Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

make claims about the way the world is and, crucially, about the way it ought to be. This knowledge is mobilized in the definition of criteria of group membership and principles of exclusion. It specifies the rights and duties that attach to membership, and the forms of treatment that it is appropriate to extend to nonmembers. These are bodies of political knowledge, oriented towards the systematic constitution of the world in particular ways and the advancement of sectional interests.

The question arises of the relationship between ethnicity, including ‘race’ and national identity, and other forms of identification, with their attendant ideologies. A partial list of these – excluding, for reasons of limitations on space, class, gender, humanity, and doubtless others – is presented schematically in Figure 6.1. There is a hierarchical overlap between different bases of identification and their attendant ideologies. For example, kinship, because of the coincidence of descent and residence in many societies, may be associated with localism. Similarly, co-residence may generate both localism and regionalism; ethnicity may be bound up with regionalism, ethnicism and nationalism. Nationality, in its turn, may in some circumstances be as likely to find its ideological expression in racism as in nationalism.

As discussed in Chapter 4 and illustrated in Figure 4.1, the taxonomic logic of ethnic identity is basically hierarchical. One metaphor for illustrating this is the Russian doll set: inside each doll nestles a smaller doll. Imagine each succeeding doll dressed in different national, ethnic and local costumes, as the focus of identification becomes more and more particularized. However, it can never really be anything like this simple: as was also discussed in Chapter 4, ethnicity overlaps with a hierarchy of other sources of identification, each with its own possibilities for inclusion and exclusion. How these relate to each other must in the first place be a matter for empirical exploration rather than theoretical specification.

Most of the ideologies of identification listed in Figure 6.1 will be familiar in one form or another, in that they have accepted usages in the social science literature. The one exception to this is, interestingly enough, ‘ethnicism’. In part, this reflects the fact that we use ‘ethnicity’ to refer to both a source or ‘kind’ of social identification and its attendant ideology. It may also, however, be the case that when faced with an ethnic ideology – an ethnicism – our response is to identify it as either nationalism or racism. Hence the coining of hybrid terms such as ‘ethnic nationalism’ (Smith 1991: 79–84) when, really, it is hard to imagine a nationalism that is not, in some sense, ‘ethnic’. Similar conceptual redundancy is suggested by the notion of ‘ethno-regionalism’ (Hechter and Levi 1979).

88 Rethinking Ethnicity

A specific example of the kind of confusion produced by the absence of an ideological model of ethnicity is, perhaps, the argument about whether the Northern Ireland conflict is a ‘race relations’ situation (McKernan 1982; Moore 1972; Nelson 1975) or a case of racism (Brewer 1992; Clayton 1996: 50–83; Miles 1996). The most obvious problem here is the ethnic ideology of Protestant loyalism. Loyalism is not obviously nationalist: that particular high ground has been claimed by its opponents, and for that reason, if no other, loyalists are, it seems, reluctant to identify themselves thus. Much depends here upon our definition of nationalism – Finlayson, for example, has argued (1996) that Northern Irish Protestant ideology is a nationalist discourse – and our preparedness to overlook local definitions of the situation. Even allowing for those considerations, loyalism cannot, by default, simply be removed to the other obviously available category, i.e. racism (which is not to deny that Ulster loyalists may also be racist). Ethnicity is so often celebrated as a positively ‘good thing’ – by obvious and explicit contrast with the evils of racism (there is more ambivalence about nationalism) – that there may be some reluctance to acknowledge its ideological and conflictual possibilities, which are, as a consequence, easily interpretable as reflections of either racism or nationalism.

A reconsideration of the relationships between ethnicism, nationalism and racism is overdue. If we conclude that ‘ethnicism’ does not hold much water as a working concept – perhaps because of its over-generality or lack of specificity – then the continued utility of the attendant concept of ‘ethnicity’ must perhaps also be regarded as problematic. More likely, however, is a solution to the problem that will encourage us to draw finer distinctions between ideologies of identification than we do at present. Such an exercise will also necessarily involve the drawing of empirically grounded analytical distinctions between, for example, various ethnicisms, nationalisms and racisms (Balibar 1991). As matters stand at present, our concepts may, in some cases – and racism as a generic term is the most obvious example here, since the word is constructed as much for purposes political as analytical – be too crude or monolithic to be of more than limited value, particularly for comparative analysis and research.

