Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

62 Rethinking Ethnicity

is generally bilateral: other people, gatekeepers of one sort or another within the education system and the labour market, play a crucial role in validating (or not) occupational aspirations. In order to pursue occupational goals and ambitions, qualifications must be obtained, jobs must be applied for and the cooperation of more powerful others obtained. In the process, there is for many young people, first in school and subsequently in the world of employment and unemployment, a gradual convergence of aspiration and outcome, self-image and public image, which is recognized culturally as ‘realism’ and is one source of stability in a visibly inequitable system (Jenkins 1983; MacLeod 1987; Willis 1977).

It is not just aspirations that are adjusted because of their public reception and evaluation; identity is also variable and vulnerable. For example, the labelling perspective in the sociology of deviance suggests that deviant identities can become internalized as a consequence of the individual concerned being publicly categorized as a law/rule breaker and treated accordingly (Becker 1963; Lemert 1972; Matza 1969). Similarly, identities are imposed upon individuals in school (Cicourel and Kitsuse 1963; Rist 1977) and in the labour market, in a dialectical process of internal and external definition. The individual is identified in a particular way by significant others, who by virtue of their power or authority are in a position to make their definition of the person and the situation count, and thus to constitute that person’s subsequent career in terms of the identity in question. That individual’s experience of the consequences of being categorized may, over time, lead to an adjustment in her self-image in the direction of the stigmatizing public image. For example, an individual who is defined as ‘unreliable’, and is not only distrusted but publicly distrusted and denied access to occasions where reliability is expected and could therefore be demonstrated, may, as a consequence, become as unreliable as she is purported to be. The notion of unreliability may then become an important dimension of her self-image.

A point that is made less often is that similar self-fulfilling processes are likely to operate with respect to positive or socially valued categorizations. Labelling is not just a negative phenomenon. Inasmuch as the external world is at least as much a source of self-esteem as it is a threatening environment of hostile labelling, this basic model can also be applied to the incorporation of positive public images into self-imagery.

The implications of these examples for ethnicity are apparent if we look at discrimination in the labour market and the depression or encouragement of aspiration – either effect being possible – among those ethnic minorities who find themselves on its receiving end. The cumulative outcome of this kind of situation, if left unchallenged by currents of resistance within the ethnic community(s) concerned, may, at best, be the development of ethnic occupational niches and a communally and individually accepted ceiling on occupational mobility. At worst, the self-image of a stigmatized and discriminated-against minority will interact with discrimination and exclusion in a vicious circle of cumulative decay and disadvantage, as documented in a series of classic studies of black urban neighbourhoods in North America (Anderson 1978; Hannerz 1969; Liebow 1967). ‘Realism’ becomes, in part at least, constitutive of ‘reality’. This general process is not in any sense peculiar to ‘race’: a similar argument can be made, for example, with respect to class.

Categorization and Power 63

Ethnic disadvantage in the labour market may seem far removed from the microinteractional concerns of Goffman. A better example for our purposes might, perhaps, be the subtlety with which people in Northern Ireland purport to ‘tell’ the difference between Catholic and Protestant in social interaction (Burton 1978: 37–67; Jenkins 1982: 30–1; Lanclos 2003: 127–9, 146–7). However, the principles involved are essentially the same. The ‘labour market’ is, after all, nothing more than an abstraction from a myriad of encounters in which the strategies of jobseekers are subject to categorizing decisions about who should get which jobs (Jenkins 1986a). Although, for the moment, a question is begged here – that of who is authorized to make the decisions and to make those decisions count – the example serves to connect the micro-interaction of self-image and public image with the institutional order of groups and categories.

The important thing to emphasize is that ethnic groups, indeed all groups, are institutions: patterns of social practice identifying persons that have become established over time as the ‘way things are done’ in a particular local context, and of which people in that context are conscious. Institutions are aspects of local social reality in terms of which and with reference to which decisions are made and behaviour is oriented. Social categories may not be institutions – although they may be – but ethnic categorization is likely to be, at least in part, institutionalized.

Most discussions of ethnicity are pitched in terms of social groups, the emphasis being on collective internal definitions of distinctiveness: ‘ethnic groups are categories of ascription and identification by the actors themselves’ (Barth 1969a: 10). While it is clear from Barth’s discussion that the ‘actors themselves’ can signify actors on both sides of the ethnic boundary, it is equally – if implicitly – clear that explanatory or analytical priority is accorded to identification within the ethnic boundary. And there is a sense in which this is as it should be. A claim to ethnic identity must be validated by an audience of outsiders or Others – because without such an audience the issue would not arise – but it seems to make little sense to talk about an ethnicity which does not, at some point, and no matter how weakly or tenuously, recognize itself as such.

