Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins
Majority Ethnicity 107
you go down to the dole in Corporation Street and you’ll see them in their thousands. I went down there one day and nearly never came back. That’s another thing, they’re nearly always on the brue [registered as unemployed] … claiming for everything, and doing the double [working illegally while on benefit]. Although maybe I shouldn’t say that because there’s a lot of Prods doing the double too. But I reckon there’s hell of a lot more Catholics on the dole, claiming for everything off the Government.
Nor was it only a matter of working-class stereotypes. Thomas Wilson, an Ulster Protestant and an economist, eloquently exemplified this:
As for business life, Presbyterians and Jews are probably endowed with more business acumen than Irish Catholics … For generations they were the underdogs, the despised ‘croppies’, the adherents of a persecuted religion, who were kept out of public life by the Protestant conquerors. They were made to feel inferior, and to make matters worse they often were inferior, if only in those personal qualities that make for success in competitive economic life. (Wilson 1955: 208–9)
Three decades later, Wilson appeared to have moderated his views, emphasizing (1989: 108) the importance of local perceptions that Protestants possessed a distinctive and superior work ethic. One could turn this round to say – which is, to be fair, a plausible reading of the 1955 quotation – that what mattered was the categorization of Catholics as idle, unreliable, shiftless, lacking in enterprise.
The notion that Protestantism – qua doctrine – encouraged economic enterprise in Ulster found its way into other academic analyses (e.g. Baker 1973: 803), which was not surprising in view of the debate about Max Weber’s argument linking the ‘Puritan asceticism’ of the Reformation with the development of capitalism. Whatever the merits of the Protestant Ethic thesis, however, there is a firm case for resisting the notion that Protestant economic supremacy in Northern Ireland had anything to do with the cultural norms – whether doctrinal or otherwise – of Protestantism. The economic advantages enjoyed by Ulster Protestants must be traced back to the Plantation and the systematic dispossession of the indigenous Irish population. This act of initial domination, creating as it did two ethnicities in conflict – one advantaged, one disadvantaged – was consolidated during the industrial revolution, institutionalized during the fifty-one years of semi-autonomous Unionist government, and has yet to be completely undermined. Historically and more recently, the opportunity structure for Catholics – itself the result of Protestant political domination – and the intimate relationship between Unionism and the local business élite are sufficient explanations for the continuing ethnic division of labour in Northern Ireland.
As I pointed out above, that ethnic division of labour is changing, even if it is moving slowly towards approximate meritocracy. With it, local perceptions and attitudes may also be moving. Not least, new factors to be taken into account are Catholic and Protestant perceptions of the changing economic realities. In this respect, the attitudinal data – which must be approached with the sensible reserve that one should always extend to survey findings of this kind – can be summarized thus:
The fact that Catholics perceive an improvement in their position and that Protestants are somewhat ambivalent about this points to the success of the [fair
108 Rethinking Ethnicity
employment] legislation. The data suggest, however, that there is potentially a fly in the ointment. Although the evidence is fairly weak, trends indicate that Protestants are increasingly likely to perceive discrimination in the area of employment. Taken together with evidence suggesting that employment is now more of an equality concern for Protestants than it is for Catholics, and the fact that a substantial minority of Protestants (38 per cent) believe that legislation protects Catholics at the expense of Protestants, this is an area that raises some cause for concern. (Hughes 2004: 182)
One interpretation of these findings is that, for many Protestants, their categorizations of Catholics have changed little from the historically established stereotypes that I described earlier. From their point of view, any improvement in the situation of Catholics is more likely to reflect unfair special treatment than merit and fair achievement (see, for example, McKay 2000: 153).
This account of Ulster Protestant ethnicity and intra-group relations has at least one major weakness. The need to keep to a manageable length has encouraged a tighter argument than I would have wished. Consequently, the ins and outs of history have been smoothed over, if not ironed out altogether. Protestant workers were not, for example, as easily or comprehensively ‘bought off’ as I may at times seem to have suggested: witness the gulf between ‘respectable’ Unionism and paramilitary loyalism. That split also highlights another oversight: important differences between the urban middle class and rural Protestants would find a place in a more detailed discussion.