One last characteristic of ideology is also important. Ideology tells us how the world is, and how it ought to be. Let us concentrate on the last part of that definition. In part, it tells us how we ought to be. In this sense, our ideologies may be burdensome to us. This is, indeed, how many people experience nationalism, or ethnicism: as a constant social pressure, a collective impetus towards a degree of belonging or conformity with which they do not feel comfortable. And there is also, of course, the matter of how they ought to be. In this, the inherent categorizing and imperial potentialities of ideology reveal themselves most clearly. Ideology and categorization are perhaps something more than merely logically related.

In this chapter I have been working towards clarification, rather than aiming for definitive conclusions. Some areas of conceptual confusion have been identified and a beginning made on their disentanglement. I have suggested the usefulness to our thinking about ethnicity and ‘race’ of three theoretical moves.

The first is to reconcile the situationalist view of ethnicity, inspired by Barth, with the emphasis on primordialism, and the power of belief, suggested by Geertz. This analytical move prepares the ground for a possibly imprecise but nonetheless plausible distinction between ethnicity and ‘race’ in terms of historical ubiquity

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and affective immediacy. By this token, ethnicity and ‘race’ do not, strictly speaking, appear to be the same order of social phenomena, in much the same way, perhaps, that diamond or graphite are not the same ‘thing’ as carbon.

The second move is to differentiate between internal processes of group identification and external processes of social categorization. Each is chronically and inextricably implicated in the other in the production and reproduction of identity. Although ethnic identity and ‘race’ both involve internal identification and external categorization, the emphasis in each may fall on a different moment of the dialectic of identification.

The final move is to differentiate between social identities and their attendant ideologies of identification. This encourages the acknowledgement of a neglected area of concern: ethnic ideologies that are neither racist nor nationalist in their primary orientation. It also allows the adoption of a comparative and historical perspective – upon racisms rather than racism, nationalisms rather than nationalism, and ethnicisms rather than ethnicism – without sacrificing the small amount of general ideal-typical theoretical continuity that such comparisons demand.

Explorations

The chapters that follow are not, in any deliberate sense, intended to exemplify the arguments that I have developed in the first section of the book. If nothing else, this is true because they present arguments in their own right. They are certainly no less argumentative or theoretical than Chapters 1–6. Chronologically, their original writing took place alongside – in and out of – the others, and they belong to the same flow of work. In contrast to those earlier chapters, they explore their arguments through engagement with the historical and ethnographic detail of actual places and settings. This creates a different feel – it is another way of writing altogether – and a different style. The two sections – arguments and explorations – are complementary strategies for exploring the same issues.

The exploration of material about Northern Ireland, Wales and Denmark follows the evolution of my research interests over the last thirty years. That evolution has, if I am being perfectly honest, been shaped at least as much by serendipity and biography as by a long-term intellectual project. My interest in these places does have a bearing on one of my general arguments – that ethnicity is not to be restricted to ‘them’ or to the exotic Other – but this is not why I find them so interesting. It might be more accurate to suggest that my personal interest in Northern Ireland, Wales and Denmark is responsible for my appreciation of the everyday, non-Otherness of ethnicity and the issues that it raises. Similarly, my interest in why and how ethnicity matters to people has emerged out of my experiences in these places, as, too, have the comparative explorations of nationalism in Chapters 9 and 10.

Northern Ireland is not the easiest place in the world about which to write. The politics of writing – of naming, of identification, of categorization – are sensitive. In particular, I know that my consistent use of the geo-political expression ‘Northern Ireland’ – rather than its alternatives, such as ‘the six counties’, ‘the north of Ireland’, ‘Ulster’, or whatever – will annoy some readers. This form of naming has, however, the merits of reflecting much everyday practice in the place itself, of being in accord with present international usage (which includes Dublin), and of indicating clearly the formal nature of the political beast about which I am talking.

Finally, one last difference between making theoretical arguments and exploring evidence is worth mentioning. More than any other kind of writing, exploration is provisional; the account always remains open. These chapters were written – and subsequently revised for the second edition – in this spirit. It is also how I would like them to be read.