Материал: Rethinking ethnicity, 2nd Edition by Richard Jenkins
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ethnic groups and categories are incorporated into states (Baumann 1999; Eriksen 2002; Verdery 1994; B. Williams 1989). It is now anthropological common sense to consider ethnicity and nationalism in the same analytical breath, although ‘race’, as we shall see, is more problematic. The study of ethnicity – and nationalism – has become one of the major growth areas within the discipline, ‘a lightning rod for anthropologists trying to redefine their theoretical and methodological approaches’ (B. Williams 1989: 401).
Being a growth area has encouraged a healthy diversity: the anthropological model of ethnicity is a relatively broad church, which allows a wide range of phenomena under its roof. What is more, it remains firmly grounded in empirical research. In this field as in others, social anthropologists remain most concerned to get on with writing in detail about everyday life in specific local contexts. This is what most anthropologists see themselves as doing best (and in this they are probably right). At the level of meta-theory, however, it is perhaps worth noting that these detailed ethnographic texts about particular places and people contribute, even if only by default, to the perpetuation of an axiomatic view of the human world as a mosaic of discontinuous and definite cultural difference, rather than a seamless web of overlapping and interweaving cultural variation.
The empirical ethnographic tradition notwithstanding, there is social anthropological theory and there are definitions. Perhaps the most general is the notion of ethnicity as the ‘social organization of culture difference’ originally proposed by Fredrik Barth’s symposium Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969b), the seminal text from which stems much current anthropological conventional wisdom about ethnicity. In his ‘Introduction’ to that collection, Barth (1969a) outlined in detail a model of ethnicity that was intended as a corrective to the structural functionalist understanding of the human world – which was at that time still dominant within anthropology – as a system of more or less unproblematic, more or less firmly bounded, societies or social groups, which existed as ‘social facts’, and were, pace Durkheim, to be treated or understood as ‘things’.
Barth began with what actors believe or think: ascriptions and self-ascriptions. He focused not upon the cultural characteristics of ethnic groups but upon relationships of cultural differentiation, and specifically upon contact between collectivities thus differentiated, ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Eriksen 2002: 11–13). Barth’s emphasis was not so much upon the substance or content of ethnicity, what he called the ‘cultural stuff’, as upon the social processes which produce and reproduce – which organize, if you like – boundaries of identification and differentiation between ethnic collectivities:
we can assume no simple one-to-one relationship between ethnic units and cultural similarities and differences. The features that are taken into account are not the sum of ‘objective’ differences, but only those which the actors themselves regard as significant ... some cultural features are used by the actors as signals and emblems of differences, others are ignored, and in some relationships radical differences are played down and denied. (Barth 1969a: 14)
In emphasizing boundaries between groups, and their production and reproduction, Barth immediately shifted the analytical centre of gravity away from this or that settled, bounded group – or ‘society’ – and towards complex universes of relationships between groups and their members.
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In doing so, Barth emphasized that ethnic identity is generated, confirmed or transformed in the course of interaction and transaction between decision-making, strategizing individuals. Ethnicity in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries is, perhaps before it is anything else, a matter of political manoeuvring, and individual decision-making and goal orientations. This provided the ammunition for the consistent criticism that Barth’s view of humans is materialistic, individualistic, narrowly instrumental and neglects ‘structural constraints’ (Evens 1977; Kapferer 1976; Paine 1974; for a response, see Barth 1981: 76–104).
Shared culture is, in this model, best understood as generated in and by processes of ethnic boundary maintenance, rather than the other way round: the production and reproduction of difference vis-à-vis external others is what creates the image of similarity internally, vis-à-vis each other. Barth and his collaborators ushered in an increasing awareness on the part of many anthropologists that ‘culture’ is a changing, variable and contingent property of interpersonal transactions, rather than a reified entity, somehow ‘above’ the fray of daily life, which produces the behaviour of individuals. As Barth has more recently suggested, this point of view can be seen to anticipate the postmodern view of culture (Barth 1994: 12). Whatever one might make of that idea – and, as I have already implied, it is not absurd – his understanding of ethnicity has been central to pretty much all subsequent anthropologizing about ethnicity.
