Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

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dichotomy is implicated in the other and social identification is the outcome of a dialectical process of internal and external definition. Whether, in any specific instance, one chooses to talk about a group or a category will depend on the balance struck between internal and external processes in that situation. It is a question of degree.

Which may be a good point at which to address a criticism of this model of categorization, and to look at another, more general, way in which the word is used in connection with ethnicity. Levine has argued that my use of ‘categorization’ is ‘conventionally psychological’ and, more significantly perhaps, that it leaves us unable to distinguish between groups and categories, in that people A will be a group in their own eyes and a category in the eyes of others: ‘Can categories become groups and groups become categories?’ (Levine 1999: 168). The answer, to rephrase what I have said above, is that a category can certainly become a group, and groups are – always – categories as well. What’s more, a group may define itself in one way, but the Other’s alternative categorization of them may turn out, in the local context of power relationships, to carry more weight and be more consequential (to the degree that the original group in question may, in fact, eventually come to see itself in terms that have been defined by the Other). The point that Levine misses is that my focus is on two different processes – group identification and categorization – and how these are implicated in each other in the production and reproduction of ethnic identifications and collectivities. And my point is also that categorization, as I define it, has been neglected, not just by anthropologists, but certainly also by anthropologists.

The ‘as I define it’ in the last sentence is important. The conventional psychological use of the term ‘categorization’ refers to what anthropologists, equally conventionally, tend to call ‘classification’: the process of dividing the world up into classes of phenomena on the basis of criteria of similarity and difference. While in the psychological literature this is fundamental to understandings of stereotyping (Hogg 2004; Oakes 2004), it also applies to what psychologists call ‘self-categorization’. This seems to be very close, if not identical, to what Levine has in mind in his cognitive ‘reconstruction’ of ethnicity: ‘ethnicity is that method of classifying people (both self and other) that uses origin (socially constructed) as its primary reference’ (1999: 168). Brubaker’s notion of ‘ethnicity as cognition’ (2004: 64–87; Brubaker et al. 2004) also offers essentially the same understanding of ethnicity, and of categorization.

And I do not doubt that ethnic identifications are classificatory processes – done by people – that produce and reproduce shared meanings. They also, necessarily, produce and reproduce collectivities, as meaningful social phenomena. The major difference between Levine’s position and mine, and also mine and Brubaker’s, seems to be largely a matter of how we use words: I am distinguishing between classification and categorization, reserving the latter – in a very different sense to the ‘conventionally psychological’ usage – for the external definition of identity.

Although social anthropology, inasmuch as it has considered individual identity at all, has privileged social or external knowledge over selfor internal knowledge (A.P. Cohen 1994), the emphasis of the post-Barthian anthropology of ethnicity and communal identity has tended to fall on the other side of the internal–external dialectic: on processes of group identification rather than social categorization (e.g. A.P. Cohen 1982, 1985, 1986; Eriksen 1991, 2002; Wallman 1978, 1986). To go over

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some old ground, there are at least three reasons why this is so. First, anthropology, in its enthusiasm for ‘Otherness’ and its powerful residual model of the human world as, essentially, non-conflictual – regardless of internal theoretical debates or the impact of various threads of postmodernism – tends to celebrate ethnicity as a positive social resource. This is often at the expense of paying sufficient, or indeed any, attention to ethnicity as a social liability or stigma. Second, this is reinforced by the fact that enthusiasm for an interactional model of social life – ethnicity as process – has typically been accompanied by a view of social relationships as rooted in reciprocation, exchange and relatively equitable negotiation. Finally, anthropology’s continued emphasis on participant observation as the discipline’s methodological sine qua non has led its practitioners to concentrate on the collection of data during face-to-face encounters or through direct observation. Processes of collective internal definition may be easier to study using such an approach than their external counterparts. This bias is, however, entailed neither by the Barthian model nor, indeed, by anthropology. The exploration of processes of ethnic and other forms of categorization is an extension, refinement and development of the anthropological model rather than an alternative to it.

There is one important further point that has so far only been implicit. In talking about the names, characteristics and boundaries of groups and categories, there is a strong suggestion that identity is ‘made up’ of a number of distinct strands, even if they are only analytically distinguishable. Two of these strands, in particular, are significant here. Social identity, whether it be ethnic or whatever, is both nominal, i.e. a name, and virtual, a practical meaning or an experience. This contrast is implicit in the distinction between boundaries and their contents, and very approximately analogous to the well-worn distinction between ‘status’ and ‘role’ (Jenkins 2008: Chapter 13). It is an important contrast because one can change without the other doing so; similarly one can be the product of internal processes of identification, the other of categorization. For example, although categorization may not necessarily change the name or boundary of an identity, it may have considerable potential to define what it means to bear it, the consequential experience of ‘being an X’. I will explore the implications of this below.

