Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

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to formulate a definition of nationalism broad enough to include them all, but capable of differentiating nationalism from racism, ethnicism or regionalism, for example (although the boundaries between them will always be located along continua of degrees of difference and distance). In each case it is possible to identify the conditions for and components of nationalism which I defined earlier: an ideology or ideologies of ethnic identification, historical contingency and variation, a state context, ethnic criteria of political membership and a claim to a collective historical destiny.

Historical destiny may seem an odd notion – even dated or anachronistic – to introduce into the argument (and perhaps Eriksen’s ‘future orientation’ [1993b] might sound less worrying). To some, mindful of the terrible ends to which notions of history and destiny can be bent, its use may appear irresponsible. But it is crucial. One distinguishing feature of nationalisms is their appeal to the past – an ethnic-national history embodied in such things as myths of origin, royal genealogies or cultural romanticism – in the construction of a collective project for the future. This is the inspiration for Benedict Anderson’s evocation (1983: 147) of Walter Benjamin’s imagery of the ‘angel of history’: looking back, in nostalgia and anger, but irresistibly propelled forward at the mercy of progress. Nationalism differs from Benjamin’s angel, however, in that it does not present its back to the future in futile resistance to change. It is, rather, actively in the business of moving forward, in pursuit of the historical destiny that it claims for itself. Perhaps a more appropriate image is Anderson’s other description of nationalism, as Janus-headed (1983: 144), simultaneously looking ahead and behind.8

The future towards which nationalism looks is not, however, as tightly circumscribed as some commentators argue. The collective project need not be independence, secession, or any of the other political goals that may come to mind most readily under the sign of nationalism. It may be cultural preservation and promotion, as in Wales, or the creation and preservation of a particular kind of society, as in Denmark. And, as in both cases and in Northern Ireland, there may be important subsidiary concerns too. If literacy gave people, in history, a different kind of past, it also created for them the possibility of the future as a project. Nationalism was among the results. As social scientists we must continue to talk about nationalism in an abstract ideal-typical sense. We can only do so, however, in full recognition of the limitations of such a discourse. The ‘real’ world is full of nationalisms.

Rethinking Ethnicity

I began this book by arguing that although the basic social anthropological model of ethnicity has for a long time been the most useful analytical framework available, its potential has not been fully explored or appreciated. The ‘rethinking ethnicity’ of the title is my attempt to do some of that exploration and to encourage that appreciation. In the process, I do not, however, lay claim to dramatic innovation. The rethinking that I have done is just that: thinking again about what others have thought about before, building upon what they have done, occasionally rescuing or renovating overlooked insights, developing hints and suggestions into something more substantial, and putting together things that may not, hitherto, have been connected.

The ‘basic anthropological model’ is a series of loosely linked propositions, thus:

•ethnicity is a matter of ‘cultural’ differentiation (bearing in mind that identity is always a dialectic between similarity and difference);

•ethnicity is a matter of shared meanings – ‘culture’ – but it is also produced and reproduced during interaction;

•ethnicity is no more fixed than the way of life of which it is part, or the situations in which it is produced and reproduced; and

•ethnicity is both collective and individual, externalized in social interaction and the categorization of others, and internalized in personal self-identification.

In emphasizing social construction and everyday practice, acknowledging change as well as stability, and allowing us to recognize individuality in experience and agency as well as the sharing of ‘culture’ and collective identification, they remain fundamental to a rounded understanding of ethnicity.

These propositions do not amount to all there is to be said. Developments and themes have emerged in the course of previous chapters that are worth restating in closing. If some of them were put on the agenda by Fredrik Barth in 1969, only to be subsequently sidelined, that is more, rather than less, reason to attend to them now.

And the first of these themes is just such an issue. The axiomatic preoccupation with ‘groupness’ in many studies of ethnicity, post-Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, has encouraged the continuing reification of ethnic groups and, particularly, their boundaries. This is a serious problem in that it undermines the analytical vision of the human world consistently promoted by Barth himself; a vision of social life as perpetual coalition, fission and negotiation; of collective forms as emergent patterns generated by the ongoing ins and outs of individuals interacting. Social groups are not ‘things’.

Another problem is at least as serious. The preoccupation with definite bounded groups focuses largely – if not totally – on their collective self-identification. This arguably obstructs our better understanding of processes of ethnic identification in

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all of their complexity. The focus on group identification rather than social categorization is not simply an ‘empirical’ oversight. It is, if one can use such a word, simply wrong. If ethnic identification is understood as a dialectical process of mutually implicated internal and external definition, then categorization must be included in our analyses, and social categories as well as groups be counted legitimate – and necessary – as building blocks for our arguments. Even if we acknowledge the analytical centrality of group identification – a reasonable enough point of view, given that some self-conscious ‘group-ness’ is necessary for active collective identification – it is impossible to understand how groups are constituted without a full appreciation of social categorization. There are no groups, ethnic or otherwise, without categorization.

