Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

172 Rethinking Ethnicity

The ‘cultural stuff’ is undeserving of neglect for other reasons. Logically and substantively, similarity and difference are mutually entailed in identification. Difference cannot exist without similarity, and vice versa. If we are to focus on the social construction of cultural differentiation then we also have to take into account the social construction of cultural similarity (which suggests that we should pay attention to the cultural content of identity). Difference and similarity are each imagined; neither is imaginary; both come together in ethnicity. For difference to be socially marked, there has to be something upon which to seize as its marker, no matter how minor, no matter how arbitrary (no matter how imaginary?). For similarity to be identified there has to be something in common. To follow Max Weber and recognize ethnicity as a principle of collective social organization, in the context of group identification, for example, there probably has to be at least mutual intelligibility of behaviour. Even in the context of categorization, the criteria of identification have to possess at least some social relevance: they have to be differences that make a difference to someone. There are local limits to how arbitrary the social construction of identities can be.

This means that we must also take seriously the fact that ethnicity means something to individuals, and that when it matters, it can really matter. This doesn’t, in any sense, mean swallowing the primordialist line. It suggests a focus on ‘culture’ and the everyday constitution of ethnicity, during primary socialization and subsequently. Some kinds of ‘cultural stuff’ – religion, or language, perhaps – may be of greater affective and personal consequence than others. In principle, it is possible to mobilize around any marker of differentiation – which end of a boiled egg is the right one to open, for example – and the logic of symbolism allows that anything can be signified in this way. In terms of everyday realities, however, some things may be more emotable than others. And, whether one accepts this or not, the character of the ‘cultural content’ of being an X or a Y is likely to influence the character of the interaction between Xs and Ys (the ‘cultural’ acceptability of violence as a means for the pursuit of ends is one obvious illustration that comes to mind).

Re-emphasizing the ‘cultural content’ of ethnicity offers a further way to differentiate among ethnicity and its allotropes: locality, community, national identity, nationality (which is not quite the same thing), and ‘race’. They are about somewhat different things, ‘culturally’. And so are their respective ideological expressions. Thus looking at content allows us to distinguish, for example, nationalism and racism, or to differentiate between nationalisms and racisms. This is no more than we might expect given that these are fundamentally ideological: ideology, perhaps before it is anything else, is a matter of ‘culture’. The ‘cultural stuff’ concerned is not, what is more, just a matter of elite ‘culture’, of ‘culture with a capital C’. It is also inescapably a matter of everyday banal social reality. At least in part, the ordinariness of life fuels the extra-ordinariness of collective mobilization and conflict.

Another theme has been implicit in my approach to the comparative discussions of Northern Ireland, Wales and Denmark. I have leaned heavily on history, albeit an amateur’s history, dependent upon secondary sources and commentaries, in order to understand these places. A historical perspective is vital if we are to understand the differences between ethnicity and ‘race’, or between different nationalist impulses. And without taking the long view we can only take the ‘cultural stuff’ somewhat for granted. The here-and-now of the ethnographic present

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that is rightly so beloved by anthropologists is – and must remain – one basic datum of our theorizing and exploration. History, however, must be the other.

These issues and themes come together in the recognition that, although ethnic identity is socially constructed, it is not infinitely variable, malleable or negotiable. It may be deeply founded in the more than half forgotten experiences of primary socialization. It is constrained and shaped by its necessary dependence upon the categorization of Others. Its potential is always an immanent emergent property of its ‘cultural content’ and history. And it all depends upon how much it matters – in terms of costs and benefits if nothing else – to those whose everyday lives are its making, remaking and unmaking.

That there are limits to the plasticity of ethnicity, as well as to its fixity and solidity, is the founding premise for the development of an understanding of ethnicity that permits us to appreciate that although it is imagined it is not imaginary; to acknowledge its antiquity as well as its modernity. Rethinking demands that we should strike a balanced view of the authenticity of ethnic attachments. Somewhere between irresistible emotion and utter cynicism, neither blindly primordial nor completely manipulable, ethnicity and its allotropes are principles of collective identification and social organization in terms of ‘culture’ and history, similarity and difference, that show little signs of withering away. In itself this is neither a ‘good thing’ nor a ‘bad thing’. It is probably just very human. It is hard to imagine the social world in their absence.

Notes

Chapter 2 From Tribes to Ethnic Groups

1.For further discussion of whether the Nuer are really the Dinka (and vice versa), see the correspondence pages of Man (n.s.) 8 (1973), Burton (1981), and Southall (1976). Hutchinson’s recent study (1995) brings the issue up to date in the context of the warfare of the last two decades or more.

2.I have placed the word ‘race’ in inverted commas to signify that it is a contested concept, whose meaning may not be taken for granted. In my own usage it refers simply to folk ‘racial’ categorization, and no other meaning should be presumed for it.

3.It is moot whether ‘ethnic set’ – a broad social field within which ethnic categories are significant classificatory and organizational themes – should actually be included in Handelman’s typology.

4.For a discussion of local Hutu–Tutsi ‘racial’ classifications in Rwanda, see Maquet (1972); see Banks (1996: 164–5) and de Waal (1994) for discussions of more recent, and more anthropologically troubling, aspects of this conflict; see Prunier (1997) for a general account of the genocide.

5.The work of Bruce Kapferer (1988) is particularly relevant to the topic under discussion.

Chapter 3 Myths of Pluralism

1.Gluckman’s work, of course, owed much to Coser and Simmel.

2.And not just anthropologists: see Saggar (1996).

3.Among the major sources for this discussion, Volumes 2–5 of the Glamorgan County History (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, various dates) stand out, for those who want to follow up in great detail, and with respect to only one part of the region, many of the points made in the first half of this section. John Davies’s single-volume history of Wales (1993) is indispensable, as is the survey of contemporary issues edited by Dunkerley and Thompson (1999). See Rees (1990) for a political argument that complements in some respects my discussion here. The interested reader can also consult the collection to which the original paper on which this section is based formed the tailpiece (Jenkins and Edwards 1990).

4.This is a reference to Gwyn Alf Williams’s When Was Wales? (1985) and his thesis that Wales only existed as a nation between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the emergence, as part of the imperialist project, of the British nation.

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Chapter 4 Ethnicity etcetera

1.This can, for example, be seen in the pages of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s magazine Anthropology Today. The, mainly anthropological, contributions to Identities, a new journal edited in the United States, also illustrate the increasing comfort of the discipline with change and conflict. There is still a way to go, however.

2.Among other such conceits are the notions that childhood was unknown in earlier times, or that reflexive self-identity is a distinctively modern phenomenon.

Chapter 7 Majority Ethnicity

1.This in itself may seem to be an odd choice of words: haven’t Protestants, after all, always been a minority within Ireland? I am, however, referring here to the fact that until the Reformation, the Irish and their conquerors were adherents to the same universal Catholicism.

2.Although it is valid enough, this is of course the kind of generalization to which one has to resort in a short discussion, and there is considerable variation in this pattern.

3.I have summarized the debate about the extent and impact of discrimination in the decades leading up to the ‘troubles’ elsewhere (Jenkins 1988: 318–19).

4.Among the ‘other things’ to which I am referring, the Protestant sense of the legitimacy of their own loyalist political violence was undermined, as it was taken outside the law by paramilitary organizations, and, particularly, as it was manifest in the bloodthirsty assassination campaigns of the 1970s.

5.Lest I am even further misunderstood, to say this is not to join Allen Feldman, for example, in objectivizing murder; in reducing extreme violence and death to acts of communication: ‘Stiffing [i.e. murder] is a graphic act, and the stiff is a political text whose original script of ethnic-spatial symmetry has been effaced by wounding and death. The corpse, its blood, its wounds are quasi-organic signs of a tactile and political contiguity with the other’ (Feldman 1991: 78).

Chapter 8 The Cultural Stuff

1. Reported in the Guardian, 28 July 1984.

Chapter 9 Violence, Language and Politics

1.Reported, for example, in the Guardian, 17 September 1990.

2.This claim was made in a BBC Cymru-Wales documentary in the Week In – Week Out series broadcast on 25 May 1993, on the basis of an opinion poll undertaken for the programme by Beaufort Research, Cardiff, in the counties of Dyfed and Gwynedd. I am grateful to both these organizations for making available to me the survey findings.