The mobilization of ethnicity as a resource in the pursuit of political dominance and capital accumulation may, if the Ulster situation is any guide, take many forms. In particular, during the period of industrialization and urbanization, that strand of Protestant ethnicity which of necessity ‘faced outward’ encouraged and facilitated – and was produced and reproduced by – the links with Britain through which technology was imported, capital exported for investment elsewhere, and political support mobilized. From the late nineteenth century, ethnic ties were increasingly – and, apparently, at least to some degree self-consciously – part of the local Protestant bourgeoisie’s strategy for dealing with the threat of organized labour. The ‘management’ of the class-stratified Protestant community was achieved in a number of complementary fashions, the two most important being the control of recruitment into employment – in a labour market which always had more job-seekers than jobs – and the creation of political unity, a class alliance against the external threat of Catholic nationalism. Protestant commercial and industrial supremacy in Ulster has been built on these foundations.
Intra-group relations are not the whole story, of course: what about the boundary between Protestants and Catholics? The internal relations of the Protestant community have contributed, in no small way, to the categorization of Catholics. However, this isn’t just a matter of nominal identification; the virtualities of categorization are also significant. Hence my emphasis on economic activity in this chapter. For centuries, Ulster Protestants were disproportionately able to constitute what it meant – beginning with the most everyday matters of subsistence – to be Catholic. The specifics of that experience may have changed and shifted as circumstances shifted and changed, and there were doubtless local and individual exceptions and ameliorations, but the essential fact remained. Northern Catholic identity was to a
Majority Ethnicity 109
significant degree – and for long enough for it to acquire a certain consistency, the solidity of history expressed in Barth’s notion of the universe of discourse – a social construct emerging out of categorization (by Protestants) and out of the economic and other consequences of that categorization. The balance began to change in the 1960s, as external factors and developments within the Catholic community began to encourage a more vocal and successful assertion of Catholic group identification than had hitherto been possible. It has changed even more since, as Protestants have gradually seen their power to categorize – and to govern – slipping away.
The economic sphere is, however, only one aspect of categorization and its consequences. As suggested in Chapter 5, violence – particularly killing – can be understood as the ultimate act of categorization.5 Nominally, it forecloses on the possibility of a response or a redefinition; virtually, in terms of consequences, it is equally absolute. It really is ‘putting them in their place’ (and, as the republican hunger strike of the early 1980s demonstrated, it can work both ways: death can make the ultimate claim to identity and, in the process, brand the persecutor with the mark of Cain). Although there is no space to explore the matter in detail, the differences in the nature of Catholic and Protestant paramilitary violence can be interpreted within this framework. Summarized rather baldly, and taking intracommunity violence out of the picture, while Protestant paramilitaries mainly focused their attacks on Catholic civilians, Catholic paramilitaries largely took the security forces to be their primary target (O’Leary and McGarry 1996: 34–40). As the Protestant power to categorize and define Catholics – a power upon which so much Protestant group identification has historically depended – dwindled in other respects, violence was one means of ‘putting them in their place’ that they were able to retain.
Events in Drumcree, on the outskirts of Portadown, Co. Armagh, since July 1995, when the ‘traditional’ claim of local Orangemen to process down the Garvaghy Road, through a Catholic neighbourhood, was pressed home despite residents’ opposition, illustrate that there are other ways of putting people in their place. Subsequent years saw escalating protests and counter-protests in Drumcree and Portadown, and when, in 1998, the parade was re-routed by order of the new Parades Commission – itself established as a result of the Drumcree situation – the violence worsened. Since 1996, whether directly or indirectly related to the Drumcree confrontations, lives have been lost in Portadown and elsewhere, and the damage to the ‘peace process’ – because the matter is not regarded as settled yet, despite a more peaceful parade in 2007 at Drumcree – should not be underestimated (Bryan 2000a, 2000b; Fawcett 2000: 95–9; McKay 2000: 119–86).
