ANTH 380B The Making of the Middle East – Anthropological Perspectives
Starzmann 2011
Social Science Citation & Reference Formats
Sample text:
The argument that race is a cultural category, as opposed to a ‘natural’ category, may perhaps
best be evidenced by attending to the shifting history of the category race. Sanjek (1994:1), for
example, suggests that it was not until the 15th century that race emerged as “all too real in its
social ordering of perceptions and policies.” Since that time, the defining features and
significances of “race” have shifted perceptibly. Analyzing the 19th century heyday of scientific
racism, for example, Gould (1993) has argued that race was inscribed in – and simultaneously
deduced from – a variety of ‘natural’ phenomena: according to Gould, Samuel Morton undertook
“phrenological measurements” of skulls to evidence his claims about the “inferior quality of
Indian intellect” (1993:104), while Morton’s predecessor, Serres, believed he had documented
racial differences (apparently only among men) in “the distance between navel and penis” (91).
More recently, in the debates that followed publication of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and
Murray 1994), claimed “ethnic differences” in IQ test scores became fodder for enlivened late
20th century arguments that “race” (note the slippage from ethnicity) is both a biological fault
line within the human species and one which neatly lines up with racist social inequalities. In
Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) analysis, it is correlated with low IQ and, through that, with
elevated school drop-out rates, crime, poverty, illegitimate birth, and bad parenting, as well as
with “lack of civility” and “poor citizenship” (De Parle 1994:62; see also Murray and Herrnstein
1994, Gould 1994). Yet while race is not a ‘natural’ category, the salience of race as a cultural
category is nonetheless profound: These [racial] categories had material weight in the lives of
individuals and groups; racial identities were embodied in political practices of discrimination
and law, and affected people’s access to education, forms of employment, political rights, and
subjective experience. (Stepan and Gilman 1993:171)
Bibliography:
De Parle, Jason. 1994. Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’? The New York Times
Magazine (October 9):48-53.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1993 [1981]. American Polygeny and Craniometry Before Darwin: Blacks
and Indians as Separate, Inferior Species. In The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science. Sandra Harding,
ed. Pp. 161-169. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
––––. 1994. Curveball. The New Yorker (November 28):139-149.
Herrnstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray. 1994. The Bell Curve. New York: Free Press.
Murray, Charles and Richard J. Herrnstein. 1994. Race, Genes and I.Q. – An Apologia. The New
Republic (October 31):27-37.
Stepan, Nancy Leys and Sander L. Gilman. 1993. Appropriating the Idioms of Science. In The
‘Racial’ Economy of Science. Sandra Harding, ed. Pp. 170-193. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
ANTH 380B The Making of the Middle East – Anthropological Perspectives
Starzmann 2011
Clarifications:
• titles of books, journals, magazines or newspapers should be italicized (as above) or
underlined
• long quotes – of four or more text lines – should be indented and single-spaced (as in the
sample above)
Addendum on Online Referencing:
Referencing an online source follows the same general structure as print citations (as above) in
that one always needs to provide the following information, in order:
• the author (if there is one) or, if there is no author, the title of the article (e.g., “STD Rates Rise
Among College Students”)
• the year of publication
• the publication’s title (unless there is no named author)
• the name of or a brief descriptive title for the webpage (e.g., Salon.com, Elliston Faculty
Webpage, Centers for Disease Control webpage)
• the full URL
• the date you accessed the URL (this information goes in parentheses)
So, the usual reference for a web sources will be formatted as follows:
author. year of publication. title. URL title/description. URL address. date accessed.
And those with no authors will be formatted like this:
title. year of publication. URL title/description. URL address. date accessed.
Note that it is fairly common that an online source is actually a reprint of a regularly published
source – this is especially the case with scholarly publications, journal articles, newspaper and
magazine articles. In relation to ALL of these kinds of sources, you are responsible for providing
the full original publication reference (as modeled above) to be followed by the URL and date
you accessed it online. An example of how to cite such a reprint:
Weil, Elizabeth. 2006. What if it’s (Sort of) a Boy and (Sort of) a Girl? The New York
Times Magazine (September 24). Accessed at www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/magazine/24
intersexkids.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all (access date, 9/29/06).