Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

6 Ideologies of Identification

In Chapter 4 I suggested that ethnicity is a ubiquitous mode of social identification, and that homologous phenomena such as racism and nationalism can be understood as historically specific allotropes or versions of the wider principle of ethnic affiliation and classification. This chapter will explore these arguments in greater detail and will critically examine some current conceptualizations of ethnicity, racism and nationalism, and the relationships between them.

‘Race’ is typically differentiated from ethnicity in terms of a contrast between physical and cultural differences (Banton 1988: 1–15). Whether explicit or implicit, and however formulated, this basic model underlies most social science discussions of the topic: ‘racial’ differentiation is something – the contentious issue is what – to do with physical differences between people. However, the ‘physical differences’ with which we are concerned in matters of ‘race’ are only differences that make a difference because they are culturally or socially signified as such (Wade 1993, 2002). There is, therefore, nothing ‘objective’ about ‘race’; hence the need felt by many of us to continue to hedge the word around with scare quotes.

Although it is possible to define these concepts in the above general manner, the relationship between ‘race’ and ethnicity is something about which there is little consensus and a good deal of touchiness. There may not even always be agreement that the distinction is, in itself, valid or important. In previous chapters I referred to Sandra Wallman’s argument (1986: 229) that phenotype or physical appearance – and this is what is generally meant by ‘race’ – is no more than ‘one element in the repertoire of [ethnic] boundary markers’. A perspective similar to Wallman’s in many respects, although arrived at from a very different direction – ‘a multiculturalist context that seeks to redress racial disadvantage by providing for ethnic difference’ – is offered by Floya Anthias, who argues ‘that “race” categories belong to the more encompassing category of ethnic collectivity’ (1992: 421). ‘Race’, she suggests, is simply one of the ways in which ethnic boundaries are constructed.

There is much to be said for arguments that recognize a systematic relationship between ethnicity and ‘race’; indeed, this book must be counted among them. However, the versions offered by Wallman or Anthias are unconvincing, for several reasons which I have discussed elsewhere. First, while ‘ethnic’ social relations are not necessarily hierarchical, exploitative and conflictual, ‘race relations’ would certainly appear to be. Although ethnic boundaries often involve relations of power, and social categorization is inherent to the internal–external dialectic of ethnic identification, hierarchical difference is not definitive of ethnic relations. In other words, it is possible to imagine – and, in fact, to document empirically – ethnic inter-group relations in which the groups involved neither look up to nor down on each other. Second, leaving power to one side and simply focusing on process, ‘race’, unlike ethnicity, seems to be much more a matter of social categorization

78 Rethinking Ethnicity

than of group identification (although still a matter of both). Third, while ethnic identity is, of course, part of a structured or coherent body of knowledge about the human world – as an aspect of culture, how could it be otherwise? – ‘racial’ categorization often appears to be both more explicit and more elaborated in its justification. Finally, and to repeat this chapter’s point of departure, regardless of whether the comparative perspective is historical or cross-cultural, ethnicity seems to be a ubiquitous social phenomenon; those situations which we describe as ‘race relations’ are not.

The last two points – the role of explicit justificatory knowledge, and the greater or lesser ubiquity of each – raise slippery questions about the respective ontological statuses of ethnicity and ‘race’, questions which lurk unacknowledged within many discussions of the problem. These are questions that are begged by the physical– cultural distinction. Furthermore, operating with a contrast between ‘the physical’ and ‘the cultural’ risks sneaking into our discussions through the back door other, even more troublesome, conceptual oppositions, such as ‘objective’ versus ‘subjective’, or ‘material’ versus ‘ideal’. This may result in confusion, at best, and conflict about the nature of the topic under discussion, at worst.

In order to begin the work of clarification, I want to suggest that ethnic identification, although it is every bit (and only) a social and cultural construction, should be conceptualized as a basic or first-order dimension of human experience. There are three, rather different, aspects to this claim. The most general concerns the ubiquity of ethnic attachments. If we define ethnicity very broadly – as collective identification that is socially constructed with reference to putative ‘cultural’ similarity and difference – then it seems uncontroversial to suggest that this has probably been around for as long as cultured humans have lived in social groups. This is, however, a point of view that requires considerable care in its articulation:

Classifying the most diverse historical forms of social identity as ‘ethnic’ creates the scientifically questionable but politically useful impression that all ethnicities are basically the same and that ethnic identity is a natural trait of persons and social groups … This is not an argument which bears up to historical scrutiny. Rather, it is a nominalist operation intended to provide scholarly legitimation for ethnonationalist ideologies. (Lentz 1995: 305)

This warning is important, timely, and well taken. There is a danger, in adopting too general a definition of ethnicity, of neutering the concept, while at the same time according it dubious extra-social potency. But to say that ethnicity seems to be one of the ‘givens’ of culture and human social life should not be misconstrued as saying that it is ‘natural’, other than in the sense that culture is a ‘natural’ propensity of humans, which, in turn, is to say little beyond problematizing the value of the culture-nature distinction (Jenkins 2002a: 111–38). To illustrate the point by analogy, the basic realities of sociality (Carrithers 1992) and the close caretaking of infants and children are ubiquitous in human experience. This doesn’t mean – although it can easily be construed thus – that there are universal, and normative, patterns or forms of either.

In the same way, to argue that collective identifications and attachments based on perceived cultural differentiation appear to be historically ubiquitous is not to justify ethnic or nationalist excesses, along the lines of ‘they – or we – can do no

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other’. Such an argument is vulnerable to politicized misrepresentation: a good example of how this can happen is the way in which Geertz’s original argument about ‘primordial attachments’ has been academically caricatured, as discussed in Chapter 4. But while the danger of rewriting history by definitional fiat – and lending support to arguments that are not only repugnant but certainly untrue – is omnipresent, and demands that we exercise vigilance, it is not inevitable. Ethnic attachments are not necessarily malign; what matters is that we should try to understand the circumstances in which they become so.