When the issue is expressed thus, the anthropological emphasis upon internal group identification becomes apparent. Leaving aside the massive body of work on caste and hierarchy in India and elsewhere, because it is arguably not concerned with ethnicity as such – although there is a discussion to be had about this – there are relatively few examples in the anthropological literature on ethnicity of an explicit concern with processes of social categorization. Those examples that can be found, however, testify to the value of such an approach. For the reader who wishes to survey the diversity of ways in which it can be done, these include: Hugh Brody (1986) on relations between the Beaver Indians of the Canadian sub-Arctic and white trappers; Bernard Cohn on the impact of colonial censuses in South Asia (1988: 224–54); Elizabeth Colson (1953) on Makah native Americans and reservation life; the theoretical arguments of Jean and John Comaroff (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992: 49–67); Frederick Erickson (1976) discussing gatekeeping encounters and ‘race’ in the schools of Chicago’s West Side; Ralph Grillo (1985) on encounters between French bureaucrats and (im)migrants; my own work (Jenkins 1986a) on racism and employment recruitment in England; Carola Lentz (1994, 2000) on the colonial and post-colonial creation of ethnic identities in Ghana; and

64 Rethinking Ethnicity

Jill Nash and Eugene Ogan (1990) on mutual categorization in Papua New Guinea. To this list I would also want to add anthropologically informed studies of the historical and recent categorization of the Ainu by the Japanese, by David Howell (1994) and Richard Siddle (2002a), respectively, and Siddle’s study of the Japanese categorization of Okinawans (2002b).

For the purposes of illustration, looking at one such example in a little detail will do (Stuchlik 1979). During European colonial expansion into Chile, the Spaniards came into contact relatively early – in the sixteenth century – with an indigenous people known today as the Mapuche. Milan Stuchlik, using documentary sources, identifies five distinct ways in which the Spanish, and subsequently the Chileans, categorized the Mapuche in the course of the centuries which followed: as ‘brave and fearless warriors’, ‘bloodthirsty bandits’, ‘lazy drunken Injuns’, ‘the white man’s burden’ and ‘gentle savages who lack education’, in historical sequence. The main thrust of this analysis – which, while it does not tell us directly about the impact of categorization on Mapuche group identity, does suggest some of its consequences for Mapuche life – is that these categorical models of the Mapuche are not a reflection of ‘factual’ knowledge about the Mapuche. Rather, they tell us about native policies, the goals of the Spanish and the Chileans with respect to the Mapuche. Hence they tell us about the categorizers – how they see themselves and their objectives – more than the categorized. It is Spanish and Chilean ethnic identifications that are under construction as much as anything else.

A more general point can perhaps also be made about the anthropological enterprise itself, particularly with respect to notions of ‘primitiveness’ as a categorization of other cultures (Boon 1982; Kuper 1988). The constitution of individual Others as sufficiently similar to us to be comprehensible human beings has been one of modern anthropology’s greatest achievements. It has, however, proceeded, much of the time, hand in glove with powerful assumptions and discourses about collective difference. Fortunately, unlike Spanish colonizers or Chilean administrators and politicians, the capacity of anthropologists to make their definitions count for those whom they categorize has generally been modest, although their indirect influence should not be underestimated.

The three social orders – the individual, the interactional and the institutional – they can be distinguished only for the purposes of understanding better the human world. They are thoroughly intertwined in each other; occupying the same space and each made up of embodied, socialized, individuals. The unitary sense of self lies behind self-image. Self-images meld with public images in the complex negotiation of shared meanings, understandings and practices that constitutes group identification. Group identification and categorization combine in situationally specific relations of resistance or reinforcement to produce the social reality in historical time and space of institutionalized ethnic collectivities. I could, of course, as easily have approached these interrelationships from the other end, beginning with the relationship between groups and categories. The traffic on this street flows in both directions. Making this point re-emphasizes the internal–external simultaneity of processes of ethnic identification: individually, interactionally and institutionally. None has precedence, whether conceptually, historically or developmentally. Nor can any of them be imagined in the absence of the others.

