of Boas’s critique of typological thinking about races as we confront the intensifying racisms of our time, take much greater account of heterogeneity and contradictions in cultural systems, and recognize that ethnicities come in many varieties and to call a social entity an ‘ethnic’ group is merely the beginning of the inquiry.
