Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

4 Ethnicity Etcetera

In Chapter 1 I outlined a basic social constructionist anthropological model of ethnicity, made up of four elements:

•in ethnicity the emphasis falls on cultural differentiation (although identification is always a dialectic between similarity and difference);

•ethnicity is based in shared meanings – ‘culture’ – but is produced and reproduced during interaction;

•ethnicity, rather than being fixed or unchanging, is, depending on situation and context, to some extent variable and manipulable; and

•ethnicity, as an identification, is both collective and individual, externalized and internalized.

That this is the basic anthropological model, and that it is widely agreed upon, does not mean – as indeed we have already seen – that it is uncontroversial. Some of the most interesting controversies bear upon questions about how ethnicity is to be differentiated from, or related to, other bases of communal attachment or identification with which it appears to have much in common. Hence the ‘ethnicity etcetera’ of this chapter’s title. Looking at these issues leads almost inexorably to questions, which are probably always lurking somewhere in the background, about what ethnicity actually is, about the nature of ethnicity in some kind of basic ontological sense.

The communal, the local, the national, the global

Inasmuch as it is situational, ethnic identity is also likely to be segmentary and hierarchical. Although two groups may be differentiated from each other as A and B in one situation, in a different context they may combine as C in contrast to D (with which they may combine in yet other circumstances). One of the best illustrations of this model can be found in Moerman’s classic paper dealing with Thailand (1965). The model is straightforward to communicate, and easy to relate to on the basis of one’s own experience. But it does precipitate an interesting problem. When does an identity in the segmentary hierarchy of comparison and contrast become ‘local’ or ‘communal’ rather than ‘ethnic’? Consider Figure 4.1, a very incomplete classificatory sequence, which harks back to the case study of south and west Wales in the previous chapter (for another example, based on Sicily, see Jenkins 2002b: 122):

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East Swansea : West Swansea

Swansea : Cardiff

South-east Wales : South-west Wales

South Wales : North Wales

Wales : England

Britain : Europe

Figure 4.1 A hierarchy of Welsh identifications

This scheme is, of course, incomplete: with what, for example, might one contrast Europe? It is also only one way to cut this particular cake. Most obviously, whether Swansea is south-east or south-west Wales, or whether it lies on the border between the two, might, for example, be a matter of local disagreement.

Precisely where, in Figure 4.1, does an identity that is based on community or locality become an identity that is based on ethnicity? Is the difference between, for example, a South Walian and a Gog (an epithet for a North Walian, derived from the Welsh gogledd, meaning ‘north’) an ethnic difference? And where does ethnicity become national identity? And why? And what, indeed, is the difference? After all, each of these identificatory contrasts reflects ‘the social organization of culture difference’ (Barth) and involves ‘socially ratified personal identities’ (Geertz).

One way to understand the Welsh illustration, above, is as a hierarchy of nominal identifications, which overlap and intermesh with each other in complicated ways, depending upon the virtualities of each. Nominal identification is a matter of name and classification; virtual identification encompasses the consequences of name and label, what the nominal means in terms of experience (Jenkins 2008: Chapter 8). From this perspective, the difference between, say, the communal and the local, or the local and the ethnic, lies in the consequences of each: in terms, for example, of rights and responsibilities, or access to social and economic resources, or social recognition. Shared locality does not entail the same kind of mutual interpersonal recognition that is ideally presupposed in communality. In terms of administration and bureaucracy, locality involves political rights and responsibilities – the payment of local taxes, the right to vote in local elections – which are not entailed in ethnicity. And so on.

