Short Abstract

Whiteness is not only a matter of skin colour. Its complexities, however, are often lost in polarised discourses which ignore or essentialise it. This panel aims to critically interrogate whiteness through discussing its nuances and ambiguities in various contexts from an ethnographic perspective.

Long Abstract

Currently polarising issues have strong racialised and racialising features, whether explicitly evoked or implicitly alluded to in disputes about diversity or migration. While anthropologists have analysed how such discourses and the material conditions interlinked with them enable the continuous marginalisation and exploitation of those racialised as non-white, less attention has been paid to the question how these processes also construct and consolidate whiteness as a specific powerful positioning within racialised hierarchies.

For whiteness is not only a matter of skin colour. Intimately entangled with capitalism and colonialism, the workings of whiteness intersect with ideas of class, gender, and sexuality (among others) to allow for the extraction of labour and resources (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010, Quijano 2000, Robinson 1983). At the same time, whiteness does not operate entirely detached from bodily materialities, as appearances, gestures or movements are classified along racialised hierarchies. This entails certain binary oppositions, yet the contours of whiteness and other racialised categories are not clear cut. Rather, they vary depending on specific historical, political and sociocultural contexts, as exemplified in analyses of shifting racialisations and “passing” into whiteness (Gutiérrez-Garza 2025), or differentiations and hierarchies of whiteness highlighted in recent scholarship on the racialisation of “Eastern Europeans” (e.g. Kalmar 2022, Krivonos 2023, Lewicki 2023).

Such complexities, however, are often lost in polarised discourses which tend to ignore or essentialise whiteness. Arguing for the urgency of a critical engagement with whiteness, this panel invites contributions which interrogate whiteness in its various historical and sociopolitical specificities from an ethnographic perspective, and open up a debate around the possibilities and pitfalls of anthropology’s engagement with whiteness.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
Propose paper