Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

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90–114). Ethnic jokes – and here one may perhaps legitimately stretch the concept of the joke to include performances such as the Brer Rabbit tales of the American South, or the Anansi stories of the Caribbean – are a potent site of passive resistance to domination. They are also equally effective in the categorization of ethnic subordinates. Jokes facilitate categorization where it may not be socially acceptable or explicitly possible; there’s no such thing as just a joke, and ethnic jokes are no exception.

Inter-ethnic verbal abuse and violence do not, perhaps, require too much discussion here, except to suggest that humour, insult and violence shade into each other and are intimately connected (Allen 1990). Verbal abuse and violence, in particular, are concerned with the beating of ethnic boundaries through the enforcement of definitions of what the ethnic ‘Other’ is or must do. Power is at the heart of the matter. However, for a variety of reasons, authoritative social control – legitimate according to local specifications – has provided political and legal anthropology with the bulk of its subject matter. Violence and its threat have, in the process, been somewhat underestimated as routine mechanisms of control and strategies for achieving goals. Violence to others, up to and including killing, may – in addition to all of its other dimensions – be the ultimate form of categorization. I will return to this in Chapter 7.

Power and control are also central to sexual relationships, which straddle the divide between the public and the private. The sensitivity of inter-ethnic sexual relationships has been documented in a wide variety of settings (e.g. Dollard 1957: 134–87; Okely 1983: 154–6; Pryce 1979: 80–94). It may be expressed in notions of group ‘possession’ of women and must, in part therefore, be considered as an aspect of patriarchy as well as ethnicity. In terms of ethnicity, what is typically at issue is the definition of which men may or may not have access to which women. The resolution of the issue is typically asymmetrical, in reflection of the power relationships between the groups in question, and between men and women. Access to another group’s women may loom large in the ethnic identity of a dominant group, with lack of (male) control in this respect being a defining feature of subordinate categorization. When systematized racism enters the picture, a general prohibition of ‘miscegenation’ may – officially or legally, anyway – deny the men of a dominant group access to ethnically subordinate women.

Communal relationships, the more or less tightly knit networks that evolve over time in residentially shared localities, provide many opportunities for ethnic categorization. Most obviously, communities are often ethnically relatively homogeneous. Gossip may serve to mark the boundaries between one ethnic community and another and is one of the most effective ways of policing interethnic sex and friendship relationships. All kinds of social interaction across communal boundaries are – following Barth and Anthony Cohen – important in boundary maintenance (hence the need for policing at times of changing boundaries). Local peer groups are particularly efficient at socializing their members into group identity, and dramatizing the articulation of ethnic categorization with respect to other ethnicities.

Membership of informal groups may be a dimension of everyday communal life. However, there are informal social groups which are not grounded in local communality but serve nonetheless as efficient contexts of ethnic exclusion and, through their tacit – or not so tacit – criteria of membership, of categorization. Mundane examples

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are to be found in ethnic peer groups within schools and in work organizations. There is also a spectrum of more formally constituted organizations – from the Ku Klux Klan to B’nai B’rith to immigrants’ mutual aid associations – whose membership is ethnically specified and which pursue ethnically defined goals.

Kinship relationships – whether consanguineal or affinal – are subject to a degree of public regulation. In many societies this regulation is formally embodied in law. There are few examples, however, of the formal categorization of permissible marriage partners in strictly ethnic terms, and where they can be found, as I have already observed, they typically involve organized racism in one form or another (laws prohibiting ‘miscegenation’ have been current in this century, inter alia, in some states of the American Union, Germany and, most recently, South Africa). The informal regulation of inter-ethnic sexual relations in the communal arena remains the most potent force maintaining ethnic exclusivity in marriage. Categorization generates a situation in which the operation of a courtship and marriage market, structured by individually internalized ethnic categories which are expressed consciously as preferences and unconsciously as encounters, will tend to reproduce the ethnic status quo without recourse to explicit regulation.

Kinship relationships may, of course, be intimately bound up with life-course transitions (Hockey and James 2003). Among the key social junctures are: the acceptance/recognition of the new infant, puberty, the transition to adulthood, parenthood, significant stages of mid-life, withdrawal from economic activity, transition to the category of the aged, and death. The formality or informality with which these transitions are handled are locally variable, but two things which seem common almost to the point of universality are that these transitions of identity/status are typically symbolized in rituals of passage, whether religious or secular, and that categorization, manifest in recognition or consecration by others, whether ritual specialists or audience, is fundamental. They are never unilateral or inevitable. They are also potent markers and statements of ethnic identification (e.g. Pleck 2000: 141–249)