In Northern Ireland, violence and territory are, as they have ever been, intimately linked (Murtagh 2003; Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). The local institutionalization of relatively low-level violence – and in Northern Ireland these things are always relative – at significant territorial boundaries, and attempts, in response, to develop ‘interface management’ strategies, have been among the defining features of the post-1998 ‘peace process’ (Byrne 2005; Jarman 2003; Shirlow and Murtagh 2006: 81–100). Historically, the annual cycle of parades during ‘the marching season’ was, as it still is, about the institutionalized dramatisation of territorial interfaces, by Catholics and Protestants alike (Bryan 2000a; Fraser 2000; Jarman 1997), and in recent years massive displays of partisan flags have added a dimension of semi-permanence to this process (Bryan 2005). However, given the long-standing
110 Rethinking Ethnicity
ethnic constitution of state, power and place in Northern Ireland, this ‘beating of the bounds’ has never been an even-handed tit-for-tat. It is even less so in the present climate. The tenacity with which the ‘loyal orders’ have pursued the ‘right to march’ at Drumcree, and not only at Drumcree, makes most sense when it is realized, despite vocal protestations to this effect, that it is not the recognition of Orange ‘cultural traditions’ that is at stake. What is at stake is the continued capacity of some Protestants, at least, to put Catholics in their place, in this case by denying that they have an autonomous place, free from incursion. When all else fails, struggles over identity and power remain, and Ulster loyalists may continue to seek ways to translate their imaginings of domination into reality.
8 The ‘Cultural Stuff’
In a well-known passage in the ‘Introduction’ to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Barth argued that the focus for the investigation of ethnicity should be ‘the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses’ (1969a: 15). By ‘cultural stuff’, he means language, religion, customs and laws, tradition, material culture, cuisine, etc. In arguing this he stood, as outlined in Chapter 1, in a direct line of descent from Max Weber. And it remains an argument that must remain at the centre of our thinking. In insisting that there is no simple equation between the seamless tapestry of cultural variation that is the human world and the discontinuities of ethnic differentiation, it prevents us from mistaking the morphological enumeration of cultural traits for the analysis of ethnicity. It also reminds us that where or how any particular ethnic boundary is drawn is arbitrary, rather than self-evident or inevitable.
However, this might also suggest that the ‘cultural stuff’ out of which that differentiation is arbitrarily produced and reproduced is somehow irrelevant, which surely cannot be true. For example, a situation in which the As and the Bs are distinguished, inter alia, by languages that are mutually intelligible for most everyday purposes – as with Danish and Norwegian – would seem to differ greatly from one in which the languages involved are, as with English and Welsh, utterly different. Similarly, relations between groups of rival Christians are likely to be different – although not necessarily better – than between a Christian and Muslim group.
Handelman made a generally similar point three decades ago (1977: 190), suggesting – and using ‘category’ and ‘group’ interchangeably – that the ‘categorical corporate holdings of culture’, far from being irrelevant, specify ‘a corporate history in time and space’. They tell a story about ‘why the category is substantial and legitimate’, providing group members with ‘the elements of a “social biography” which connects “culture” and behavior, and the past to the present’. If nothing else, Handelman argued, this aspect of the ‘cultural stuff’ is important for distinguishing ethnicity from other kinds of identification. Anthony Cohen’s discussion (1985) of the ‘symbolic construction of community’ appears to imply something of the same. Similarly, in attempting to understand the complexities of why ethnic attachments are more or less contingent and flexible, Cornell and Hartmann (Cornell 1996; Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 173–84) have argued for a partial shift of analytic attention, back to what goes on within the boundary, to what co-members share as much as what differentiates them from Others; to the content of ethnicity, which includes the ‘cultural stuff’.
Recently, a number of discussions of nationalism have focused on what appear to be cognate issues, the changeable meaning and content – both collectively and for individuals – of national identifications (Brubaker 1996; Reicher and Hopkins