And there is another, arguably worse, danger: of overlooking the consistency over time of the principles of collective identification and affiliation with which we are concerned and thus, in the process, misunderstanding them. Ernest Gellner – whose hostility towards nationalism can scarcely be in doubt, and who knew what its costs were – recognized this in his discussion of the loyalty that people feel for the groups to which they belong and the fact that they identify with them:

If one calls this factor, generically, ‘patriotism’, then … some measure of such patriotism is indeed a perennial part of human life … nationalism is a very distinct species of patriotism. (1983: 138)

If we do not acknowledge a very general, ideal-typical model of something that we can call ‘ethnicity’ – which, witness Barth’s ‘the social organization of culture difference’, for example, will necessarily be imprecise – how are we in principle to distinguish ethnic attachments from kinship, neighbourhood or organizational attachments, for example, and how, correspondingly, can we compare different ‘ethnic’ situations?

The second aspect of the claim that ethnicity should be understood as a basic dimension of social life alludes to taken-for-grantedness and embeddedness. Ask the question: what is it that constructs ethnic identification? At least part of the answer has got to be culture. While Hughes and Barth are absolutely correct to insist that cultural traits don’t constitute ethnic difference, Handelman (1977) and, more recently, Cornell and Hartmann (Cornell 1996; Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 173–84) are equally correct to remind us that the ‘cultural stuff’ is not irrelevant either, a point of view that is also strongly implied by the ‘ethnicity as cognition’ arguments of Brubaker (2004: 64–87; Brubaker et al. 2004) and Levine (1999). And our culture – language, non-verbals, dress, food, the structure of space, etc. – as we encounter it and live it during socialization and subsequently, is for us simply something that is. When identity is problematized during interaction across the boundary, we have to make explicit – to ourselves as much as to Others – that which we have hitherto known without knowing about. This is what Bourdieu (1990: 53–97) calls habitus, the embodied and unreflexive everyday practical mastery of culture: unsystematic, the empire of habit, neither conscious nor unconscious. Nothing could be more basic and nothing more inextricably implicated in ethnicity (Bentley 1987).

In the third place, however, a great deal turns upon local histories, circumstances and situations. This, again, is to return to an earlier thread of my argument: ethnic attachments do not have the same salience and force everywhere, or for everyone. Experience, if nothing else, insists that this is the case. For many people(s), ethnicity is a background factor, part of the cultural furniture of everyday life, and

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bone structure and so on … What exists is not ‘race’ but phenotypical variation: ‘race’ is a word used to describe or refer to such variation. (Miles 1982: 20)

The relationship between ‘race’ and phenotype cannot possibly be this neat. For example, visible phenotypical differences – such as hair colour, perhaps – may be invoked in ethnic identification without ideas about ‘race’ also being invoked. On the other hand, putative ‘racial’ differentiation may be categorically asserted on the basis of physical differences that are either invisible to the unassisted naked eye – cranial indices are an obvious example here – or utterly imaginary. Finally – and Miles seems, paradoxically, to recognize this himself when he says that one does not exist but the other does – phenotype and ‘race’ are different orders of thing: phenotype is the material product of the interaction of genetic endowment (genotype) and environment; ‘race’ is a cultural fiction.

Other authors can appear to be just as confused. Thus Wade, criticizing ‘the seemingly unexceptional approach’ of Banton and Rex, argues that their work,

poses it [i.e. phenotype] as an obvious objective biological fact when in fact it is a highly socially constructed one. For it is not just any phenotypical variation that has become racialised (in any of the changing definitions of race), but a specific set of variations that have become salient in long-term colonial encounters. (Wade 1993: 21)

Phenotype cannot, on the one hand, be ‘highly socially constructed’ and, on the other, the range of physiological variations – as implied by ‘not just any phenotypical variation’ – out of which specific sets are historically selected for attention. Wade has subsequently tried to clarify this issue, but he still leaves us with a tension between the socially constructed ‘phenotype that is taken to underlie race’ and phenotype as ‘all aspects of appearance – actually it includes even more than that’ (Wade 2002: 4). At best, one appears to be more socially constructed than the other. Perhaps the real message here is that the concept of the ‘phenotype’, given its biological origins and meaning, does not have anything useful to offer the social science of ‘race’.

While I might not want to go all the way with Banton in arguing that ‘there is no distinctive class of social relations to be identified as racial relations’ (1986: 49), his viewpoint resonates with that which I am suggesting here. To express that point of view in another way, ethnicity and ‘race’ are different kinds of concept, they do not actually constitute a true pair. To oppose the one to the other does not, therefore, seem to make much sense. The most that can be said is that, at certain times and in certain places, culturally specific notions of ‘race’ – or, more correctly, of ‘racial’ differentiation – feature, sometimes very powerfully, in the repertoire of ethnic boundary-maintaining devices; for a recent study of the racialization of contemporary Welsh identity, for example, see the work of Scourfield et al. (2006; Scourfield and Davies 2005). To anticipate my argument below, and in general agreement with Robert Miles (1989), it is racialization and racism – or, to anticipate myself even further, racisms – to which we should be attending, rather than ‘race’.

Does it matter that we should agree on the nature of the difference between ‘race’ and ethnicity? Perhaps not, but it is certainly more than a ‘quibble’, and it is important to attempt to be clear about the matter. The issue has probably been responsible for even more confusion, and generated greater imbalances between heat and