What Becomes of the Ethnicized Body (Natasha)

At first I couldn't quite put my finger on why our readings this week kept making me think of this picture. I found it years ago while doing research for my Master's thesis and, although it wasn't related to my research, I kept a copy of it because it was such a striking and disturbing image. I don't know anything about it beyond what the caption says, that it is a border inspection around 1920 and what I can infer from the picture: that these men are being subjected to a humiliatiing full-body inspection by officials in lab coats before they are able to enter into the U.S. presumably as workers.

I think the reason this image kept coming to mind during this week's readings is that in the process of constructing identity, ethnicity, and race, the human bodies at the heart of those concepts are also objectified and treated as specimens. I think that the classifications and systematic approach to creating concepts of race and ethnicity under the guise of nationbuilding can contribute to the normalization of treating the racial other as a sort of dehumanized specimen. This photo highlights for me how far that mentality can be taken.

It also highlights the fact, as Deloria points out, that despite efforts to assimilate the racial other, Americans maintained deeply rooted fears about the ability of that other to be modern, civilized, and truly integrated. Though Deloria's arguments were specifically about Indians in America, I think the same mentality influenced - and continues to contribute to - U.S. treatment of Mexican immigrants.

Finally, this picture relates directly to Foucault's work on disciplined bodies, which Goldstein didn't touch upon but ought to have. One outcome of the scientific approach to ethnic and cultural  observation and classification is that the bodies attached to those categorizations become subjects liable to scientific and/or disciplinary treatment.

Comaroff speaks of the unresolved dialectic between the incorporation of identity and the commodification of culture. I would argue that the body and the treatment of the "ethnic subject" is also part of that unresolved equation.