Like Hughes, Barth had clearly read Weber. Having been a student at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, he was probably also familiar with Hughes’s work (and he acknowledges the influence of Erving Goffman, one of Hughes’s students). Whatever the source – because intellectual lineages are never straightforward – the above quotation from Barth illustrates the striking affinities between the model of ethnicity that was elaborated in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries and earlier sociological discussions of ethnicity. It can, in fact, be understood as their development and elaboration.
Barth’s arguments had more strictly anthropological antecedents, too. Leach (1954), for example, talked about Kachin identities in Highland Burma as flexible rather than fixed over time, questioning the general utility of the notion of the ‘tribe’. Later, Moerman’s (1965) discussion of the situational variability of ethnicity in Thailand implicitly anticipated much of Barth’s model, and Yehudi Cohen’s apparently independent discussion of ‘social boundary systems’ (1969) is a good example of the extent to which the contributors to Ethnic Groups and Boundaries were part of a wider intellectual Zeitgeist. Thus, although his was arguably the most systematic model in depth and detail, the most securely grounded in wider theoretical arguments about social forms and social processes (e.g. Barth 1959, 1966, 1981), and has certainly been the most influential, Barth was not alone in establishing the current anthropological understanding of ethnicity.
And Barth’s is not the only influential anthropological model of ethnicity to have been influenced by Weber. Reflecting, on the one hand, the practical ethnographic concern with the everyday lives of real people – their ‘actually existing’ social relationships (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 190) – and, on the other, the pursuit of verstehen (‘understanding’) advocated by Weber and Simmel, Clifford Geertz has elegantly defined ethnicity as the ‘world of personal identity collectively ratified and publicly expressed’ and ‘socially ratified personal identity’ (1973: 268, 309). In this view, which does not clash with Barth’s approach at all, ethnicity has to mean something – in the sense of making
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a difference – not only to the people one is studying, but also to individual persons. I will return to Geertz in subsequent chapters.
What I have called the ‘basic social anthropological model of ethnicity’ can be summarized as follows:
•Ethnicity is a matter of cultural differentiation – although, to reiterate arguments I have explored in detail elsewhere (Jenkins 2004), identification always involves a dialectical interplay between similarity and difference.
•Ethnicity is centrally a matter of shared meanings – what we conventionally call ‘culture’ – but is also produced and reproduced during interaction.
•Ethnicity is no more fixed or unchanging than the way of life of which it is an aspect, or the situations in which it is produced and reproduced.
•Ethnicity, as an identification, is collective and individual, externalized in social interaction and the categorization of others, and internalized in personal self-identification.
Some cautionary words about ‘culture’ are appropriate before going further. First, the implicit understanding of culture upon which this model of ethnicity depends is considerably narrower than the general-purpose model of culture – as the definitive characteristic of human beings, the capacity for which unites us all in essential similarity – to which neophyte anthropologists are quickly introduced, often in the shape of Tylor’s famous and time-honoured omnibus definition. Here, instead, is a model of different cultures, of differentiation based in variation of language, religion, cosmology, symbolism, morality, ideology, and so on. It is a model that leads occasionally to the problematic appearance that culture is different from, say, politics or economic activity (when, in fact, they are all ‘cultural’ phenomena in Tylor’s sense). In this, the model is revealed as the analytical analogue of everyday notions of ethnic differentiation. This should be borne in mind in reading the discussions of the ‘cultural stuff’ in subsequent chapters.
A second, more awkward, point about the notion of culture follows from this. ‘Culture’ is, at best, a cumbersome concept, difficult to define in any rigorous manner and difficult to distinguish in any sensible fashion from its conceptual close cousins ‘society’ and ‘the social’ (Jenkins 2002a: 39–62). Ideally, I would like to discard these words altogether. However, not only is ‘culture’ a lively presence at large in the human world, but the entire social science debate about ethnicity is couched in terms that, explicitly or implicitly, refer to it. So consigning it to the bin is not an option. The reader should, therefore, bear in mind that the notion of ‘culture’ in what follows is at best a general-purpose and somewhat vague word drawn from the social science vernacular, referring to equally vague analogous notions in the everyday conversations of the human world.
