Mixed Race Studies

Are there ‘Mestizos’ in the Arab World? A Comparative Survey of Classification Categories and Kinship Systems

Middle Eastern Studies
Volume 48, Issue 1 (January 2012)
pages 125-138
DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2011.643301

Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste, Professor of Social Anthropology
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Terminology devoted to miscegenation and inter-ethnic relationships is extremely problematic, and this article shows that many of these categories are more classificatory than descriptive. Some North African and Middle Eastern examples reveal that theoretical concepts about mixture reflect the folk conceptions of the observers rather that the meaning of local categories which not necessarily share those notions of mixture. In this sense, it is suggested that social categorizations of miscegenation are created from specific structures of descent which consider the transmission of two different social statuses, and that the pre-eminent unilineal descent systems of the Arab world should refrain from the political construction of such classification categories.

The aim of this study is to consider the cultural classifications of mixture as a social category, despite the fact that the social sciences have used many concepts in an arbitrary way as analytical categories that arc supposedly neutral and descriptive of something evident, deriving from biology. In fact, the central problem is that historians and anthropologists have projected their folk conceptions of mixture onto the societies studied, instead of analysing it as a political exercise in social classification: mestizo, half-caste, half-blood, mulatto and so on are far from being objective concepts that describe people; they are social and political categories created in specific historical contexts. The question I would like to pose is what these mixture categories as applied to persons, taken for granted by those who should question them, refer to, and whether these ideas of mixture are applicable to Arabic societies. From this standpoint. I aim to show that: (1) the ideas about mixture depend on social classification systems, so that socio-political categories construct the idea of the mixture of people and not the reverse: (2) in the Maghreb, and in the Arab-Muslim world in general, there is an apparent absence of mixture categories as applied to persons: (3) explaining why some societies produce classifications about miscegenation while others do not involves taking into account political factors and the role of the systems of descent in defining group membership.

In social sciences, the idea of a mixture of people has become a category that is not only taken for granted, but is also considered as a description of a target biological phenomenon. My proposal is that the mixture can only emerge when one considers the contribution of two different entities that are transmitted in a bilateral way; and therefore requires that such entities be thought of as being different. This is the premise already discussed by Jean-Loup Amselle in terms of the paradox of racial mixing as an affirmation of pure essences. In contrast, the data I shall present regarding Arab contexts reflect the weight of a system of patrilineal descent that establishes membership without recognizing mixtures, and is based on the formal reproduction of the male lines.

In Western ideas about mixture, two major dimensions have converged concepts which are in fact based on a bilateral approach to the transmission of social status: (1) the idea that sexual mixing generates new people (mestizos, mulattos, half-caste, etc.), in accordance with the emerging racialist thinking of the eighteenth century,…

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