44 Rethinking Ethnicity

Questions about the relationship between ethnic and other identities are thrown into sharp relief by the work of Anthony Cohen on cultural identity and the symbolic construction of community and communal boundaries (Cohen 1982, 1985, 1986). There is a great deal of similarity between the ideas of Cohen and his collaborators and the Barthian, social constructionist view of ethnicity. Indeed, many of the contributors to Cohen’s edited volumes (1982 and 1986) make the connection explicit, as does Cohen himself. What is more, the subtitles of both of the edited collections invoke the idea of ‘British cultures’, a minor reification which hints that each of the local research sites documented by the ethnographers concerned can be conceptualized, anthropologically at least, as a distinct domain of bounded cultural difference. Perhaps not quite ethnic groups or tribes, but almost:

‘Community’ thus seems to imply simultaneously both similarity and difference. The word thus expresses a relational idea: the opposition of one community to others or to other social entities … the use of the word is only occasioned by the desire or need to express such a distinction. It seems appropriate, therefore, to focus our examination of the nature of community on the element which embodies this sense of discrimination, namely, the boundary. (Cohen 1985: 12; original emphasis)

Substitute for ‘community’ the words ‘ethnicity’ or ‘ethnic group’, as appropriate, and this would be a perfectly sensible set of propositions, that would not look out of place in Barth’s ‘Introduction’ to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Cohen’s further emphasis upon the role of symbolism in the social construction of community boundaries is, suitably modified, a powerful contribution to our understanding of ethnicity.

But this still leaves the question of whether, and how, we can distinguish the ethnic from the communal or the local. Ruane and Todd’s notion of ‘peoplehood’ might be one way (2004: 216), even if it merely shifts the definitional question to what is a ‘people’? When does a ‘community’ become a ‘people’? Nor is the question confined to locality or community. Heading in the other direction, towards the more macro and the more abstract, when does ethnic identity become national identity, and what is the relationship between them? This question is also posed by the Welsh illustration, above. From a different angle, Eriksen (1993b, 2002: 115–18) draws upon his Mauritian ethnography to raise the possibility of a ‘non-ethnic nationalism’. Which turns the argument somewhat on its head: when does nationalism cease to be ethnic? Does it, indeed, make any sense to talk about a nonethnic nationalism? Two things seem to be in need of conceptual clarification here. The first has to do with the scale of our abstraction and analysis, the second with the developing character of nationalism in the modern world. These are matters to which I will return in subsequent chapters.

Talking about the nature of the modern world raises again some of the issues that I discussed in the previous chapter. Regardless of what we decide to call the historical juncture at which we presently find ourselves – ‘postmodernity’, ‘high modernity’, ‘late modernity’, or whatever – one consistent theme, about which there is a broad consensus among academics and other commentators alike, is that something called ‘globalization’ is happening or has happened. The nation-state economies of the world are becoming ever more interdependent and ever more

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subject to the eddies and currents of a thoroughly internationalized economic system. New technology has facilitated a shift in the nature, amount and communicative immediacy of information that is available to us. Cultural homogenization and creolization seem, in some respects, to be the order of the day, alongside diversity and ‘pluralism’. International travel, whether it is migratory or temporary, occupational or recreational, has become an accepted part of the way of life of ever larger sections of the world’s population. The result – globalization – is believed by some to be a qualitative break with the past (Robertson 1992), while others locate the present situation firmly within a much more long-term evolution of a world social and economic system (Frank and Gills 1993; Raudzens 1999). Whichever option we choose, a range of commentators agree that globalization has consequences, one way or another, for ethnicity as a social phenomenon (Friedman 1990, 1994; Hall 1991; Hannerz 1990, 1992; Waters 1995: 133–9).

It is, however, painfully clear that globalization doesn’t necessarily broaden the mind. Globalization and heightened localization, far from being contradictory, are interlinked: the world is becoming smaller and larger at the same time; cultural space is shrinking and expanding. Localism and ethnicity are conceptualized as inseparable sides of the same coin, and each may (re)assert itself either as a defensive reaction to, or a result of, the increasingly global context of social life.

The debate about globalization raises a number of concerns. Perhaps the most important is whether the ‘global’ can ever be an appropriate or useful unit of analysis, particularly with respect to identity and culture. Is it possible to say anything about it other than the glib or the superficial? Another concern is the way in which the local and the global are juxtaposed. There are a number of mediating contexts of identification in between, which require considerable attention as well: nations, regions, and ethnic groups have not diminished in importance. The notion of globalization also seems to take for granted more than it should the close implication of the ethnic in the local. The jury is still out with respect to the shape which all of these issues will assume in the medium term, but, in the anthropological here and now, the discipline is still only beginning to formulate a response with respect to either theory or method (Baumann 1999; Eriksen 2002: 143–61; MacClancey 2002; Marcus 1992; Miller 1995; G. Smith 1999).