Returning to ethnicity, the general model that I have outlined above is accepted, to some degree, by most social anthropologists who work with the topic. I will elaborate upon it in subsequent chapters, and introduce some important qualifications and modifications. However, it is not my intention to provide a comprehensive survey of the enormous anthropological literature about ethnicity. Several, generally complementary, essays into this territory are already available (Banks 1996; Baumann 1999;
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Cohen 1978; Eriksen 2002; B. Williams 1989) and little would be served by repeating, or competing with, them. However, the fact that lots of anthropologists are talking to each other about ethnicity, combined with the disciplinary enthusiasm for prioritizing detailed ethnographic studies, may lead to some things being taken for granted. Among these things are the definition of anthropology, and, more important, the definition of ethnicity, both of which have already been discussed.
A further problem, however, is the perpetual need to struggle against our tendency to reify ethnicity (and, indeed, ‘culture’). Although they are talked about endlessly in these terms, neither ethnicity nor culture is ‘something’ that people ‘have’, or, indeed, to which they ‘belong’. They are, rather, complex repertoires which people experience, use, learn and ‘do’ in their daily lives, within which they construct an ongoing sense of themselves and an understanding of their fellows. Ethnicity, in particular, is best thought of as an ongoing process of ethnic identification.
One possible consequence of this reification, particularly given anthropology’s history, is the construction of ethnicity as typically – or even only – an attribute of the Other. Ethnicity thus becomes a phenomenon that characterizes other people, rather than ourselves. We need to remind ourselves all the time that each of us participates in an ethnicity – perhaps more than one – just like them, just like the Other, just like ‘the minorities’. Some of us, members of those ‘ethnic minorities’, perhaps, or who come from ethnically marked peripheries – such as, in the British Isles, Wales, Ireland, or Scotland – may know this only too well. However, for others it can be difficult to appreciate. Yet its appreciation is arguably the first step towards understanding the ubiquity and the shifting salience of ethnic identification. Recognizing that ethnocentrism is routine and understandable, as routine and understandable as the invisibility of one’s own identity, does not absolve us from the need either to struggle against it, or to make ourselves more visible (to ourselves).
Although, as good social scientists, we may, and probably should, pooh-pooh its reality, or distance ourselves from it by recourse to irony, our national identity or ‘national character’ may be easier to perceive than our ethnicity. Nationalism and the construction of national identity are, after all, explicit projects of the state. If nothing else, we have passports. The contours and contents of national identity are likely to be more visible, as are the contexts of its uses and justifications. And even if, as good anthropologists, we may not have to remind ourselves of the socially constructed character of national identity and sentiment, there is certainly a job to be done in keeping that idea as firmly in the public eye as possible.
And that idea is undoubtedly important. Although it is welcome, we should not really need Eric Wolf’s reminder (1994) that ‘race’, ‘culture’ and ‘people’ are ‘perilous ideas’. We should know this. Newscasts if not history should have taught us it long ago. Which makes anthropological research and teaching about ethnicity both urgent and troublesome. Because of its combination of a comparative global reach and a local-level research focus, its emphasis upon shared meanings as well as social construction, and its capacity to see individual trees as well as the collective wood, anthropology offers a promise to the world beyond the academy: to relativize notions about ethnicity and to resist the naturalization or the taking for granted of ethnic identity and nationalist ideology.
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No less than when I wrote the first edition of this book, more than ten years ago, there is still some way to go, however, and some conceptual clarification, before we can live up to that promise. This book is offered as a contribution to that clarification. It should be read as part of an ongoing enterprise. It is, hence – and perhaps all theoretical texts should declare themselves in this way – self-consciously provisional (which doesn’t mean that it is merely tentative). I hope that the fact that it is a computer-age bricolage – a rewriting and collage of an existing body of papers – has not resulted in too much repetition or overlap in the arguments, and that the reader will bear with me where they occur.