Categorization and Power 65

Contexts of ethnic categorization

Identity is produced and reproduced during interaction, and interaction is always situated in context. I will now look at some of the specific contexts and processes of social categorization. These – and I wish I had thought of this metaphor myself – are what Cornell and Hartmann (1998: 153–94) call the ‘construction sites’ of ethnicity. Although the emphasis will be upon ethnic categorization, the overall picture is generalizable to other social identifications (Jenkins 2000a). This section will begin to draw out the implications of my arguments for a research agenda concerned with ethnicity and ethnic identity. It will also relocate the theoretical discussions so far, into the everyday contexts of social life in which we do our research.

The basic shape of the empirical agenda is presented schematically in Figure 5.1. It is not intended to be exhaustively comprehensive; it is simply an attempt to sketch in some flesh that can be hung on the bones of my argument. To keep the discussion manageable, two simplifying assumptions are implicit in the discussion that follows: first, that ethnic categorization is likely to be more often pejorative, negative or stigmatizing than not, and second, that there are no contemporary social settings in which the formal–informal distinction does not have some relevance.

The contrast between the formal and the informal in Figure 5.1 should not be seen as a sharp distinction. It is, rather, a continuum of emphasis. The degree to which primary socialization, for example, is the private domestic responsibility of the child’s immediate caretakers – unsupervised by state or local community – and the degree to which it is formally organized and regulated by the state or municipality, is a matter of enormous variability. So too is the relationship between primary socialization and subsequent formal education. Similarly, routine public interaction, although typically informal, can also, in specific circumstances, be formalized (as in the case of inter-‘racial’ public encounters in the South Africa of apartheid). At the other end of the spectrum, administrative allocation and organized politics, for example, are shot through with informality in every aspect of their organization and practice. If for no other reason, this is because informality is not conceptualized as a residual category, as whatever is left in the absence of formality, or once the formal dimensions of a situation have been identified. Formality and informality are specific kinds of social relation that have developed, historically, hand in glove: ‘The formal is simultaneously an absence and a presence within the informal, and vice versa’ (Harding and Jenkins 1989: 137). Each depends upon and takes part of its meaning from the other.

The importance of primary socialization in the social construction of identity has already been alluded to, and will be mentioned again. Suffice it to draw attention briefly to a number of points here. First, there is no necessity that ethnicity will feature explicitly in primary socialization; much depends here upon local circumstances and histories. If it does, however, ethnicity may take its place alongside the primary identities of humanness, gender and selfhood (Jenkins 2008: Chapters 6 and 7): they are deeply rooted in first encounters and in the egocentric axiomatic constitution of the human world that is the embodied individual point of view, and resist easy transformation. Finally, primary socialization is an exchange of communication between infant and others, but in the first instance, and for quite a time thereafter,

66 Rethinking Ethnicity

Figure 5.1 Contexts of ethnic categorization

it is an exchange in which information in dominates: if we know who we are, it is because, a long time ago, beyond the reach of conscious recall, other people told us (Dunn 1988; Kaye 1982; Richards 1974). Very early socialization is the realm par excellence of categorization, setting a template for our receptivity to being categorized in later life. The taken-for-grantedness of selfhood that is thereby fostered may also, and only apparently paradoxically, be the sine qua non for the rapidly developing post-infancy social agency to which the recent sociology of childhood has sensitized us (James et al., 1998).

Routine public interaction is the face-to-face interaction that occurs, much of it outside ongoing social relationships, within the gaze of others. Informal ethnic categorization organizes ‘relations in public’ in a number of ways. First, there are the verbal and non-verbal cues which are used to allocate unknown others to an ethnic category. In some cases, these cues are a dimension of group identity, explicit signals of ethnic identity: language, clothing, bodily adornment, etc. Others, however, such as many aspects of non-verbal behaviour, are likely to be involuntary or unconscious (and here we see again the importance of habit and the body again, pace Bourdieu). Items of behaviour are appropriated by others as criteria of ethnic categorization, without those who ‘own’ them participating in this identification (or even, perhaps, being aware of it). Aspects of physical appearance – whether ‘real’ or imaginary and typically crystallized in ethnic stereotypes – are also a staple of anonymous public categorization.

Other forms of routine public behaviour are instrumental in the construction and mobilization of ethnic categories. Particular mention should be made of humour, verbal abuse and violence (all of which are, of course, also important in the context of enduring relationships and in the private sphere). With respect to humour, the case of the ‘ethnic joke’ is well known (C. Davies 1990). Anthropological analyses of joking suggest that ethnic joking is likely to characterize situations where social restraints inhibit the overt expression of inter-ethnic hostility (Douglas 1975: