Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins

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The world is, however, changing, as it has always done – if nothing else, that ‘gap between civilized and primitive’ no longer seems obvious or defensible – and anthropology has, to some extent, changed with it. Additional subjects and issues have been gradually taken on board during the last three or four decades, including urbanization, socio-economic change and ‘development’, health care and illness, new reproductive technologies, nutrition, tourism, literacy, forced and voluntary migration, nationalism, and even the virtual realities of cyberspace. Allowing for this, however, and, as already suggested, a holistic emphasis on understanding local meanings (culture) using data (about everyday life) gathered via participant observation remains characteristic of the anthropological point of view.

A further important development within the discipline has been a modest shift in its relationship to the exotically Other. This occurred in three phases. First, from as early as the late nineteenth century, and more routinely from the mid-twentieth century onwards, the metropolitan peripheries offered accessible and relatively exotic alterity, in the shape of residual hunters, fishers and nomads, or peasants. Subsequently, second, the exotic Other migrated to the metropolitan homelands of anthropology to become ethnic minorities; anthropologists followed them home. Third, and perhaps most radically, anthropologists have begun to pay more attention to their own ethno-cultural backyards (Forman 1994; Jackson 1987).

These trends – theoretical and topical diversification and a widening of cultural and/or geographical scope – reflect anthropology’s attempts to negotiate the postcolonial world and globalization. They have brought with them, however, problems in disciplinary boundary maintenance. It is, for example, not as easy as it might once have been to distinguish anthropology from sociology, its closest sibling and most obvious rival, by reference to method or area. In terms of method, ethnography is a long-standing sociological research tradition – remember the Chicago School? – albeit as part of a varied portfolio of research methods. On the other side of that coin, some anthropologists have been using quantitative and other non-ethnographic methods since at least the 1950s (e.g. Epstein 1967; Pelto and Pelto 1978). And the comparative method – witness Max Weber if no one else – has always been as sociological as it is anthropological.

With respect to area and setting, sociologists have been working in the ‘developing world’ for a long time, and the two disciplines have always competed in the rural areas of industrial societies. What’s more, industrialization and globalization have, between them, conspired to produce a degree of convergence: in some sense all societies must now be thought of as industrial societies. Anthropology no longer has a territorial preserve that it can unambiguously call its own (a situation which has been further encouraged by the post-colonial disrepute in which anthropology is held in some places). On top of this – in part in response to it, indeed – anthropologists are, as I have already mentioned, ‘coming home’ to look at ‘their own’ societies.

This particular institutional and intellectual fault line has become further confused as sociology, moving now in a fully global arena, has itself engaged with a widening topical agenda. The sociology of culture, in particular, deserves mention in this respect. The blurring of boundaries has been further encouraged by the development of interdisciplinary feminism as a unifying intellectual field of critical discourse, and the debate about, and influence of, postmodernism. Nor is sociology the only problematic boundary: social psychology, social geography and social history might also be mentioned here.

8 Rethinking Ethnicity

In some other respects, however, anthropology has been moving steadily further away from sociology. As a consequence of the institutional specialization that has encouraged the growth of separate departments within universities and colleges, heightened competition for dwindling resources, the partial abandonment by both disciplines of the shared theoretical heritage of structural functionalism, and the perceived threat posed by the modest convergence of the disciplines in terms of field and topic, boundary maintenance has become more assertive. Competitive or entrepreneurial assertions of the distinctiveness and virtue of anthropological approaches to topics outside the traditional disciplinary spheres of competence have become ever louder. The difference between anthropology and sociology seems to matter more than it did in the 1960s and 1970s (and most anthropologists even then thought that it mattered, and mattered a lot). Despite the fact that personnel and, even more important, ideas do cross disciplinary boundaries – most usually, at least in Britain, from anthropology into sociology – those boundaries remain. Sociology – bigger, less specialized, more intellectually promiscuous and pluralist, recruiting from and training within less elitist social and institutional fields – may not be not as sectarian as social anthropology, but both disciplines are intellectually impoverished by the communication gap that has opened up between them.

So, where does this leave social anthropology? One analogy which has been used with some success to understand relationships between disciplines – and which is peculiarly appropriate to this discussion – is that of ‘academic tribes’ (Becher 1989). In this view social anthropology and sociology can be seen as two neighbouring and historically related academic ‘tribes’ (or, indeed, ethnic groups). With environmental change they are increasingly competing – with respect to limited research and teaching opportunities – in and for the same ecological niches. Bearing in mind that anthropological studies suggest that ethnic identity is often hierarchically segmentary, it is plausible to argue that while social anthropology excludes sociology, sociology includes social anthropology; while sociology embraces all of the methods and many of the concerns of anthropology, the reverse is not true. Social anthropology can thus be analogized as an exclusive and specialized sub-section or clan of the greater tribe that I have elsewhere called ‘generic sociology’ (Jenkins 2002a: 22–7).

Lest this view be thought too provocative, consider the following definition of sociology, offered by the late Roy Wallis, writing in The Times Higher Education Supplement on 18 April 1986, a time when sociology was having to justify itself in an altogether hostile British political climate:

Sociology is not only about translating the manners and mores of alien life and subculture into the language and sensibility of the rest, it is about making strange and problematic what we already know, questioning the assumptions long held in our community deriving their strength from prejudice and tradition rather than openminded observation. And making the strange, the foreign, obvious, enabling us to see how reasonable people starting from the point they do, could come to live and think this way; and making what has hitherto seemed obvious in our own society problematic, to question how and why it is done, providing the opportunity for reappraisal or greater understanding of our own behaviour, seems to me a socially and morally worthwhile purpose.

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This is, admittedly, only one view of sociology, and from 20 years ago. Any such definition, in a discipline famous for differences of opinion, if not discord, must expect to be contested. But it sketches out a broad intellectual enterprise with which most, if not all, social anthropologists would feel utterly at home. In the context of the present discussion, it eloquently emphasizes the essentially sociological character of social anthropology.

This doesn’t mean, however, that sociology and social anthropology are the same thing. They clearly are not (quite). The differences of emphasis between them, when taken together, constitute a specifically anthropological point of view:

Our emphasis on pluralism, our understanding of culture, our appreciation for the informant’s perspective … add up to a distinctive perspective. (Blakey et al. 1994: 302)

A minimalist disciplinary model of this kind is what I have in mind when I persist in seeing myself as an anthropologist: comparative, epistemologically relativist, methodologically holistic, focusing on meaning, stressing local perceptions and knowledge, and documenting the routines of everyday life. This is the specifically anthropological version of the sociological imagination.

However, if the notion of anthropology as a segment of sociology is right, its continuing vitality will not be nurtured simply by putting sufficient water between sociology and social anthropology to allow the latter a distinct intellectual identity. Despite recent moves in what I think is the right direction, anthropology faces a problem, which the following summarized nicely, more than ten years ago:

it is not a crisis of representation which now threatens our discipline but a problem of relevance. Social anthropology as we know it is in danger of becoming marginalized and redundant unless it adapts to the changing world which now threatens to undermine its cherished theories, methods and practices. This means, above all, re-evaluating its conventional objects of study and developing new domains and methods of inquiry that are commensurate with the new subjects and social forces that are emerging in the contemporary world … anthropology’s image as a discipline still primarily concerned with exotic, small-scale disappearing worlds must be complemented – perhaps even supplanted – by greater concern with ‘emerging worlds’, the culture of the ‘colonizers’ as well as those of the colonized, and on subject areas that cannot be defined by traditional fieldwork methods alone. (Ahmed and Shore 1995: 14–16)

Apart from wanting to insist that the problem of anthropological relevance is not new or even particularly recent – a minority of anthropologists, some of them eminent within the discipline, have been pursuing the approach advocated by Ahmed and Shore for many years now – this, it seems to me, still hits the nail on the head.

The rest of this book should be read, therefore, not only as a rethinking of ethnicity, but also as a contribution to the ongoing rethinking of anthropology. To the development of an anthropology that is unapologetically at home in large-scale, metropolitan, industrialized societies. An anthropology that is sure of its epistemological ground when using survey methods, archival sources, relying on secondary material, or whatever. An anthropology that is not put off its stride by history and globalization. A discipline that is no longer defined by its methods or by its places of work, but by its concerns and, above all, by its point of view.

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Locating ethnicity

So, what do anthropologists mean when they talk about ethnicity? What does anyone mean when they talk about ethnicity? The word comes from the ancient Greek ethnos, which seems to have referred to a range of situations in which a collectivity of humans lived and acted together (Østergård 1992a: 32), and which is typically translated today as ‘people’ or ‘nation’. As Ruane and Todd have recently put it, ethnicity is a matter of ‘peoplehood’ (2004: 216). Since the early decades of the last century, the linked concepts of ethnicity and ethnic group have been taken in many directions, academically (Hutchinson and Smith 1996; Stone 2004) and otherwise. They have passed into everyday discourse, and become central to the politics of group differentiation and advantage, in the culturally diverse social democracies of Europe and North America and, increasingly, globally. With notions of ‘race’ in public and scientific disrepute since 1945, ethnicity has obligingly stepped into the gap, becoming a rallying cry in the, often bloody, reorganization of the post-Cold-War world. The obscenity of ‘ethnic cleansing’ stands shoulder to shoulder with earlier euphemisms such as ‘racial hygiene’ and ‘the final solution’.

So it is important to be clear about what our subject – ethnicity – is and what it is not. An early and influential sociological reference to ethnic groups, and the ultimate rootstock of the argument that I develop in this book, can be found in Max Weber’s Economy and Society, first published in 1922 (1978: 385–98). Allowing for infelicities of translation (Brubaker et al. 2006: 11 fn.), an ethnic group is based, in this view, on the belief shared by its members that, however distantly, they are of common descent. This may or may not derive from what Weber calls ‘anthropological type’ (i.e. ‘race’, embodied difference or phenotype):

race creates a ‘group’ only when it is subjectively perceived as a common trait: this happens only when a neighbourhood or the mere proximity of racially different persons is the basis of joint (mostly political) action, or conversely, when some common experiences of members of the same race are linked to some antagonism against members of an obviously different group. (1978: 385)

From my perspective, perhaps the most significant part of Weber’s argument is that:

ethnic membership does not constitute a group; it only facilitates group formation of any kind, particularly in the political sphere. On the other hand, it is primarily the political community, no matter how artificially organized, that inspires the belief in common ethnicity. (1978: 389)

Weber seems to be suggesting that the belief in common ancestry is likely to be a consequence of collective political action rather than its cause; people come to see themselves as belonging together – coming from a common background – as a consequence of acting together. Collective interests thus do not simply reflect or follow from perceived similarities and differences between people; the active pursuit of collective interests does, however, encourage ethnic identification.

In terms of collective action, this sense of ethnic communality is a form of monopolistic social closure: it defines membership, eligibility and access. Any ‘cultural stuff’ in common can provide a basis and resource for ethnic closure: language,

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ritual, kinship, economic way of life, lifestyle more generally, the division of labour, are all likely possibilities in this respect (cf. Ruane and Todd 2004). Shared language and ritual are particularly implicated in ethnicity: mutual ‘intelligibility of the behaviour of others’ is a fundamental prerequisite for any group, as is the shared sense of what is ‘correct and proper’ which constitutes individual ‘honour and dignity’. By this token, an ethnic group is a particular form of status group. Finally, Weber argues that since the possibilities for collective action rooted in ethnicity are ‘indefinite’, the ethnic group, and its close relative the nation, cannot easily be precisely defined for sociological purposes.

The next significant sociological contribution to our understanding of ethnicity came in an undeservedly neglected short paper by the Chicago sociologist Everett Hughes, first published in 1948 (1994: 91–6). Hughes had clearly read Weber, and he rejected a commonsensical or ethnological understanding based simply on distinctive ‘cultural traits’:

An ethnic group is not one because of the degree of measurable or observable difference from other groups: it is an ethnic group, on the contrary, because the people in it and the people out of it know that it is one; because both the ins and the outs talk, feel, and act as if it were a separate group. This is possible only if there are ways of telling who belongs to the group and who does not, and if a person learns early, deeply, and usually irrevocably to what group he belongs. If it is easy to resign from the group, it is not truly an ethnic group. (1994: 91)

Hughes’s argument can be paraphrased thus: ethnic cultural differences are a function of ‘group-ness’; the existence of a group is not a reflection of cultural difference. Furthermore, ethnic groups imply ethnic relations, and ethnic relations involve at least two collective parties, they are not unilateral. Identity is a matter of the outs as well as the ins. A concomitant of this point of view is the injunction that we should not, for example, study a minority group – which is, after all, a relational notion – without also studying the majority:

if the groups in question have enough relations to be a nuisance to each other it is because they form a part of a whole, that they are in some sense and in some measure members of the same body. (1994: 95)

In Weber and Hughes we can see the early sociological emergence of the social constructionist model of ethnicity which anthropologists have so strikingly made their own. From this point of view, ethnic groups are what people believe or think them to be; cultural differences mark ‘group-ness’, they do not cause it (or indelibly characterize it); ethnic identification arises out of and within interaction between groups.

The notion of ethnicity did not, however, come into widespread anthropological use until the 1960s, beginning in the United States. Within American anthropology, the increasing use of an ethnicity model was part of a long-term, and gradual, shift of analytical framework, from ‘race’ to ‘culture’ to ‘ethnicity’ (Wolf 1994). It can also be interpreted as a change – about which more in Chapter 2 – in the conceptualization of one of the basic units of anthropological analysis, from the ‘tribe’ to the ‘ethnic group’. More recently, the unit of analysis in this respect has widened further, to reflect a growing concern with the ‘nation’ and the processes whereby