Globalization notwithstanding, I find it difficult to imagine a future in which the notion of ethnicity does not continue to be necessary as a way of talking about one of the most general and basic principles of human ‘sociality’ (Carrithers 1992): collective identification, a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’, socially constructed with some reference to cultural similarity and difference. By this token, the communal, the local, the national and the ‘racial’ are to be understood as historically and contextually specific social constructions on the basic ethnic theme, allotropes of ethnic identification. We can also talk about ideologies of identification such as communalism, localism, nationalism, racism and ethnicism. Whether or not we can look forward to talking about globalism remains to be seen (although, in the shape of the dream of socialism, it may already be something about which we can, regrettably, only be nostalgic). Unresolved for the moment, these issues remain on the table, questions which must be broached in our research and theorizing and in our teaching. Fundamentally concerned with the theoretical constitution of the topic and the pragmatic definition of the field for research purposes, they could not be more important.

46 Rethinking Ethnicity

The primordial versus the instrumental

Over the years this opposition has generated a perennial and argumentative debate about the nature of ethnic identity (Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 39–71; Fenton 2003: 73–90). Is ethnicity a fundamental, primordial aspect of human existence and selfconsciousness, essentially unchanging and unchangeable in the imperative demands it makes on individuals and the bonds that it creates between the individual and the group? In other words, is ethnicity an irresistible aspect of human nature? Or is it, to whatever extent, defined situationally, strategically or tactically manipulable, and capable of change, both individually and collectively? Is it socially constructed?

This argument takes its place alongside a range of theoretical controversies about the capacity of humans to intervene in their own lives, to determine or to be determined. But the primordial model also has deep historical roots in the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationalism. Finding some of its more respectable voices in the work of Herder and Hegel, this is more than an academic point of view, providing the intellectual charter for a great deal of terrible – to the point of murderous – ethnic chauvinism and nationalism. The ideology of primordialism naturalizes ethnic groups and justifies chauvinistic ethnic sentiments. It can, for example, be identified at play in the ongoing debate about the modernity and nature of nationalism (Bauman 1992; Smith 1994).

Within anthropology, the name that has most often become identified with a primordial model of ethnicity is that of Clifford Geertz (1973: 255–310). Drawing upon the work of Edward Shils (1957), Geertz, writing originally in 1963, was concerned to understand the obstacle that ‘primordial attachments’ – deriving mainly from kinship, locality and culture and encompassing much more than ethnicity – posed to the development of the modern political sentiment of citizenship, in the emergent post-colonial ‘new states’, in particular:

[the] crystallization of a direct conflict between primordial and civil sentiments – this ‘longing not to belong to any other group’ – … gives to the problem variously called tribalism, parochialism, communalism, and so on, a more ominous and deeply threatening quality than most of the other, also very serious and intractable, problems the new states face. (1973: 261)

If nothing else, this quotation provides a neat bridge between the present discussion and the issue of contexts of identification that was raised in the previous section. It is also a timely reminder that the problem is not new.

In opposition to this position one is generally offered the ‘instrumentalist’ or ‘situationalist’ perspective, deriving in the main from Barth. As we have already seen, this model of ethnicity emphasizes a degree of plasticity in ethnic identification and in the composition of ethnic groups: that people (and peoples) can and do shift and alter their ethnic ascriptions in the light of circumstance and environment. The pursuit of political advantage and/or material self-interest is the calculus which is typically held to inform such behaviour.

The dispute is, however, not as clear-cut as it seems, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that more heat than light has been its outcome. To begin with, both positions arguably have at least as much in common as not (Bentley 1987: 25–7; Hale 2004: 459–62). Whether that is the case or not, the protagonists are certainly