Nor does this line of argument apply only to collective identifications. Any identification – and ethnicity and its allotropes are not exceptions – must mean something to individuals before it can be said to ‘exist’ in the social world. The collective cannot be ‘real’ without the individual. With respect to individual meanings and experience, primary socialization is an obvious place to begin. Entering into ethnic identification during childhood is definitively a matter of categorization: we learn who we are because, in the first instance, other people – whether they be co-members or Others – tell us. Socialization is categorization. It cannot be otherwise. What is more, categorization continues to contribute in a significant fashion to individual identification throughout adult life. Being categorized is a necessary and foundational part of the individual development and ongoing production and reproduction of group identifications; it is at the heart of the individual meaning and experience, and the power and force, of ethnic identification. Without categorization, there are no socialized individuals.

To recognize that categorization – as I have defined it – is a vital element in our models of the social construction of ethnicity is to place issues of power and compulsion – and resistance – at the heart of what we do, rather than uncomfortably regarding them with our peripheral vision. The corner of our analytical eye will not do. If for no other reason, this is because the capacity to define for Others – in the shape of consequences – what it means for them to be identified in a particular way is part of our group identification and our experience of membership. To put Others in their place is necessarily to claim a place for ourselves (and vice versa).

This also speaks to the particular need – political as much as intellectual – to engage with the difficult relationship between ethnicity and ‘race’. Anthropology has recently, and for too long, neglected this matter. Although ‘race’ is an allotrope of ethnicity, they are somewhat different social phenomena. Historically speaking, ethnic identity is probably ubiquitous; ‘race’ is not. With respect to individual identification, the two are qualitatively different. Ethnic identity is the more general, the more basic; it is also the more likely to be embedded in the everyday contexts of ‘culture’-in-common such as language and religion. This does not mean, however, that it is more significant. ‘Race’ is likely to be at least as consequential as ethnicity in everyday experience, and historically it has been an organizing principle of domination almost without parallel. Identifications of ‘race’ are typically rooted in categorization rather than group identification, in ascription and imposition rather than subscription, in the external rather than the internal moment of identification. Power in this context is the capacity to determine for Others, not just the consequences of identity, but also their nominal identification itself.

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The distinction between the nominal and the virtual is basic to the understanding of ethnic – and other – identities which I am proposing. It is homologous to the group-category distinction but not precisely the same. The nominal is the name: English, Welsh, Ulster Protestant, Irish, Danish, etcetera. Nominal identities are often hierarchically segmentary; individuals may thus participate in a plurality of nominal ethnic (or similar) identities. One can be Danish and a ‘home German’, Welsh and a gog; British and Welsh. In fact, to be a ‘home German’ one must be Danish, to be a gog one must be Welsh, and so on.

The virtualities of identification are constituted in consequences and everyday experience. The hierarchical and segmentary organization of the nominal – the classificatory intersection of the communal, the local, the ethnic, the national, the ‘racial’ – is, at least in part, to be understood in terms of virtual identification. The practical entailments of communal identification are, for example, different from those of local identity; local identification has different consequences from national identity; and so on.

The relationship between the nominal and the virtual is thus always a matter of specifics, to be discovered. Nominal and virtual may be in harmony with each other or they may not. The virtualities of the same nominal identification can differ from situation to situation. The name may stay the same – ‘Welsh’, for example – even though the experience of being Welsh may change dramatically; conversely, the experience may stay relatively stable while the name changes. Both name and experience may change. Individuals may share a nominal identity, but that may mean very different things to them in practice, it may have different consequences for their lives; they may ‘do’ it differently. And so on across a wide range of possibilities. The virtualities of experience are likely to be central to processes of change; they are certainly likely to be less stable than the nominal. In times of flux, the relationship between the nominal and the virtual may contribute a useful image of continuity; it is just as likely, however, to sow the seeds of confusion and conflict.

Although the nominal and the virtual can be distinguished for analytical purposes, in everyday social reality they are chronically implicated in each other. This brings us back to the consequences of identification by others. My argument here can be understood as in some respects a collective version of the labelling model of individual identification developed within symbolic interactionism. It is a loosely specified processual model of the way in which what goes on at and across the boundary affects the ‘cultural content’ of identity. Our ‘cultural stuff’ will, even if only in part, reflect our interactions with Other(s): how those Others categorize and behave towards us, how they label us. Nor is this all. Our categorizations of Others, and the routines that we evolve for dealing with them, are also intrinsic to our ‘cultural’ repertoire. Social interaction at and across the boundary will necessarily involve categorizations: of ‘us’ by ‘them’, and of ‘them’ by ‘us’. Whose categorizations are the more influential, and the balances that are struck between group identification and categorization, are ongoing open questions, emerging out of history and past experience, located within power relations in the here-and-now, and constitutive of the ongoing situation. Whose definition of the situation counts, nominally and virtually, impinges upon the (external) interactional boundary and (internal) ‘cultural content’. Taking categorization seriously means taking the cultural stuff seriously too.