A number of key social categorizations – the quick and the dead, the well and the sick, the curable and the incurable, the safe and the contagious, the sane and the mad, physician and patient – and their application to, in the main, individuals, are the stock in trade of healing and medicine. This social field may also contribute to life-course transitions. In all societies diagnosis and intervention, where deemed appropriate, attract at least a degree of specialization. However, even in modern industrial societies, where this specialization is most extensive and formal, informality and uncertified lore remain significant. Authority does not always derive from formal socialization into professional medicine, and informal ethnic healing traditions persist. The authority and power of institutionalized bio-medicine is not to be underestimated; nor is the degree to which ethnic categorizations, whether implicit or explicit, contribute to diagnosis, treatment and the distribution of health resources (e.g. Helman 2007; Nazroo 2001)

Secondary socialization may also contribute to life-course transitions, particularly before the assumption of social adulthood, but other identifications are involved too. In most contemporary societies, formal socialization is established in institutions of education and training and their systems of categorization (assessment and examination, leading to diplomas and accreditation). The occupational division of labour is critically dependent on secondary socialization, and the

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degree to which these systems categorize and stratify individuals and populations according to ethnicity should not be underestimated. However, one should not neglect informal secondary socialization within the family, communal life, peer groups and the workplace, particularly with respect to the impact of categorizations such as ethnicity and ‘race’.

Another field of social life that is hierarchically structured in terms of power and formally regulated to a limited extent is the domain of market relationships. Governed, on the face of things, by economic principles that emphazise the pursuit of either profit or relatively equitable exchange (notions of equity and acceptable profit being contextually defined), business and trading are nonetheless structured by ethnic categorization. This is so with respect to who can trade with whom, who can trade in what, and the price that different categories of people must pay for similar commodities or services. Ethnically organized market relationships can be found in contexts as diverse as the housing markets of Britain and the United States (Banton 1983: 336–65), the trading networks of northern Norway (Eidheim 1969) and the exchange relationships of ‘primitive’ New Guinea and northern Australia (Sahlins 1972: 277–314).

The job of marketing specialists is the systematic identification of consumer categories, and these may be ethnically constituted (Costa and Bamossy 1995). These categories are designed to allow for the efficient promotion of goods and services via targeted advertisements, and the development of new products for specific markets (i.e. categories of consumer). It is now a sociological commonplace that consumption and identification are intimately related, although the emphasis has typically been on selfand group identification (Bourdieu 1984; Mackay 1997), even when shopping is seen as largely otherrather than self-oriented (Miller 1998). However, the categorizations of marketing are significant too. They may, for example, encourage the de facto exclusion of certain social categories from access to, or desire for, high-status goods (which, of course, is exactly the point: how else is the imagined value of status to be maintained?).

Lamont and Molnár (2001) open up further our understanding of the relationship between marketing and ethnic categorization. As moneyed consumers, AfricanAmericans have historically been disadvantaged and stereotyped negatively. Whether because of alienation or in resistance, many have responded by adopting distinctive strategies of self-identificatory display and conspicuous consumption – exemplified recently in the hip-hop B-Boy and B-Girl styles – which may have reinforced those stereotypes. Working within this context, black marketing specialists are now self-consciously attempting to foster new and positive categorizations of African-American consumers, in their own eyes and in the eyes of the ‘mainstream’. Instead of appropriating and recasting the stereotypes, an attempt is being made to intervene directly in the process of categorization.

Employment is a particular kind of market relationship, characteristic of modern, industrialized societies. It may be informal or formal, but, for increasing swathes of the world’s population, entry into the labour market represents – apart, perhaps, from limited eligibility for membership of a welfare system – their only possible relation to the means of production and, hence, their only source of livelihood. In ethnically heterogeneous labour markets – which are the rule rather than the exception – ethnic categorization is a powerful criterion governing the allocation of job-seekers to jobs by those who are authorized to make recruitment decisions.

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This is encouraged and reinforced inasmuch as recruitment to the positions of supervision and management which involve hiring and firing is, of course, also likely to be ethnically biased. In addition, the cumulative effect of ethnic categorization in housing markets and in access to education serves further to limit, systematically and disadvantageously, the labour-market options of particular groups.

A key moment during employment recruitment is the interview, no matter how perfunctory it may be. Although formalized diagnostic testing is becoming increasingly influential in initial screening (Hanson 1993), interviewing and committee decision-making are central to processes of administrative allocation (Batley 1981). These formal and informal practices serve to allocate resources and penalties within and from publicand private-sector formal organizations. In addition to employment, these rewards and penalties include public housing (Flett 1979), welfare benefits (Howe 1985) and social work interventions of one kind or another (Hillyard and Percy-Smith 1988: 170–203; Liddiard and Hutson 1991; Spencer 2001). Processes of interviewing and bureaucratized collective decision-making are important sources, alongside formal rules and certificated expertise or knowledge, of the institutional rationality which legitimizes the powers of delegated discretion exercised by officers in deciding individual cases. They are also the site of the creation of a distinctively modern and subordinated generic social category, that of the bureaucratic client (Collmann and Handelman 1981; Järvinen and Mik-Meyer 2003).

It is the discretionary nature of these gatekeeping encounters, within a permissive bureaucratic framework, which allows ethnic categorization its inevitable entry into the process – whether explicitly or implicitly (Erickson 1976; Grillo 1985; Karn 1983) – along with other ascriptive and stigmatizing categorizations (Lipsky 1980; Prottas 1979; Scott 1970). Administrative allocation processes have an increasing reach within modern states. Their significance in the social construction of patterns of disadvantage and of the everyday experience of being a member of a stigmatized social category, whether ethnic or not, should not be underestimated. Administrative allocation is a privileged context for the transformation of the nominal into the virtual (a distinction which was briefly introduced in Chapter 4). Ethnic categorization in this context is likely to count in the lives of the categorized. It is authorized, officially legitimate categorization, from which consequences flow.

Intimately related to administrative allocation – and, where it is bureaucratized, dependent on it – institutionalized social control is among the most important contexts of categorization. Although all the social fields mentioned so far include elements of social control, specialized institutions of control such as the police, courts and other tribunals, prisons and private-sector security industries have some autonomy, if only for analytical purposes. Formal legal authority is likely to be supplemented by widespread discretion and informal practices. Categorization is significant in two mutually reinforcing respects. First, the law is never blind, anywhere. Some categories of people – and which categories is, in context, neither arbitrary nor random – are more likely to fall foul of it, other things being equal, than others. We know that ethnic categorization is consequential in this respect, in many different jurisdictions. Second, the social control field is itself productive of the – very consequential – categorization of both individuals and collectivities, and once again ethnicity is relevant in this respect: moral panics about the criminality

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of this or that ethnic group are well documented (see Hall et al. 1978 and Thompson 1998: 57–71, on black street crime in Britain).

Social control is the core business of the state. Organized politics is the source of the statutes and regulations that underwrite the legitimacy of state and other bureaucracies. In states with histories of ethnic conflict, this conflict will be mirrored in the political system. In these situations, political parties and politicians may foster ethnic categorization through public rhetoric, legislative and administrative acts and the distribution of resources via networks of clientage. Official categorization of this kind, can also, however, involve the denial of the existence of historically constituted ethnic groups, as in the Nazi state’s refusal to acknowledge Sorbian identity in Lusatia (Burleigh and Wippermann 1991: 130–5).

Even in societies without an explicitly ethnically structured polity, similar trends may be observed, as and when the calculus of politics favours them. Rhetoric is in these cases perhaps more significant than legislation or administrative act. As moral entrepreneurs, politicians, in conjunction with newspaper proprietors, journalists and commentators, public officials and spokespersons for interest groups, may participate in the development and promotion of moral panics about ethnically constructed issues, such as immigration, black street crime (as referred to above) or ‘black youth’ as a general problematic category (Solomos 1988). People in these positions are influential in the public constitution of a ‘problem’, in its identification with particular ethnic categories (or, rather, their identification with it), and eventually in the framing of legislative and administrative responses. Less subtly, politics has historically provided the platform for the expression and mobilization of overt ethnic chauvinism; moral panics about ethnic ‘problems’ shade into the incitement of inter-ethnic conflict and violence.

Looking at unintended consequences, social policy responses to perceived social problems may also contribute to the politics of ethnic categorization. The attempt to target resources and intervention at a section of the population which is perceived to have particularly urgent or specialized ‘needs’ may serve either to call into existence a new social category or strengthen an existing categorization. This classification may emphasize the worthiness to receive resources of the category in question, as in the case of ‘the elderly’. It may, however, identify members of the category in question as socially deficient or lacking in some fashion, and serve to label them further as ‘undeserving’ or ‘troublesome’, as in the construction and mobilization of the category of undeserving ‘asylum seekers’ – as opposed to deserving ‘refugees’ – in recent British political discourse (Sales 2002). It seems particularly likely that welfare, social inclusion and equal opportunity initiatives, and other redistributive policies, will have these effects.

Policy is intimately bound up with official classification, a definitive practice of the modern state (Dorling and Simpson 1999). An increasingly conventional understanding of the elaborate and pervasive schemes for classifying populations that characterize bureaucratic government is that they mark a historical shift in state approaches to social control, from the public exercise of power over the body to the private disciplining of the mind (Foucault 1979). However accurate this may in some senses be, it is worth reminding ourselves that, as in Nazi Germany, the classification of persons may be a precursor to attacks on the body. The conjunction of power and knowledge that is embodied in legitimate social categorization has many facets. Suffice it to mention two here: the first, in principle at least, benign, the second emphatically not.