Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins
52 Rethinking Ethnicity
anthropological model that have been expressed cast doubt in any way on these basic points of departure. However, the criticisms and reservations suggest that some qualifications to these foundational principles are necessary. These qualifications are, in large part, restatements or developments of the original arguments of Weber, Hughes and Barth.
For example, with respect to cultural differentiation, the arguments of Chapter 3 must be re-emphasized: diversity – with respect to ethnicity – is nothing new, it is altogether the ‘norm’. It is an expected dimension of human sociality. Inhabited social arenas are routinely multi-ethnic: as far as the archaeological, historical and anthropological records can tell us, bounded, homogeneous ‘societies’ or ‘cultures’ are exceptional (if they can be said ever to have existed at all). This is what ethnicity – collective identification that is socially constructed in the articulation of purported cultural similarity and difference – is all about. The increasing scale, density and extensiveness of modern social life, allied to rapidly evolving technologies of the intellect – to borrow a useful expression from Jack Goody – may have upped the tempo of, and increased opportunities for, differentiation. But, even if this is so, to suggest that this represents something qualitatively new or radical is probably to fall victim to one of the many conceits of modernity.2
Thus we should neither problematize difference in itself, nor celebrate it as a departure – and a liberation – from the past. It simply is, and there is no reason to expect that matters could ever be otherwise. Adopting this sceptical position does not, of course, prevent us from critically and systematically investigating either how difference is socially constructed, or the relative salience of difference from one context to another. The key Barthian theme that seems to have been most comprehensively forgotten by anthropologists who have written about ethnicity in the wake of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries requires emphatic reiteration here: ‘groupness’ is not to be reified, and ‘groups’ are not distinct ‘entities’ or ‘things’ in any sense (and nor, pace Durkheim, are they to be treated as if they are things). They are contingent and immanently changeable, an emergent product of interaction and of classificatory processes (the definition of ‘us’ and the categorization of ‘them’). Human society – and here we return to the issues raised in the discussion of Brubaker’s recent work in Chapter 2 – is best seen as an ongoing and overlapping kaleidoscope of ‘group-ness’, rather than a ‘plural’ system of distinct and separate groups.
There is more to difference, of course, than the simple fact of diversity: there is also temporal and situational difference, the flexibility and negotiability of ethnic identity. One of the central lessons of the anthropology of ethnicity is that there is nothing new or distinctively modern – let alone post-modern – about the possibility of a degree of shape-shifting, whether collective or individual, with respect to ethnicity (and a similar point could be made about other identifications). There is, however, a further point that should be underlined here. To say that ethnic identity is transactional and changeable is really to say that it may be; it doesn’t mean that it always is, or has to be. This is perhaps the one sensible point that emerges from the debate about instrumental versus primordial ethnicity. The recognition that ethnicity is neither static nor monolithic should not be taken to mean that it is definitively and perpetually in a state of flux. It isn’t. There are, however, important questions to be asked – and they should always be asked – about how and why
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ethnicity is more or less flexible, or more or less imperative, in different places and at different times (Ruane and Todd 2004).
In the chapters that follow, these arguments will be given shape and direction through the exploration of three interrelated themes. The first of these is the role of social categorization in the construction of ethnic identifications. This directs our attention away from the ‘group’ as the atom of ethnicity, and also highlights relationships of power and domination. Second, there is the relationship between ethnicity and other analogous or homologous principles of identification. This involves looking not only at classificatory models such as ‘race’ or nationality (or, indeed, class and religion), but also at the role of ideology. Finally, I want to begin to address the individual or personal aspects of ethnicity. To turn Geertz’s definition on its head, this is to problematize the processes whereby social identity becomes personally ratified. Why does ethnicity seem to matter to some people(s) – in some situations – but not to others? And why, when ethnicity matters, does it seem to really matter?
5 Categorization and Power
One of the most important insights offered by the basic social anthropological model of ethnicity is that ethnicity is not an immutable bundle of cultural traits, which it is sufficient to enumerate in order to identify a person as a member of this or that ethnic group, or to locate the boundary between ethnic collectivities. As Barth has consistently argued, ethnicity is situationally defined, produced and reproduced in the course of interactions that occur at or across – and in the process help to constitute – the ethnic boundary in question. Ethnicity is thus fundamentally political, at least with a small ‘p’, and ethnic boundaries are to some extent permeable and osmotic, existing despite the flow of personnel across them (and because of the interaction across them). Criteria of ethnic ascription and subscription are variable in their nature and salience.
Although Barth’s overall concerns have remained grounded in the theoretical concerns of his 1966 Models of Social Organization project – how to theorize ‘the constraints and incentives that canalize choices’ and the ways in which social ‘patterns are generated through processes of interaction and in their form reflect the constraints and incentives under which people act’ (1966: 1, 2) – his point of view on ethnicity has not remained static since the publication of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. His later discussions of the routine cultural pluralism of complex societies emphasize, for example, the importance of history, as well as the interactional immediacy of everyday life and its negotiations (Barth 1983, 1984, 1989). He invokes history in two different senses: as the ongoing progress of events which constitutes the context and content of the here-and-now, and as ‘streams’ of ‘tradition’ – the reference to Redfield is explicit – within which people are to differing degrees located and of which they differentially partake. Stressing history has produced a shift of emphasis away from the individualistic voluntarism of his earlier writings, for which he has been so consistently criticized, and towards a Weberian acknowledgement of the unintended consequences of action. Further, recognizing the centrality of history entails a search for pattern, influence and effect within a wide social and geographic arena; attention must be given to factors both within and without the social setting, local community or region that is the object of analytical attention.
In all important respects, however, Barth has remained true to the original perspective of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, not least in according primacy to the perceptions, definitions and behaviour of actors themselves. I shall concentrate upon this in what follows, focusing on the question of which actors? Rather than offer an alternative that pretends to radical novelty, I shall draw out some elements of the anthropological model of ethnicity, interpreting their implications in the context of a set of general arguments about the production and reproduction of social identity (Jenkins 2008).
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Groups and categories
If ethnicity is interactional, those interactions are of two basic kinds. First, there are processes of internal definition: members of a group signal to fellow group members or others a self-definition of who they are, their identity. This can be an individual process or a collective, group process (although when we are talking about an individual, it only makes sense to talk of ethnicity when the identification in question and its expressions refer to a recognized collectivity and draw upon an appropriate repertoire of shared practices). Although conceptualized in the first instance as ‘internal’, these processes are necessarily interactional and social – even in the individual case – because they presuppose an audience, without whom they make no sense, and a shared framework of meaning.
On the other hand, there are processes of external definition. These are otherdirected processes, during which one person or set of persons defines the other(s) as ‘X’, ‘Y’, or whatever. This may, at its most consensual, be a validation of the others’ internal definition(s) of themselves. At the conflictual end of the spectrum of possibilities, however, there is the imposition, by one set of actors on another, of a name and/or characterization that the categorized do not recognize, which affects in significant ways their social experience(s).
This process of external definition may, in theory, be an individual act, in which person A defines person or persons B as, say, ‘X’ or ‘Y’. For two reasons, however, it is difficult to think about external definition as solely an individual act. In the first place, more than an audience is involved: the others here are the object(s) of the process of definition, and implied within the situation is a meaningful intervention in their lives, an acting upon them. Thus external definition can only occur within active social relationships, however distant or at however many removes. Second, the capacity to intervene successfully in other people’s lives implies the capacity – the power or the authority – to do so. The exercise of power implies competitive access to and control over resources, while authority is, by definition, only effective when it is legitimate. Power and authority are necessarily embedded within active social relationships.
This distinction between internal and external definition is, of course, primarily analytical. In the complexity of day-to-day social life, each is chronically implicated in the other in an ongoing dialectic of identification. The categorization of ‘them’ is too useful a foil in the identification of ‘us’ for this not to be the case, and the definition of ‘us’ too much the product of a history of relationships with a range of significant others (Hagendoorn 1993). Which was, of course, one of Barth’s original claims. Ethnicity – the production, reproduction and transformation of the ‘group-ness’ of culturally differentiated collectivities – is a two-way process that takes place across the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. At the individual level, in the ongoing production of personal identities, much the same can be said. Individual identity is located within a two-way social process, an interaction between ‘ego’ and ‘other’, inside and outside. It is in the meeting of internal and external definition that identity, whether collective or individual, is created.
It may be objected that the suggested homology between collective identity and individual identity is misleading, in that the boundaries of the self are secure and unproblematic in a way that is not, for example, true of social groups, particularly inasmuch as selfhood is embodied. There are, however, a number of reasons for
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persisting with an approach that treats individual and collective identities as similar in important respects. First, it seems clear that a relatively secure sense of the boundaries of individual selfhood is acquired, as the infant separates itself psychologically from the significant other(s) in its life through an early interactive process of being defined and defining (Cicchetti and Beeghley 1990; Dunn 1988; Kaye 1982; Stern 1985). Second, there is a well-established understanding of adult personal or self-identification that understands its content(s), boundaries, performance and, most critically, security as variable over time, given changing circumstances (Giddens 1984: 41–92). Finally, even if the boundaries of the self are, most of the time, stable and taken for granted, this is only true as long as it is true. When it is not, when the boundary between the self and others weakens or dissolves, the result is a range of more or less severe, and not uncommon, disruptions of secure selfhood which, in Western cultures, are conceptualized as psychiatric disorder (for one understanding of which, within a model which is analogous to the distinction between external and internal definition, see Laing 1971). To extend the logic of this last point, the boundaries of collective identity are also taken for granted until they are threatened.
Drawing upon concepts from social research methodology may help to illuminate further these internal and external processes of identification. The classification of human collectivities is basic to sociology and anthropology. One useful way to do this is to distinguish between groups and categories: a group is a collectivity which is meaningful to its members, of which they are aware, while a category is a collectivity that is defined according to criteria formulated by the sociologist or anthropologist. A group is a self-conscious collectivity, rooted in processes of internal definition, while a category is externally defined. This distinction is, in the first instance, concerned with the procedures that sociologists and anthropologists employ to constitute the human world as a proper object for systematic empirical inquiry and theorization. As such, it is relevant beyond the study of ethnicity and ethnic relations. Debates about social class, for example, are often characterized by disagreement about which principle of definition is most appropriate for the adequate constitution of classes as objects of/for analysis.
However, social groups and social categories can also be understood as different kinds of collectivities in the actual human world, and not just in the abstracted human world conjured up by social scientists. A vivid example of this can be found in Marx’s famous contrast between ‘a class in itself’ (a category) and ‘a class for itself’ (a group). In this understanding of the development of class consciousness, the working class(es) – a social category that was initially defined, with reference to their immiseration and alienation from the means of production, and to their threat to the established order, by others such as capitalists, agencies of the state, socialist activists, etc. – becomes a social group, the members of which identify with each other in their collective misfortune, thus creating the possibility of organized collective action on the basis of that identification.
What this suggests is that social categorization – the identification of others as a collectivity – is no less a routine social process than the collective selfidentification of the group. Whereas social groups define themselves, their name(s), their nature(s) and their boundary(ies), social categories are identified, defined and delineated by others. All collectivities can be conceptualized by reference to processes of group identification and social categorization: each side of the