Social categorization

Distinguishing between internal and external definitions, between group identification and social categorization, allows us to think about ethnic identification from a number of different points of view within a unified analytical framework. The basis for this framework is what I have called, elsewhere, pragmatic individualism: the recognition that the human world is constituted in and by embodied individuals (Jenkins 2002a: 57–8, 2008: Chapter 4).

Taking inspiration, inter alia, from Erving Goffman (1969, 1983) and Anthony Giddens (1984: 1–40), I have elsewhere proposed a model of the human world that begins from the proposition that embodied individuals are no less central to any sociological understanding of the human world than collectivities (Jenkins 2002a: 68–76). Viewed in this light, it is possible to talk about whatever it is that we call society as a set of relationships within and between three orders of phenomena:

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•The individual order is the human world considered as made of embodied individuals and ‘what-goes-on-in-their-heads’.

•The interaction order is the human world as constituted in the relationships between embodied individuals, in ‘what-goes-on-between-people’.

•The institutional order is the human world seen as pattern and organization, as established ‘ways-of-doing-things’.

This scheme is only a way of thinking about the human world. It simply says that the experiential world that is produced and reproduced by humans can be thought of as constituted in and by individuals, the interaction between individuals, and institutions. It also says that it cannot be thought of as constituted in and by any of these in isolation from the other two. This an ideal-typical model of a complex actual reality: it is not meant to suggest that there are really three separate social domains, analogous, for example, to ecological zones or different states of physical matter.

Each ‘order’ is constituted in and by embodied individuals. Thus embodiment is one of the keys to understanding this model. Each of the three orders is distinctively materialized: in individual bodies; in the collective space of ‘set and setting’ and the interactional practices that take place between embodied individuals; and in the institutionalized appropriation of space in buildings, territories, visible symbolism, etc. The use of the word ‘order’ is meant to indicate both distinctive ‘domains of activity’, and the ordered, if not always orderly, nature of the human world (Goffman 1983: 5). But words such as ‘world’ and ‘domain’ are apt to mislead: the orders overlap completely. Each is irredeemably implicated in each of the others, and none makes sense without the others. The word ‘order’ also indicates that these are classificatory devices that should not be confused with the actual phenomena and localities of the human world to which they refer. They are different ways of apprehending the same observable realities, and amount to an act of ordering in their own right.

The internal–external dialectic of identification can be seen at work in each of these orders. Before looking at each one in greater detail, a number of basic points of departure need to be outlined. The most fundamental of these is that internal and external identification do not exist in isolation from each other. Identification is never a unilateral process: at the very least there is always an audience. This principle can be established in a number of ways. First, categorization – external definition – is a basic dimension of internal definition. The process of defining ‘us’ demands that ‘they’ should be split off from, or contrasted with, ‘us’; group identification is likely to proceed, at least in part, through categorizing others, whether positively or negatively. Second, external definition – by others of us – undoubtedly has an impact on our internal definition(s). Finally, pre-existing established internal definitions may provide a defence against the imposition of external definitions. The experience of categorization may strengthen existing group identity through a process of resistance and reaction. Thus, the experience of being categorized as ‘A’ may, only apparently paradoxically, contribute to the reinforcement, or even perhaps the formation, of group identity as ‘B’ (although the ways in which it will do so are a matter for empirical investigation rather than theoretical prediction). Arguments analogous to all the above can also be offered with respect to individual identity.

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To talk about the individual order is to talk about mind, selfhood and embodiment. I will leave the issue of the social constitution of mind for discussion elsewhere (Jenkins 2008: Chapter 5) and concentrate on embodied selfhood here. A concept that is well known in this respect is the distinction between I and me. Inspired by William James, it derives its sociological formulation from G.H. Mead (1934: 173–226), a theorist who has been ‘curiously unacknowledged’ by social anthropology’ (A.P. Cohen 1992: 226; see Morris 1994 for a good example of this neglect). To paraphrase Mead, the ‘I’ is that active aspect of the self which responds to others, whereas the ‘me’ comprises the attitudes and responses of significant others, as they are incorporated into the self. Mead’s ‘me’ is intimately bound up with what he called the ‘generalized other’, the voice of the individual’s community of membership. Mead’s self is embodied, not in a crude physiological sense, but in the notion that selfhood is the social organization of individual consciousness. To put this another way, the self fills the space between embodied mind and (embodied) social interaction, and is inextricably a part of each. Hence Mind, Self, and Society, as the building blocks of Mead’s theoretical framework (1934).

The distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ is homologous in many respects to Freud’s formulation of the ‘ego’ and ‘superego’ as fundamental aspects of individual personality. And it shares at least one of the Freudian model’s major shortcomings: the ongoing embodied unity of selfhood is vulnerable to misrepresentation as an assembly of more or less separate bits: ‘as if an ordinary person is really some sort of committee or team of persons, all laced together inside one skin’ (Ryle 1963: 181). That criticism aside, however, Mead’s model of the self is suggestive here, particularly because it leaves no room for doubt about the social character of selfhood, or the centrality to selfhood of an internal–external dialectic of identification (Jenkins 2008: Chapter 6).

In the course of earliest socialization each human being develops a unique personality, a ‘sense of self’ that, although it may not always be available to us consciously, is one of the bedrocks of our ‘ontological security’ (Giddens 1984: 50 ff.) Much of this ‘sense of self’ is located in that embodied hinterland of routine and unreflexive habit – neither conscious nor unconscious – that is the generative site of practices which Bourdieu calls the habitus (Bourdieu 1990: 53–97). This ‘sense of self’ is not simply a ‘mental’ phenomenon but is intimately bound up with the physical integrity of the individual. Selves are located within bodies, and that embodiment is one of the sources of the unity of selfhood. A sense of self is created in the course of the early verbal and non-verbal dialogue – a complex interaction of separation from and identification with – between the child and significant others. Typically parents in the first instance, the voice of these others becomes internalized as what Mead calls the ‘me’, and Giddens (1984: 8) the ‘moral conscience’. A voice which tells the child both who it is and what it should do, each being an aspect of the other.

We know who we are because, in the first place, others tell us. This is the interactional learning process of primary socialization, which works consciously and less-than-consciously, and which creates an internal relationship – whether harmoniously ‘adjusted’ or not – between the individualized demands of the self and its internalized social expectations (which may also be thought of in this context as representing ‘culture’. It is in the initial and continuing dialectic between the internal and the external that basic selfhood – the individual’s sense

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of who she is, and her embodied point of view on the ‘rest of the world’ – is constituted.

It is easy to imagine how primary socialization may – depending on local circumstances and the salience of ethnicity – include an ethnic component. Cognitively, if nothing else, the child will develop a point of view on a world that is axiomatically organized in terms of ethnic classifications. She will learn not only that she is an ‘X’, but also what this means: in terms of her esteem and worth in her own eyes and in the eyes of others; in terms of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour; and in terms of what it means not to be an ‘X’, what it means to be a ‘Y’ or a ‘Z’ perhaps (Epstein 1978). This is emphatically the case, for example, in social contexts where ‘racial’ categorization is a powerful principle of social organization and stratification (Goodman 1964; Milner 1975; Troyna and Hatcher 1992; van Ausdale 2001).

The interaction order is where self-image meets public image. Self-image is the way we see ourselves and, perhaps even more important, the way we would like to be seen by others. The starting point for any attempt to understand how this works in interaction is Goffman (1969). In the context of this discussion, Goffman’s most important arguments about the ‘presentation of self’ are: first, that identity is a matter of performance; second, that, in interactional terms, there is no necessary consistency in selfhood, but rather a range of partial aspects or revelations of self, depending on the situation; third, that management of the awkward relationship between the desired presentation of self and other, countervailing aspects of one’s biography and present situation is of great importance; and fourth, that validation of the performance by others, if not their complicit collaboration, is central to successful impression management. The homology between Goffman’s view of social selfhood as performative and processual and Barth’s model of ethnicity as interactional is obvious.

The third and fourth points, above, direct our attention to public image, the vexed question of how others see us. It goes without saying that there is no necessary equivalence between self-image and public image. What is more, it is not always easy to know how others see us anyway. Apart from the obvious epistemological issue – the old philosophical problem of ‘other minds’ – there are a number of reasons why this should be so. The audience may attempt to conceal its opinion of both actor and performance. The actor may, for various strategic or tactical reasons, attempt to present something other than their ‘true’ self-image. There may be poor communication between the two sides, for various individual, interactional, institutional or other external reasons. The unique personal psychology that is integral to selfhood may, in the event of major disagreement between self-image and public image, block acknowledgement of the threatening public image.

However, allowing for these qualifications, there will usually be at least some interaction between self-image(s) and public image(s), some process of conscious or unconscious adjustment in the ongoing process of the making and re-making of social identity. An example may clarify the point. Occupational identities are among the most important of social identities. For many people they provide the basis on which their livelihood is secured. They are also closely connected to social status. This was so in the pre-modern world and it remains so today. In modern industrial societies, there is an element of election involved in the assumption of an occupational identity. Choice, however, only operates within strict limits and